The Ford Ranger Super Duty, in “Shadow Black”. Photo: James Coleman.
Ford Australia can probably put its feet up for a bit now.
More Australians have bought a Ford Ranger Super Duty this year than the vehicle it was designed to beat – the Toyota LandCruiser 70 Series.
You know the one. The rugged, boxy workhorse designed in 1984 that has barely changed since. It still uses levers for the air-conditioning, for goodness sake. It’s also the ute whose spare parts can apparently be found scattered around every outback pub in the country.
The LandCruiser is a very tough nut to crack in Australia.
And yet, Ford claims victory.
“It’s been an incredible success for us … There’s simply nothing that can deliver the combination of capability that Super Duty does,” Ford Australia marketing director Ambrose Henderson told media earlier this month.
“We’ve now delivered thousands of those vehicles since we launched at the end of last year and in fact, for the first quarter of this year – the first quarter that Ranger Super Duty was on sale – it outsold LC70.”
Toyota delivered 1287 LandCruiser 70 Series utes in the first quarter, according to industry sales reports. But it’s worth noting Toyota bundles wagon sales with the much newer LandCruiser 300 Series, so the true 70 Series tally is likely higher than that.
Ford wouldn’t say exactly how many Super Dutys it has sold, only that it’s more.
Whatever. Is it simply the novelty of something new? Or is there actually something special here?
What is it?
Ford likes to tell the Super Duty story by harking back to the origins of the ute itself in Australia.
Just as a farmer’s wife famously wrote to Ford asking for a vehicle capable of taking the family to church on Sunday and pigs to market on Monday, Ford says the Super Duty began with a conversation with a fleet customer back in 2018.
“The genesis of the story is sitting with a fleet customer and talking about what was frustrating them,” Ford Australia CEO Andrew Birkic has said.
“What inhibited productivity, what drove cost into the system and what drove waste.”
A wider stance, thanks to those beefier wheel arches. Photo: James Coleman.
The result is a Ranger built for people who think the standard Ranger isn’t quite enough.
Under the bonnet is Ford’s biggest Ranger engine – a 3.0-litre V6 turbo-diesel. It gets a stronger chassis, beefed-up suspension and axles, chunkier driveshafts and a 130-litre fuel tank. The wheels are so large Ford had to fit wider, squarer wheel arches just to contain them.
That snorkel and tray? Factory fitted. And, in my case, so was a little bottle of hand soap sitting next to the water bottle like the apple in the mouth of a Viking roast pig.
The numbers are equally ridiculous. It can tow 4.5 tonnes braked. Gross combination mass is eight tonnes.
In other words, it could probably tow your house.
What’s it like to live with?
I didn’t have a house handy to tow during my fortnight with the Super Duty, so the best I could manage was a trip to Canberra Sand and Gravel for garden mulch.
A request to “fill her up” saw me leave with two cubic metres piled into the tray (and maybe slightly spilling over the sides).
Yet apart from a slightly flatter stance, I could barely tell it was there. The Ranger’s pores didn’t even sparkle with sweat pulling away from intersections.
My old VW Polo GTI made almost as much power, so outright speed isn’t really the Super Duty’s thing. It gets moving with all the urgency of Jabba the Hutt.
But where power could be described as how fast you hit the wall, torque is how far you take the wall with you. And the Super Duty has spades of the latter – 600 Nm, to be exact.
Fuel consumption didn’t seem to suffer either, although perhaps that’s because it already likes a drink. I averaged a little over 12 L/100 km.
You’re also in for a surprise at Costco when $100 worth of diesel disappears into the tank and barely nudges the gauge. A 130 litre tank will do that.
Inside, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a working ute. It’s not especially plush. It’s noisy. It’s antisocially large around town. And it’s a royal pain to park.
But put it in a farm or construction site or open-cut mine and there’s no doubt it would be a mighty thing.
Verdict
As a vehicle designed this century, the Ranger Super Duty has a few obvious advantages over its archrival. It’s more refined. It’s more comfortable. And it actually steers.
Those strengths also make it easier to overlook the price.
The range starts at about $101,000 before on-road costs for the Single Cab-Chassis and stretches beyond $114,000 for the flagship XLT dual-cab. My Double Cab Cab-Chassis – which sounds suspiciously like a coffee order – lands at roughly $108,000 drive-away.
It is new, so you’d expect it to perform strongly out of the gate. The long game will be where it gets interesting.
After all, Ranger Super Duty parts are still considerably harder to find in Oodnadatta than LandCruiser bits.
Car parks are not really its thing. Photo: James Coleman.
2026 Ford Ranger Super Duty Double Cab Cab Chassis
- $108,160 driveaway
- 3.0-litre turbo V6 diesel, 154 kW / 600 Nm
- 10-speed automatic, full-time 4WD
- 1825 kg payload, 4500 kg braked towing capacity
- 2675 kg weight
Thanks to Ford Australia for providing this vehicle for testing. Region has no commercial arrangement with Ford Australia.
