Waiting 18+ months to get 15 mpg in a Ford Bronco

by philg

From what I have observed, there is no better way to tackle the perfectly smooth roads between a suburban Florida house and the perfectly smooth paved parking lot next to the beach than in an off-road vehicle equipped with monster mud-tread tires. The neighborhood elite seem to have been acquiring Ford Broncos for this purpose. I talked to a Ford dealer about what would be entailed in getting an Everglades edition Bronco. No orders can be placed currently. There is no waiting list. When ordering is restarted at some unknown future date, the wait to buy one at MSRP will be approximately 18 months.

Here are the steel tube doors “for off-road use only” that the neighbors are using on the street:

In typical driving, I think this machine would be lucky to get 15 mpg and it is on target for delivery at the same time that gasoline reaches $10 per gallon. How can that be justified? Friends on Facebook who are passionate Democrats have been posting the following meme:

I think that the idea is that nobody should be upset with Presidents Biden and Harris regarding the high price of gasoline ($2.30/gallon in January 2021, at the end of the hated dictator’s rule). But we could also use the above meme to toss aside all concerns regarding climate change. As long as we have the money to buy a pavement-melting Bronco and fill it with dinosaur blood we should be “thankful” and not worry about what is happening to Mother Earth, to those who don’t have the money, etc.

21 thoughts on “Waiting 18+ months to get 15 mpg in a Ford Bronco”

  1. the ford media link indicates that it will have the 4 cylinder turbo. So even if gas hits $10/gal as long as the driver stays out of turbo boost then it should get slightly better than 15 mpg and the neighborhood elite can still look cool, as it has the appropriate swamp (not to be confused with DC) gear.

    • “as long as the driver stays out of turbo boost” –

      Ha! – not likely. EPA does list it at 21mpg combined though. That’s almost as good as my 7000lb diesel pickup.

  2. The statistic I read was that for each penny increase in the average gallon of gas for a year, it is about $1 billion out of the American consumer’s pocket. So if the average gas price per gallon is $2 (200 pennies) more, that is $200 billion…

    • People will choose the Bronco over the TRX for it’s nimbleness and small ness when going off road! It competes against the wrangler. Both versions of which have a large engine planned.

    • TS, high-riding pick-up trucks are much more gentle on mild off-road where I have dome most of off-road driver and are good in tough spot. Jeeps seem to be tear ground much more aggressive then necessary on mild of-road venues and perform same as pick-ups at tough spots. One place where they are better are bogs so Everglade edition may make sense but up to the point where something small as Fort Bronco becomes useless.

    • @perplexed-

      I don’t think the Wrangler or Bronco is ever really the choice that makes sense. They’re the cool thing to have right now. SUV’s (really CUV’s) also make no sense for most people, but here we are with people convinced they want them.

  4. Philip, your Democrat friends religion seems to be opposite of mainstream American religions: they seem to be thankful to Biden, that’s the only way I can interpret the meme picture. Knowing that Democrat Party is overall anti-religious as far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned I see the making of new, well forgotten old, religion of worshiping Moloch

  5. The fancier your off-roader is, thr longer you’ll have to walk to find someone with a tractor to pull you out.

  6. I am fascinated by the work performed at Ford to analyze demographic data that churns out this type of product. Based on the HTML markup, we can clearly see that marketing drives this product. Here is the text from the page source listed below. Unlike the last Bronco, Ford has resurrected a brand with not 1 by 8 options to choose from! WoW! Surely there is something for every demographic to choose from. ( See history of the Ford Bronco here: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/why-was-the-ford-bronco-discontinued/)
    “marketingMessage”:”The Essential Bronco”
    “marketingMessage”:”Mainstream Off-Roading”
    “marketingMessage”:”Adventure Off-Roading”
    “marketingMessage”:”Off-Roading in Style”
    “marketingMessage”:”Extreme Off-Roading”
    “marketingMessage”:”High-Speed Off-Roading”
    “marketingMessage”:”Confidence inspiring off-roader”
    “marketingMessage”:”Our most capable Bronco”

    It would be interesting to see which model the residents of Florida need. I would imagine in the Palm Beach area, it is clearly the “marketingMessage”:”Off-Roading in Style”. After all, would one want to be caught in the mere, “”marketingMessage”:”The Essential Bronco” in Palm Beach?

    I can see the appeal of this product for residents of states that deal with snow, i.e. Maine, but outside of that, if Ford wants to tangle with the tried and true Jeep brand then this could become yet another terminated product.

