Ford Bronco...Misses the mark as usual

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Another amazing lineage in the Ford line and yet again they drop the ball and let it bounce right back up in their face.

In case you haven’t figured out yet, another scathing editorial, and this time it’s my opinion on how Ford made yet another huge mistake in their product line. Yet again, I am not at all surprised by the absolute idiocy from the top down. Why do I think that this was another ball dropped though? Well, there is very little to make it better than the Jeep Wrangler. That’s just the start of the rabbit hole.

Let’s go back to recent history and see what Ford was thinking. Well, need we look no further than the lunacy of a Mustang SUV? Yep, the Ford Mustang Mach-E. Not only did Ford drag the Mustang nameplate through the mud, but they decided in their infinite wisdom to drag the Mach name right down with it. In my opinion, you can see a tread here though. A car company that is relying on its namesakes for sales purposes, all the while destroying the name.

When you think of a Bronco, you typically think of the full-size Bronco and not the tiny ass Bronco II. Now that I have looked at the new Bronco, I have determined that they should have named it a Bronco III or how about an ad slogan of “Just like a Jeep” would be fitting. Yep, I just said that Ford should just call it a Jeep and be done with it.

Jeep

Bronco

While I read about the Bronco, I think to myself that the entire purpose of the vehicle is to try and steal some of the approximate 200,000 Wrangler units that are sold in the U.S. each year. Below are the numbers as reported by Ford for 2019 SUV’s. So, where does the Bronco fit into the mix?

MODEL. 2019 2018 %

EcoSport 64,708 54,348 19.1

Escape 241,388 272,228 -11.3

Edge 138,515 134,122 3.3

Flex 24,484 20,308 20.6

Explorer 168,309 227,732 -26.1

Police Interceptor Utility 18,752 33,839 -44.6

Expedition 86,422 54,661 58.1

Ford SUVs 742,578 797,238 -6.9

As you can very well see, both the small-sized Escape and Mid-sized Explorer lost sales from 2018 to 2019. About 80,000 units between the two models. Yet the full-size beast of an SUV, the Expedition, actually increased by more than 30,000 units. The new Bronco appears to be a tad smaller than the Explorer. Only time will tell if this lives up to the hype. Though I would have loved to be sitting in the focus groups for this thing and laughing.

My final take on this launch is sheer disappointment. There will be no V8 version offered as of this writing. The looks from what I can see are average, nothing spectacular. It appears that the price point will be about the same as the Wrangler. So what is the attraction to the Bronco over the Wrangler? I’m not sure that I can find one with the exception of the fact that I am a “Ford Guy” and have been for the better part of close to 30 years. Jeep has a very deep brand loyalty following and I am not sure that this was the answer to breaking that loyalty.