Ford Ranchero

July 24th, 2007 by Shenron

Well in 1957 Ford decided to make a hybrid between a normal car and a pickup truck, to follow the emerging trend at the time. So the Ford Ranchero was born, and had quite a few variations in its production run from 1957 until 1979 -when it went the way of the dinosaurs. The Ranchero was the first compact car truck of its kind after the Second World War, and was soon imitated by GM because it was a success in the beginning. The first Ranchero’s were based on the Ford Fairlane, the two door ranch wagon. They made available different packages, ranging for a Spartan package that had just everything a truck would need, to a loaded package with all the accessories you could ask for, and all of them came with every engine available to the Fairlane. By far probably the best engine for it was the 5.8L Thunderbird Special, which gave it a good balance of power and performance. In 1960 Ford overhauled the Ranchero making it much smaller and based it on the Ford Falcon, which gave it new transmission options and engines it could choose from. It could come in either the three or four speed manual, or the three speed automatic, and had four engine options from the two Thriftmaster Sixes to the two Windsor V8′s.

In 1967 Ford took the Ranchero and slapped it back onto the Ford Fairlane, and gave it a 3.3 Straight-6 up to a 6.4L Big Block V8 at 315 horses; however this year was the only year it remained. After the Fairlane was replaced by the Torino the Ranchero became larger than even in 1968, and it saw the choices between the V6′s and V8′s with the largest being that 428 Cobra Jet. In 1972 the entire line was radically changed, replacing the sleek savvy look with some kind of giant boxy heavy design, and included a large 6.6 small-block engine that would make it very powerful. The final production line began in 1977; with the ending of the Torino in 1976 Ford gave the Ranchero a new platform to base it on, so they chose the Ford Thunderbird, and the Ford LDT II. Engines were of all spectrums ranging back up to the 6.6 V8 again, and thus the truck in a car was very powerful with a decent hauling capacity.

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