“That car is a fake,” declared a guy I know, when he saw the Ford Ranger pick-up in our village.
“Why?” I asked, perplexed. “No gun-rack,” he answered. “What is the point of a pick-up without a gun-rack?”
Neil Lyndon reviews the 2016 Ford Ranger Limited Double-cab.
This man is a natural-born expert on the subject under discussion. He comes from the pampas of Argentina, where they are extremely picky about pick-ups and a gun-rack is de rigeur, along with cow horns displayed as a trophy on the front end.
You have to feel sorry for Ford. In order to make the Ranger Double Cab Limited 4×4 completely acceptable in the UK market, they’ve loaded it with just about every other piece of kit in the factory except the kitchen sink. This is the pick-up designed to take out your intended on a dinner date or the family on a picnic, rather than to cart some cow carcases to market. Now some joker points out they’ve forgotten the gun-rack.
It’s got leather seats with electrical adjustment; DAB radio with touchscreen and Bluetooth; cruise control; air conditioning; thick carpets; and the rest; and then some. Dear God, what more could anybody want for thirty grand?
It drives like a pig, of course; and the valve clatter from the 2.2 TDCi engine when it’s cold makes it sound like a threshing machine going to down the street. The six-speed automatic gearbox hunts like a hound-dog coming down through the ratios and the agricultural springing makes it jounce like a hay rig.
But I completely loved it. The seats are so high you get to see corners of your neighbours’ garden they have been keeping hidden for years; and the load space in the rear is big enough for a Jacuzzi that would allow Hugh Hefner to mess around with half a dozen bunnies.
We used that space for tamer purposes, throwing our bicycles in the back on an evening when both our daughters were away from home and setting off for an impromptu ride around a nearby loch (we live in Scotland). When we got back, my wife was perched on the tailgate, changing her shoes when she asked “Would you like to have this car?”
“Any day,” I answered
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