Rebadged utes: a critique of platform sharing

A friend of a friend asked me to help them buy a ute. A dual cab, and one with four-wheel drive, which almost goes without saying given that 4x4 dual cabs are the utes of choice of most people wishing to buy one.

That doesn’t mean that people don’t buy other types of utes. They do, and two-wheel drive single cabs, which sit at the far opposite end of the ute market in terms of pricing, are the next most popular configuration.

The friend-of-friend in question is a Mazda fan with loyalty born out of her ownership of two Mazda hatchbacks, a 323 and a 3, which back-to-back provided some 20 years of reliable and low-cost motoring.

Having essentially decided on a Mazda ute, her question to me was “new or used?” … obviously unaware that the new Mazda BT-50 is in essence an Isuzu D-MAX, while recently second-hand BT-50s are essentially Ford Rangers. And if she wants a ‘real Mazda’ she would have to buy one that’s now gone 10 years old, all of which makes the ‘new or used’ question far more complex and well-beyond the usual pros and cons of buying new or used.

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This, of course, is not just a Mazda thing. Up to 2011 if you bought a Holden 4x4 ute (any Rodeo or the first Colorado) you were actually buying a rebadged Isuzu . Likewise, all Ford 4x4 utes up to the first Ranger build on the T6 platform (late 2011) were rebadged all Mazdas.

Of course, the official company line with all these rebadged utes is that you’re still buying what the badge says but in reality, this is stretching the truth.

The latest chapter in the ongoing ute rebadging saga is that the second-gen VW Amarok due to arrive in the next 12 months will, in effect, be a mechanical clone to the soon-to-be-released new Ford Ranger, and will be built by Ford for Volkswagen.

However, there’s a twist with this latest exercise in rebadging in as much as it’s obvious that VW has said to Ford something along the lines of “if you want us to pay you to build Amaroks for us, it has to be the Amarok we want and not just the Ranger you want to build with our badge on it”.

The issue for VW is that it couldn’t walk itself backwards from its current and brilliant Amarok, which, despite its age (oldest platform in class), still offers by far the best on-road performance (thanks to the V6 introduced in 2016), and overall driving experience in the class. Throw in an ease of off-road driving that other utes can only dream about, combined with plenty of off-road ability and peerless towing, and it’s clear that the new Ford-based Amarok has big boots to fill.

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Ironically, the new Ranger will be the biggest winner out of this as it will come with some class-leading features that define the Amarok, not the least being a 3.0-litre V6 diesel and full-time 4x4. Even minor but still critically handy Amarok features, like being able to fit a pallet between the wheel arches in the tub, will be part of the package with the new Ranger.

Ford will no doubt say that these features would have found their way into the new Ranger anyway, but I’d take this with a grain of salt. After all Ford could have fitted full-time 4x4 to the current Ranger by using the system from the Everest, but didn’t. Likewise, Ford could have fitted one of its Lion-family V6 diesels to the current Ranger but didn’t, instead opting for the somewhat unsatisfactory 2.0-litre bi-turbo diesel when the far more convincing 3.2-litre five-cylinder diesel was under threat from pending exhaust emissions standards.

As for the pallet between the wheel arches, this is a design issue previously overlooked by Ford until now. And while it might seem an insignificant advantage, it does away with one reason why farm and trade users of utes need to fit aftermarket flat trays and suffer all the negatives in fuel efficiency and wind noise they bring. Trays with drop sides are even worse as they also rattle on bumpy roads. All in all, a quick way to put a dint in the refinement and fuel economy of your brand-new ute.