Ford Ranger (North America)

Ford Ranger (North America)

The Ford Ranger is a pickup truck manufactured and marketed by Ford Motor Company for the North American, Chilean, Argentinian, and Brazilian markets for model years 1983 to 2012. The "Ranger" nameplate had previously applied to a premium styling package on the F-Series full-sized pickup trucks, beginning in 1965. In 1983, the Ranger was introduced as the replacement for the Ford Courier, a badge-engineered version of the Mazda B-Series, in a segment largely defined by the pickup trucks from Datsun and Toyota. From 1987 to 2004, the Ranger was the best-selling compact pickup in America.

Rebadged variants of the second-generation Ranger were marketed by Mazda as the B-Series with Mazda using the engine displacement in their model designation; the B2500 had a 2.5 L I4 engine and the B4000 has a 4.0 L V6. For 2002, the B-Series was renamed to simply Mazda Truck in the United States.

The Ranger and Mazda B-Series were manufactured at Ford's Twin Cities Assembly Plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, at Louisville Assembly Plant in Louisville, Kentucky until 1999 and Edison Assembly in Edison, New Jersey until the plant's closing in 2004.

Declining sales of the compact truck segment as a whole and the closure of the Twin Cities Assembly Plant led to the cancellation of the Ranger after the 2011 model year; a small run of 2012 models were produced exclusively for the fleet market.