Yahoo Autos Ford Ranger 4X4 With Huge Roofnest Tent Ideal for Overlanding
Overlanding is going bonkers, and this is the perfect rig to take you there.
It’s a Ford Ranger 4X4 with a Roofnest popup tent and just about every item of aftermarket goodness you can find bolted on.
The result? Adventure!
Overlanding was already growing, then COVID came along and it really went nuts. Suddenly, everybody just had to be outside, not only for fresh air, but because they could get away with it.
With so many people working from home, all anyone needed was cell service to convince the boss that they really were “working remotely” and not goofing off four-wheeling. As a result, places that you used to have all to yourself not that far outside the big city suddenly became overpopulated on the weekends, and even mid-week.
The ol’ swimming hole required a swimsuit. Your favorite viewtop campsite had actual people in it. And the desert singalong now featured—instead of just you and the coyotes—several human voices way off key.
Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I say. So when my friend Nick the Overlanding PR guy called up and said he had a 2022 Ford Ranger 4X4 loaded with overlanding gear and would I like to borrow it, I said something like, “Yahoo!”
The Setup
The rig’s starting point was pretty solid: a Ford Ranger FX4 with four-wheel drive and beefy Firestone M/T2 tires that looked ready to eat rocks for breakfast. The Super Crew cab meant seating for five but with the penalty of a one-foot shorter bed than the Super Cab, down to five feet in length.
The 2.3-liter EcoBoost four-cylinder makes 315 hp and 370 lb-ft of torque. The rear axle features an electronically locking differential. As equipped from Ford I penciled out the cost to be around $42,030 for the Ranger alone.
Then Nick added just about everything in the catalog, or several catalogs.
In front is a monster ARB bumper/grille that you could use to drive through a brick wall in one of those 1970s bank robber/heist movies. That grille wraps around and under the side rails to form a set of functional rock rollers, making you virtually indestructible.
In the middle of that grille is a ComeUp winch with reeled-up rope strap (ready to haul lesser-equipped Chevies out of the mud, hahaha). A Safari snorkel runs up the passenger-side A-pillar to the top of the windshield to allow river fording at what looks like depths of over five feet.
It rolls on those Firestone Destination M/T2 tires measuring 285/75R16, good specs for real off-roading, not some rubber band-thick deco-tire wrapped around 23-inch poseur rims that you see in the city. “Whether it’s in slick, muddy, or snowy situations, the Destination M/T2 bites back at challenging terrain,” Firestone promises.
In back, a pair of lockable roll-out drawers from Decked filled most of the truck bed. This setup had two fairly skinny drawers inside a large, hard-plastic bed system that took up the entire rear of the truck almost up to the top of the bed.
If you’re a contractor who uses this setup all week for work then goes 4-wheeling on the weekends, that’s understandable. But the space you give up for the convenience of the roll-out drawers wasn’t optimum for overlanding.
