While the truck’s exterior changes and interior appointments are obvious, the secrets to its confidence-inspiring handling and on- and off-road poise can be found buried beneath the skin, where steel and rubber connect the Ranger to the terrain.

In designing the backbone of Ranger, Ford engineers enhanced the truck’s fully-boxed high-strength steel chassis, with the wheelbase and track both stretched 50 millimeters to provide more space in the load box and improve stability on- and off-road.

Widening the track—the distance between wheel hubs—not only allowed engineers to redesign the rear suspension, but also helps reduce load transfer onto the wheels improving grip. The Ranger’s rear live axle is connected to the chassis via leaf springs, but improvements to new Ranger’s architecture saw the rear shock absorbers moved outboard of the chassis rails.

“From a customer perspective, moving the dampers further outboard improves cornering confidence by increasing body roll damping and, by increasing damping of the axle itself in roll, improves the ability to maintain grip over rough surfaces. Importantly, moving the dampers outboard makes these improvements without driving trade-offs to vertical ride dynamics,” says Chris Dean, senior development engineer vehicle dynamics for the Ford Ranger.

This is all to do with “motion ratio,” or the relationship between motion at the wheel and the shocks. In a live axle suspension, moving the dampers outboard increases their motion ratio in roll, providing a larger “lever arm” for the damper to influence roll motion. In other words, a damper placed closer to the wheel will have more influence on roll control than a damper placed closer to the center of the truck.

“If you’ve ever driven around a corner and hit rough surface imperfections like corrugations where the vehicle yaws without steering input, you’ve experienced a condition we refer to as ‘skate’. This is a common weakness of light trucks with live axles, and is an area where we made significant improvements by moving to outboard dampers,” continues Dean.

Making this change early on in new Ranger’s program removed a lot of compromise from the development, allowing a more optimized balance of ride and handling performance to be achieved for all the scenarios the vehicle needs to perform across.