For $24,000 the price of a Ford Ranger, you can make off-roading ridiculously easy.
Thanks to regular people with more money than sense buying off-road vehicles at an alarming rate just because they can, traditional offroading as a hobby can be a black art for the uninitiated. As per Ford from their official press release they dropped earlier today (Sept. 9,2018) the technology wizards over at Ford introduced an optional Trail Control upgrade for their trucks equipped with 4X4. Trail Control is going to be optional for the 2019 Ford F-150 Raptor but will also trickle down to the Ford Ranger.
Details are scant at the moment on how Trail Control works but I imagine it’s a really smart version of cruise control that actively takes sensor and camera inputs from all over a vehicle, probably hundreds of times a second, and automates braking and throttle control for the engine as it transfers power to each wheel to best get traction. What results is a practical application of all these new technologies available to car manufacturers at the moment thanks to what’s presumably a push for automated driving.
Trail Control works by pushing trail control on, setting your speed between 1 MPH and 20 MPH, and you taking over from there, with your hands off the brakes and gas as you give steering input. The system is constantly evaluating your current terrain conditions making off-roading a truly “set it and kind of forget it” technology.
Ford also posted a handy informational video showing you how it works.
I find this feature to be particularly useful as advertised on Ford’s press release as, “It also can help in digging the truck out if it happens to get stuck in extreme sand.”
If you’re a fan of towing videos on YouTube like I am you’ll know that the best tow videos are the one where “bro trucks” are stuck on beaches because of their own fault.
Hard to believe that a Ford Raptor can get stuck on a beach but these new Ford Rangers coming, you’d better believe a couple will park on a particularly sandy bar. Now, when they get stuck, thanks to Trail Control, they can get themselves out lickety-split.
