New Ford Ranger accessories cover all bases

The new 2022 Ford Ranger will have the widest range of accessories ever offered for the nameplate as ute buyers scramble for everything from bull bars and winches to snorkels and auxiliary battery set-ups.

Ford is offering a vast range of accessories, covering everything from load space separators and roof racks to roof-mounted tents and canopies to cover the load tray.

There’s also an impressive spread of off-road accessories.

The global program manager for the T6 architecture that underpins the Ford Ranger and its Ford Everest SUV sibling, Pritika Maharaj, describes the way the company approached the accessory line-up as being “like chalk and cheese” compared with the outgoing Ranger.

She says the Ranger accessories program was all about offering customers more.

“We realised there was an opportunity there to deliver accessories that had been designed and developed as we developed the vehicle,” she said.

“We’ve brought our partners on very early, right when we were still in the early development phases.”

One of the key partners for accessories on the Ranger was ARB, a company known for its quality off-road gear – and a company that provides accessories to many 4WD brands.

The new Ranger is being offered from launch with many accessories developed in conjunction with ARB.

ARB says it has been working on the Ranger project since 2019 – something it describes as a “strategic collaboration” and has resulted in the development of more than 160 components.

As with the vehicle itself, all accessories will come with a five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty, providing an incentive to purchase them from a Ford dealer and stick with the products developed specifically for the Ranger.

At the media launch of the new Ford Ranger, the Blue Oval brand showed off a heavily-accessorised vehicle.

It included an ARB Summit bull bar – one of five bull bars planned from ARB – that perfectly showcased the challenges with fitting such accessories to modern vehicles.

The bull bar includes positions for the front-mounted camera and forward-facing radar, as well as relocation of the parking sensors.

Those parking sensors won’t be colour-matched, though. That’s because on the original vehicle the outer two front sensors are the same colour as the car whereas the inner two are black (incorporated within the lower grille) – and Ford doesn’t recommend painting them due to the sensitivities of the sensors.

Ford customisation supervisor Nathan Medbury said extensive development went into all accessories.

That included physical crash testing of the bull bars. He said “more than 10” cars were crashed to ensure they are legally compliant and optimised, while not impacting other systems on the ute.

There’s also extensive underbody protection and recovery points as well as wheel-arch flares and LED spotlights.

If you get the Ranger Wildtrak with the $1500 Premium Pack it also includes roof-mounted auxiliary switches that allow easy wiring of additional accessories.

One of the highlights of the Ranger design is the space allocated to an auxiliary battery. Slotting under the washer bottle refill neck on the driver’s side, it allows the fitment of a deep-cycle battery to power fridges, lights and other camping accessories without draining the main starter battery.

The auxiliary battery also includes a Redarc controller neatly integrated into the front of the engine bay.

That integration is key with many of the Ford-approved accessories because it means they have the appearance as though they came out of the factory fitted to the vehicle.

Other accessories include sliding draws and trays in the rear. They can hold everything from camping gear and a stove top to a fridge.

Then there’s canopies and even a 140-litre long-range fuel tank.

Of course, one of the challenges when fitting multiple accessories is what they do to the load-carrying ability of the vehicle.

Every kilogram of bull bar, winch, underbody protection and roof platform you fit to your rig is a kilo less you can carry. It’s amplified with the long range fuel tank because you’ve also got to take into account the weight of the additional fuel load.

That’s where a GVM (gross vehicle mass) upgrade comes in. A GVM upgrade allows the car to carry more weight.

Medbury said ARB is currently in communication with the federal Department of Transport and Regional Services in relation to upgrading the Ranger to carry more.

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