Spy Shots—Best Look Yet at Bronco Mule

From SEMA:

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Caught testing in Dearborn, Michigan, the Bronco mule wears light camo over a cobbled-together Ranger T6 body. Recently, the Bronco has been seen testing with the Jeep Wrangler and Toyota 4Runner, but it has been a task to capture them all in one image since they’ve been leaving the proving grounds at different times.

The Bronco will have body-on-frame construction, and unlike the Ranger, will have a coil-spring solid axle in the front and back. According to sources, the Bronco will have Dana Spicer AdvanTEK axles with a Dana 33 up front and a Dana 44 for the rear. The axles will be assembled at a new facility in Toledo, Ohio, and is located right down the street from the Jeep Wrangler plant. For cost reasons, the F-Series’ aluminum construction will not make its way to the Ranger follow-up or the Bronco.

The Bronco is expected to share the Ranger’s 2.3L turbocharged four, paired to the new Ford/GM 10-speed automatic transmission. A hybrid powertrain is rumored to be part of the lineup as Ford goes all in on hybrid availability throughout its product portfolio.

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There are a lot of prerunner setups you can buy for the later models as it may be what they are better suited for with the suspension setup on them. I'm not an offroad expert by any means, but I know that what comes on there is a topic of contention. The Raptor does come equipped with a lof of the setting for hill climbing and descent doesn't it? Maybe that is enough to appease the offroad crowd from a factory offering?
 
Didn’t some come with TTB axles and got turned into Baja-mobiles?

It won’t be much for crawling without a solid front axle IMO
Broncos are very popular among the desert scene, have been for decades. Also don't discount IFS in rock crawl scenario's anymore, the worlds most capable offroads trucks have made the move to IFS and in some cases IFS/IRS
 
Off-road does not equate to Rock crawling though. I sank a lot of money into the suspension of my 2015 4runner, and it is still not even in the same league as my Wrangler.

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Off-road does not equate to Rock crawling though. I sank a lot of money into the suspension of my 2015 4runner, and it is still not even in the same league as my Wrangler.

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In top professional leagues... Ultra4. The IFS rigs have become quite obviously superior to the solid axle trucks both at speed and especially on the rocks. Even my ranger slaps around my buddys rubicon on 37s in every scenario besides deep snow. I have said it in here before but it would be very easy for manufacturers to make center mounted IFS diffs (like what you see on side bys sides) and solid axles would truly be a story for the books even in oe applications
 
Yeah, but my Wrangler is stock and runs circles around a 4runner with 4K worth of suspension work. Being able to spend $4,000 to $15,000 on a vehicle to make it the best off-roader is not going to sell them to people cross-shopping between it and the Rubicon Wrangler which is capable of nearly any trail straight out of the box. Pics of your Ranger?
 
Yeah, but my Wrangler is stock and runs circles around a 4runner with 4K worth of suspension work. Being able to spend $4,000 to $15,000 on a vehicle to make it the best off-roader is not going to sell them to people cross-shopping between it and the Rubicon Wrangler which is capable of nearly any trail straight out of the box. Pics of your Ranger?
Yes because nobody makes a good OE ifs, I agree with that, Im more generally speaking that they could make the Bronco great with IFS still (they wont, itll be a lame ass generic ifs) but I can still complain about it haha
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Broncos are very popular among the desert scene, have been for decades. Also don't discount IFS in rock crawl scenario's anymore, the worlds most capable offroads trucks have made the move to IFS and in some cases IFS/IRS
yeah i wasn't meaning a KOH vehicle lol...just slow speed rock crawling, because that's what was mentioned. love the ranger btw!
 
Thought you guys might like this. This is being built by one of my old body techs Ben. The guy literally learned how to do body work backwards by fixing trainwrecks first and then learning how to do the finer finishing work, but he does amazing work and is a natural when it comes to fabricating. He can just look at something and put an idea together in his head and then it just comes to fruition with ease it seems. But I thought this was a pretty cool and simple looking custom job. He has owned like 25 Rangers already and has done various builds with them, mostly offroad.
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