Bakkie fans wild about Ranger

One of the main characters in the Lord of the Rings, Strider, is described as a Ranger. We all know about Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger; and then there's Tonto's pal, the Lone Ranger ...

All this is leading up to the fact that Ford's handsome Ranger bakkie has turned out to be something of a hero in South African showrooms, galloping up the sales charts to more than 1800 units in March and putting all its rivals - except the evergreen Toyota Hilux - in the shade.

There are now 26 variants of the Ranger on sale in South Africa - 12 double cabs, nine single cabs and five Supercabs. I recently drove a 2012 Ranger Wildtrak Hi-rider, a 3-litre, four-cylinder TDCI diesel with a six-speed manual gearbox and 16000km on the clock.

It's an upper-class vehicle with all the accessories you'd want and it got one of my bakkie-owning friends from Boksburg inspecting it with a longing look in his eye.

To my surprise, I came across others who felt the Wildtrak had taken the accessory game too far - a colour-screen reversing camera, for heaven's sake! On a bakkie!

But I liked the fact that the Wildtrak turned heads at even the smartest shopping malls.

There are four airbags, and the latest versions have upped this number to seven, boosting the Ranger to five stars in the EuroNCAP ratings - the first bakkie to achieve this.

Together with the 237mm ground clearance, the diesel-powered Ranger's low-down grunt will take you most places, especially if you pick one of the 4x4s. Ford claims an incredible wading depth of 800mm.

The Wildtrak also has hill launch assist and roll-over mitigation for when the offroad going gets tough. Although it has no hill descent control the compression from the diesel engine will help in this situation. Claimed fuel economy from Ford on the Wildtrak 4x2 is 9.3 litres/100km and surprisingly, that is what we saw during our few days with the vehicle. The tank holds 80 litres so a range of 800km would be achievable.

There are almost as many Rangers as Fiestas on the used-car websites, although many of these are single-cab entry-level vehicles. At a glance, I saw, one step down from the Wildtrak, a 2011 diesel double-cab XLE 4x2 on sale for under R230000, with 100000km behind it.

New, Ranger prices range from R176700 from a single-cab 4x2 base model to R488300 for the top-of-the-range Wildtrak 3.2-litre TDCI 4x4 double-cab auto.

Although I'm always one to argue in favour of buying used, the new five-cylinder 3.2-litre diesel engine produces 147kW and a mountainous 470Nm of torque.

It also has that five-star safety rating and some nice-to-have upgrades from the previous model. So it might be a good idea to look around for a 2013 demo version.