Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Ezra Dyer has another funny column in Car and Driver... I dig the way he writes, as anyone that's been looking at this blog a couple years will know


His new article begins:

The Bronco is back, baby. Or it will be, sometime, thus finally giving the Jeep Wrangler the competition it deserves. I mean, the BMW X4 M40i has direct competition, but the Wrangler doesn’t? The late Toyota FJ Cruiser was theoretically a Wrangler nemesis, except that it was absolutely nothing like a Wrangler. It was as if Toyota had said: “What do people love about the Jeep? Let’s see, it’s a convertible; you can take the doors off and it’s a total open-air experience. Let’s do none of that.” The FJ was so cavelike, the annual maintenance included checking for hibernating bears. The rear windows didn’t lower. Even the wraparound windows on the back were fake—inside, those were giant pillars. If you spilled a bottle of Dasani water in the back of an FJ, legally that’s fracking. What I’m saying is that, high on the list of my many demands for the new Ford Bronco is that it skew way more Wrangler than FJ Cruiser. I’m talking T-O-P-L-E-S-S.


I hope the new Bronco has an independent front suspension, mostly because Bronco people love to rip out an independent front suspension and replace it with a solid axle, preferably one that came from an off-road cement mixer. That move is called a straight-axle swap, and it allows your truck to cope with the axle-shredding power of a 351 Windsor with 283,000 miles on it. “Yeah,” some future Bronco owner will brag, “I did a straight-axle swap for a Dana S110. Donor vehicle was a construction crane. After I chipped the EcoBoost, there was no way that IFS was gonna hold up. She’s not quite as nimble, and I need to wear a helmet on account of the ride, but now I’m all set if I decide to go for 44-inch tires and 2000 horsepower.”

Read the rest at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/i-got-a-fever-and-the-only-prescription-is-more-ford-bronco

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