What kind of car is the 2022 Ford Ranger? What does it compare to?
The 2022 Ford Ranger mid-size pickup truck may not have a toothpick or a bottle opener, but it’s as close as Michigan gets to building a Swiss Army knife. Right-sized for daily driving, its pickup bed and off-road add-ons upconvert it into an open-sky adventure toolkit. Competition includes the Toyota Tacoma, Nissan Frontier, and Honda Ridgeline.
Is the 2022 Ford Ranger a good truck?
Review continues below
Sold in XL, XLT, and Lariat trim, with Splash,Tremor, and FX4 packages, the 2022 Ranger earns a TCC Rating of 5.3 out of 10, mostly due to the stripper XL’s lack of features and poor safety scores. (Read more about how we rate cars.)
What’s new for the 2022 Ford Ranger?
Ford adds a Splash look with orange and black accents, black wheels, and orange interior stitching as a sunny alternative to black, sport, and chrome appearance packages.
The Ranger fits the outline of a conventional pickup, but with softer sculpting and rounder corners; it’s distinctive when compared with the bluff outlines of today’s F-Series trucks. The interior wears more painted plastic and grainy black trim than we’ve seen in a while, revealing the Ranger’s age; a new version’s on the way, with shared running gear from the new Bronco.
Under its hood the Ranger’s 270-hp turbo-4 puts out stout acceleration through a 10-speed automatic. Whether it’s rear-drive or fitted with a simple part-time four-wheel-drive system, the Ranger’s quicker than it is nimble; it bounces and jounces on anything but billiard-table-smooth surfaces and nosedives under hard braking. That’s the on-road story; off-road, it’s considerably more gifted, with a torque-splitting rear axle, knobby tires, a lifted suspension, skid plates, and more. It’s good to tow up to 7,500 lb, too, and can carry 1,860 lb in its bed.
Extended-cab Rangers have too-small back seats but get a 6-foot bed in trade; four-door crew cab versions have a 5-foot bed but enough rear-seat space for helping hands at the work site. The bed can be factory-ordered with a spray-in liner, a bed mat, a bed extender, and tie-downs and tonneau covers galore. Like the off-road packages, the Ranger’s beyond-stock bed tailoring can take hours and thousands of dollars, time and money well spent.
The Ranger’s crash-test scores are below average, but all models have automatic emergency braking. Blind-spot monitors come with the XLT and Lariat, and adaptive cruise control shows up on the options list.
How much does the 2022 Ford Ranger cost?
With a base price in the mid-$20,000s, the Ranger XL cuts corners with a tiny 4.2-inch audio display, no power windows or mirrors, and steel wheels. The Ranger XLT upgrades to an 8.0-inch touchscreen with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and opens up the gate to optional Tremor and FX4 off-road packages. Out the door, an XLT with the gear we’d want—a bedliner, bed extender, meaty tires, and a sliding rear window—and the four-door crew cab costs about $37,000.
Where is the 2022 Ford Ranger made?
Ford builds the Ranger in Wayne, Michigan.