Long wait for Ford Ranger Raptor

Ford has held the Asia Pacific launch of the hotly anticipated Ford Ranger Raptor in Darwin, but if you haven’t already ordered one you’ll have to wait until at least next year for delivery.

That’s because Ford Australia has already received about 1000 local orders for its most extreme Ranger ever, exhausting its 2018 allocation from the Thai factory.

Ford won’t reveal its production plans, but says global demand for the first Ford Ranger Raptor — including in Thailand, its biggest market, and Australia, the world’s fourth largest ute market — will far exceed supply.

Ford Asia Pacific product development chief Trevor Worthington said the Blue Oval’s first global Raptor model (the F-150 Raptor was left-hand drive only) was a “whitespace” model with no competitors, and builds on both the on- and off-road strengths of the Ranger.

“Raptor sets a new benchmark in off-road ability in the mid-size pick-up segment and also excels at day-to-day driving chores – it has enormous bandwidth,” he said.

The T6 Ranger is Ford’s flagship model in the Asia Pacific region, where it found 134,000 buyers in 2017, and the first global pick-up to be released under the One Ford strategy in 2011.

Now sold in more than 200 markets globally — including China from last month, with the US to follow in early 2019 — the Ranger was designed, developed and tested primarily in Australia.

It is Ford’s top-selling model in Australia, where it was the most popular 4x4 ute last year, and the best-selling vehicle bar none in New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam last year.

“Pick-up is our core expertise and Ranger defines the global mid-size pick-up market,” said Worthington.

But the Ranger’s success has also created a massive workload for Ford Asia Pacific engineers – many of which are Australian — based in Shanghai and Melbourne, as well as the region’s Ranger production facility in Thailand.

Ford revealed the 2019 Ranger – the second major upgrade for the T6 in seven years – but first Australian deliveries don’t commence until September, followed a month later by the Raptor.

Worthington cited logistical reasons for the delay in fitting the Raptor with autonomous emergency braking (AEB), which will be standard in the 2019 Ranger Wildtrak but remains unavailable in Raptor — and sub-XLT models — until some time next year.

Now a common feature in many cars including the $14,190 Kia Picanto micro-car, AEB automatically applies the brakes when it senses an imminent collision and is now all but a prerequisite for a maximum five-star ANCAP safety rating.

Worthington also said that “the hardware is there” should Ford choose to develop further T6-based Raptor models – such as an Everest Raptor or Bronco Raptor – but indicated that engineering capacity, a business case and the marketing question of whether to extend the Raptor brand beyond pick-ups to SUVs remain key hurdles.

Further afield, Ford is already working on a next-generation Ranger and is exploring an alliance with Volkswagen, which is also working on its second-generation Amarok, to jointly develop a range of commercial vehicles.

That means the Ranger and Amarok could eventually share the same Ford ‘T6II’ platform, but if that happens it might be at least a decade away, when generation-after-next versions of both utes emerge.