Everest tech for Ranger

Next year's facelifted Ford Ranger will enlist a host of design and technology smarts from the all-new Everest to take on key new rivals including the redesigned Toyota HiLux, Nissan Navara and Mitsubishi Triton.

The new seven-seat Everest SUV was revealed last night in Beijing, where it's nicknamed 'Road Shaker', boasting first-in-class features like noise-cancelling cabin technology, an automated parking system, radar cruise control, a savvy new voice-operated infotainment system and a long list of advanced safety aids.

Some of these features will make their way into the Ranger as part of next year's midlife makeover, potentially making it most progressive ute on the market.

Set to arrive in Australia around mid-year, the 2015 Ranger will get a fresh new front-end design which, based on spy photography, appears to adopt many of the Everest's styling cues.

It will also benefit from some of the Everest's high-tech safety features, which include autonomous emergency braking (AEB), automatically dipping high-beam headlights, blind spot monitoring and a lane departure warning system can also steer the vehicle back into its lane when necessary.

David French, Ford's program director for the Everest and commercial vehicles in the Asia Pacific, confirmed he was working on the Ranger facelift and said many of the technologies pioneered in the Everest will be adopted in future models.

"No doubt about it. It's a dynamic process that we learn from every [vehicle] program and put them into the product development process. So even in the engineering phase there are learnings from this [Everest] program that are already in global processes," he explained.

Though neither he nor any of his engineering cohorts would divulge precisely which new features we might see in the Ranger, it's understood Ford's latest SYNC 2 infotainment system and Curve Control driving aid are high on the priority list. The latter is able to decelerate the vehicle by around 16km/h per second if it detects the vehicle is entering a corner too quickly.

Ford is yet to reveal details of the Everest's upgraded 2.2-litre four-cylinder and 3.2-litre five-cylinder turbo-diesel engines, but the Ranger is likely to receive similar improvements in fuel economy and performance.

Automatic emergency braking is another key safety feature that could become available in the Ranger in mid-2015. Termed Forward Alert with Collision Mitigation by Ford, the system uses sensors in the front of the vehicle to measure the distance between the vehicle and moving objects ahead. It will warn and even brake the vehicle automatically if it detects an imminent collision.

There's also a strong chance that elements of the Everest's new 4WD set-up, dubbed Terrain Management System (TMS), will make the Ranger grade. However, whether this includes the full suite of four dial-operated modes -- and vehicle data displayed in the digitised instrument cluster showing torque, pitch and roll levels -- remains to be seen.

It's unlikely the Ranger will get all of the new bells and whistles that debut on the Everest SUV -- which is due in Australia in the third quarter of 2015, just a few months after the updated Ranger – because Ford won’t want to expend all its high-tech ammo in one burst and needs to contain the cost of its volume-selling commercial vehicle.

But with a surfeit of high-end techno-wizardry available to it, the updated Ranger – top-spec Wildtrack 4x4 versions of which cost about $60,000 on the road — could become the world's most advanced ute, as well as offering more safety, capability and comfort than its key rivals.

Last month the Ranger found more Australian homes than Ford's entire passenger car range and so far this year Ford Australia has sold more than 22,500 Rangers, placing it second only behind the HiLux (more than 30,000).

Trevor Worthington, Vice President of Product Development, Asia Pacific, implied that the Everest's first-in-class technological features would be "proliferated" throughout the Ford range in time, but wouldn't be drawn on details.

"We'll talk about a lot of those high-level features [in future], but the detail of what features goes in what product in what market we can't talk about today," he said.

"However, a lot of the features you see on the {Everest] vehicle are class-leading and they are globally relevant features at the leading edge," he said, hinting that the Everest's advanced features will be incorporated into vehicles beyond the Everest and Ranger.

Watch this space.