    Prior to the recent events, the true off road adventure would have been in “The Sherp”. (https://sherpglobal.com) Based on current events, it would appear that both countries are going to lose on competing against the Bronco due to the fact that “the Sherp ATV is manufactured in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Kyiv in Ukraine,…”

    • ^This. I could do a finer-grained analysis but I’m waiting to hear back from my friend Chris about what he thinks of these models of a truck he once made something truly fearsome out of. I think I know what his answer is going to be.

    • “After all, would one want to be caught in the mere, “”marketingMessage”:”The Essential Bronco” in Palm Beach?

      They elites will have to wait the 18 months for the Everglades edition. Essential Bronco with 4-cylinder in gray scale paint might as will be called Prole Bronco.

    • @JJ Donovan:

      Basically, in another generation I would call it a “Yuppie toy.” It does have some real off-road features that are beneficial but it doesn’t really seem to have that much ground clearance (that rear axle differential housing hangs pretty low) and this new dimensional standard of “Sasquatch Size” got me a-giggling. Is the “Sasquatch Size” recognized by any international standards? How do we convert that to furlongs?

      The interesting thing is that the big tubes for the open-space doors will prove to be very noisy and boisterous at speeds under 60 MPH but probably provide very good impact protection. So they’re safe but noisy – which is why you need to have the superpowerful sound system options, to overcome all the noise.

      I have a Facebook friend who lives in Texas and her son just achieved the milestone of his first driver’s license. The first vehicle he bought was a similar-looking truck and he outfitted it immediately with an aftermarket multicolored light system that projects his peacock feathers all over the parking lot where he will show it off with its 1,000 watt stereo system.

      In words, it is a truck that is meant to have some real utility that 99% of its owners will never use but are nevertheless extremely profitable to include. We used to call those people “tools” or “posers” with the intentional misspelling.

      If you watch the video, the whole point of the exercise is to get the older, middle-aged peppershaker hair (presumably upper middle class) Dad out into some mild mud, to help a marooned Prole in his stuck-in-the-mud boat, and then go on to take out a HUGE CAMERA WITH A FOOT LONG LENS so that he can capture some wild bird photos on what looks suspiciously like a pre-manicured section of the “Everglades” with his doting daughter who kicks the whole thing off with a beautiful Father’s Day card. Well, God bless him. The daughter doesn’t look like a pierced-up porn star, and as a fantasy the ad works pretty well.

      Ford has some terrific marketing people there.

      The real test of any new vehicle happens in the first 12 months as the flaws and repairs come back into the feedback loop with qualified repair techs. With most of these new models, YOU are the beta tester.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnXNxToGmSU

      If I wanted a REAL, reliable off-road vehicle for the Florida Everglades (and he still lived there) I would buy one (even a used one!) that was modified for that use by my friend Chris. He has not yet taken my invitation to comment here.

      Those are my $0.03.

    • @JJ Donovan:

      You can see the rear differential (and the front!) just peeking out under the bottom of the vehicle in Philg’s first photo. That looks like MAYBE 5.5″ of real ground clearance? That’s less than a Subaru Outback!

      If you go out into the Everglades (or anywhere else) and whack one or both of those differentials into something solid at more than earthworm velocities, I’m afraid you’re going o be attempting to make a 5G telephone call without success, and you’re stuck like Bugs Bunny out there in the mud with your expensive Bronco.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c389rkmfWco

      If we still had Malls for the Masses, that would be a great weekend Yuppie’s Kid Mall Truck.

    • @Sam: I should have double-checked, I usually do. The GC looks unusually small because of the really large tires. 8.3″ is still not that deep for the Everglades when you’re encouraging people to go out with a snorkel.

    • Alex: Our neighbors all seem to have the monster tires for their Publix trips. The spec sheet shows 11.5″ of ground clearance with the bigger tires.

    • @Philg: I sit corrected. I knew I should have looked it up. 11.5 inches of ground clearance is plenty for trips to Publix and should allow the vehicle to traverse many more real-world off-road obstacles, including small trees that have come down in its path.

  8. Why it’s still important for your expensive, never-to-be-driven-offroad SUV to have enough ground clearance in the wild spaces of Popeyes Chicken and Starbucks Coffee. This person had obviously not yet had their latte, turned in too early and made the Range Rover into an expensive landscape ornament.

    As my daddy used to say: ” ‘Almost’ only counts playing horseshoes and hand grenades.”

    https://i.ibb.co/vHSJXVM/SUV-GROUND-CLEARANCE-PROBLEM.jpg

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