Less Really Can Be More
As the song says, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. The current midsize Ford Ranger is an appealing pickup truck in its own right, but its size and emphasis on creature comforts makes it easier appreciate the last compact Rangers from the 1990s and early 2000s, which largely toiled in anonymity during their production run.
This 1994 Ford Ranger XL is a reminder of what we’ve lost. Spotted by Barn Finds, it’s located in Seattle and is being offered for sale on Craigslist with an asking price of $7,500. According to the ad, it has 85,000 miles on the odometer—not bad for a vehicle of this age—and looks pretty clean in the accompanying photos.
A 1990s Throwback
Craigslist
The full-size and heavy-duty F-Series trucks have been the bestselling vehicles in America for decades, but the story of smaller Blue Oval trucks has more twists and turns, with Ford (not always successfully) following trends rather than setting them.
Ford sold a pickup version of its Econoline van for a few years in the 1960s to compete with similar models from Chevrolet and Dodge, along with the Volkswagen T2 that was likely the true inspiration behind all three Detroit efforts. With gas prices spiking, a more conventional compact pickup arrived in the 1970s in the form of the Ford Courier, which was designed in partnership with Mazda. Ford brought things in-house in 1983 with the first-generation Ranger.
The truck shown here is a second-generation model, introduced about a decade after the first Ranger. It’s about as basic as it gets, with a regular cab, a 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine, five-speed manual transmission, and rear-wheel drive. What more do you need?
Compact Pickup Resurgence?
Craigslist
With the second-generation Ranger, Ford returned the favor by having Mazda sell rebadged versions as the B Series. That arrangement continued after a third-generation Ranger was introduced in 1997, right up until that model left production in 2011. Ford kept the Ranger name going in other markets, and brought it back to the United States for the 2019 model year on a reworked version of that foreign-market truck. A redesigned version was introduced for the 2024 model year.
Recent Rangers have been larger and pricier, in keeping with the trend toward high-feature midsize pickups that serve more as SUV substitutes than work vehicles. The unibody Ford Maverick is arguably the true successor to the original Ranger, and Ford is preparing a $30,000 electric pickup for a 2027 launch. With Slate working to get its own affordable electric pickup into production, we could be in for a resurgence of cheap, basic trucks.
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