2024 Ford Ranger First Drive Review: A Capable Truck I Don’t Want to Drive

The 2024 Ford Ranger is a nice-looking truck with some solid capability claims. But you can only buy one with a short cargo bed and a four-door cab. There’s about a square acre of screens on the dash, but the interior feels about as refined as a booth at your high school pizza place. Suffice it to say, I have mixed feelings about this truck.

On paper, the new Ranger offers a lot of working power for its size. If you get the towing package with a hitch receiver, both the base 2.3-liter turbo-four and the soon-to-be-available 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6 are rated to pull 7,500 pounds. It’s rated to tow 3,500 pounds even if you just run one of those little bumper-mounted hitches. The bigger engine unlocks better passing power and hillclimbing comfort at the expense of a bit more fuel (20 mpg in combined driving with a 2.7-liter 4x4 versus 22 mpg combined if you grab the 2.3).

For context, the 2019 model-year Ranger that was released at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show (the first “back in America model”) also had a 7,500-pound towing max and a 270-hp 2.3-liter EcoBoost engine. What is significantly new for our market now is the look, the large portrait infotainment screen, and the availability of the bigger engine that’s coming later this year. It’s also more expensive now—a 2019 SuperCrew (four-door) short bed 4x4 Lariat listed at $39,480 when it was new, while the base MSRP of a comparable model is $47,115 for 2024.

Hang on though, we need another piece of context now too: $39,480, in January 2018, had the buying power of about $49,428 in today's money according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator. In other words, it is fair to say that a new Ranger is a better value than the last one was out of the gate.

What we’re getting as the new-for-2024 Ranger has been for sale for a couple of years abroad. Today’s Ranger is more of an Australian vehicle than an American one; it’s mostly designed and engineered Down Under. That’s not bad—Aussies love trucks and have some of the best off-road proving grounds on planet Earth.

At the Ranger’s launch event in Utah, Ford’s people were adamant that it’s “new, new, new,” but I don’t know, man. The T6 platform (born circa 2010) is still the foundation and from the side, the truck looks like the global Rangers I was encountering in Australia and South America over a decade ago.

That said, I don’t think “newness” really matters that much when we’re talking work trucks—they all boil down to a square frame, a pair of leaf springs, and an engine sending power to the rear or all four wheels. Once the segment evolved to independent front suspension (in, like, the ’80s) and disc brakes (which Toyota just caught up to), we kind of finished with game-changing innovations on pickups. High-performance variants like the Raptor, however, are a different story which we’ll get into in another post.

As for the Lariat and XLT trims that most people will end up buying, what is new with Ranger is the availability of the 2.7-liter twin-turbo V6 engine that’s been previously deployed in the Bronco and F-150. That claims an impressive 315 horsepower and 400 lb-ft of torque, which won’t fade much at elevation thanks to it being turbo-boosted. It’s scheduled to come out in the summer of 2024, at which point we’ll see exactly how much of a price premium you’re in for to get it. In the Bronco, it costs $1,895 to move up from the 2.3-liter to the 2.7 so I’d expect a similar figure with Ranger.

For now, all non-Raptor Rangers will ship with the 2.3-liter four-cylinder, which I drove paired with four-wheel drive at over 4,000 feet above sea level. Ford says it’s still good for 270 hp and 310 lb-ft of torque as it's been since '19. Again, it’s turbocharged, so it should hang on to most of that muscle far above sea level, though neither EcoBoost engine will require high-octane gasoline, which is nice.

I did some mountain road and highway test loops with two versions of the Ranger: A well-equipped XLT 4x4 optioned to about $45,000, and a Lariat 4x4 that would ring up at around $50,000 with a light camper trailer hanging off the hitch. All 2024 Rangers will run Ford’s 10-speed automatic transmission.

The 2.3 felt just OK on power. I was impressed with the transmission’s deftness at keeping the vehicle in the right gear to scoot when I asked it to and drop the revs when it could, though. Up and down some super-high Utah passes with no cargo at all, I had the power I needed but not much in reserve—I guess that’s why the bigger engine’s on the menu now.

I’m somewhat skeptical of this thing’s performance with four full seats and a heap of stuff in the cargo bed, but the engine didn’t seem to be near self-immolation with a couple thousand pounds of trailer behind it.

Braking felt great; the empty XLT panic-stopped quite swiftly and I felt like I was in total control of the trailer, too. My last piece of performance praise is a big one: The empty-bed ride quality is very nice for a pickup. Trucks can often seem a little nervous or bouncy with empty beds, but I didn’t feel that problem much here.

Steering was kind of odd, though. Moving the XLT through dry parking lot pavement had me feeling like I was pushing a knife through coarse sand. It’s not that it was unresponsive—it just felt kind of sticky and strangely heavy. The sensation lessened the faster I drove.

But my real complaints come from looking and feeling around the cab—and my list of let-downs in the interior is long. The seats are just OK; the cloth material on the XLT reminded me of the seat covers I got for $25 on eBay for my Scout—it’s super thin, and so is the cushioning under your butt. Not school bus bad, but you’re never going to forget you’re in a work truck. The Lariat’s leather is considerably nicer and pretty much worth moving up a trim on its own if you’re dead set on buying one of these.

The rear seats aren’t really any less comfortable than the fronts, which I suppose is a plus if you’re hauling people a lot. They fold both up and down to create a slightly flatter loading surface for inside cargo, which is cool.

Both trims I drove suffered from egregiously weak panel fitment. I know some drivers wouldn’t notice, but for me, even the jumbotron infotainment screen (we’ll get to that in a second) was not bright enough to distract me from the abundant evidence of cost-cutting my eyes kept landing on.