The SUV that O.J. fact noticed is even though everything is being renovated.
Ford Bronco 2021
At the base camp below, an organization of intermediate managers screams and howls as the vehicle crosses the hill in this off-road direction north of Detroit. “Have you noticed that?” says Tom Patterson, a complex product strater. “It’s amazing. Seeing it in action, on the move, is so cute.”
They applaud a Ford Bronco, now available as “cyber orange,” and have been waiting a long time to do so. The group, known as Bronco Underground, has been performing for years internally at Ford for the return of the SUV, which has been out of production for more than two decades and is more productively known for the white style as O.J. Simpson drove that June 1994. In their spare time, and without the chief’s approval, they sketched and styled a reborn Bronco playing in his early 1960s; they drafted business plans, asked for area in factories, and tried to convince Control that there was still life in the brand.
The task seemed doomed to failure due to recessions, fluctuating fuel costs and the conversion of customers’ tastes, until fuel became reasonable a few years ago and Americans fell in love with the Jeep Wrangler and other old-fashioned SUVs. But Ford, who made an unprofiered bet on small cars ten years ago, didn’t have one. That gave Bronco Underground a chance.
Recovering the Bronco is part of a broader strategy to reproduce Ford’s biggest hits. Its F-150 pickup has a generation of hands-free driving to Tesla’s, and the Mustang is becoming electric. The Bronco, presented on July 13, has a detachable roof and doors, a familiar chrome-plated horse emblem on the tailgate, rubber floors with drain holes to water the interior and a board with camera mounts or phones for passengers. show your subscribers how much they laugh.
“Many other people doubted us,” says Mark Grueber, director of complex product marketing, who has been pushing tirelessly for the bronco renaissance. He spoke as Schaffer lifted a cloud of dust that made doughnuts after going down the hill. “Everyone said Ford was going to mess it up.”
In 1999, three years after Ford stopped production of the Bronco, the subway introduced a secret program to resurrect it. The plan to move away from the square representation, which at the time had an unwavering cultural background. “We looked back at the original Bronco, and saw it” – the new one – “like a vehicle coming back to basics,” says Moray Callum, now Ford’s lead designer, who led the task at carmaker Dearborn, Michigan.
The program had codenamed U260, “U” for the application, and “2” for two doors. The “60” comes from a separate code name, T6, for Ford’s small Ranger pickup truck, which would provide the mechanical basis for the new Bronco. This “shared platform” is a must-have way for carmakers to reduce costs, and Ford has thought about building the Bronco on the chassis of a Land Rover, the elegant British SUV logo he bought in 2000, which was considered too expensive. .
The Callum team has developed two- and four-door editions with a minimalist and economical design for young buyers. He had any of the doors painted bright red and invited the then general manager, Jac Nasser, to check it out. “He enjoyed it,” Callum recalls. The next step in showing it to prospective buyers at marketing clinics is the commercial edition of Hollywood Check Projections.
But before that happens, Ford is involved in a protection scandal involving faulty Firestone tires in your Explorer SUV; more than 250 people died in rollover accidents. It followed a Congressional investigation and a major impeachment, which resulted in prosecutions and casualties. Nasser fired and the Bronco turned into collateral damage. With budgets under pressure, Ford ended the show. “After the Explorer event, things got complicated,” Callum says. “The systems were further reviewed and, if the business case was not sound, they cooled down.
Stinging from the U260’s cancellation, Ford’s then-chief designer, J Mays, took another whack at the Bronco. Mays was too senior to be in the Underground, but he was a sympathizer. He ordered his styling studio in Irvine, Calif., which specialized in futuristic concepts, to design the Bronco of its dreams, hewing to the original but with a healthy dose of 21st century industrial design.
The silver Bronco that rode on the level at the 2004 Detroit Motor Show, which looked like carved in aluminum, caused a sensation. This appeared to be Ford al Hummer’s reaction, founded on the Humvee military vehicle deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new Bronco such a star that he eventually selected to play the role of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the film Rampage.
But it’s more of a concept than a reality. Unlike the U260, the car display is not designed to be compatible with the Ranger. Without a platform to build the Bronco, the concept of the car gets nowhere. “It gave us a lot of hope and a lot of frustration,” Grueber says. “This showed what the Metro believed: that there was a visitor for some other Bronco.”
The subway fit in desperate. Patterson, the marketing strato, said the company’s executives were not taking advantage of Bronco’s popularity in the car show. “We were scratching our heads, ” he said. “And we’ll never give up.”
However, the ancient logo of the Bronco SUV fit with a dying breed. Rising gasoline costs and aging buyers have led SUVs to transform into curved, comfortable, fuel-efficient cars, known as “multisegments” because they were sedans and vans. “When all the crossovers arrived, there was a component of the shopping population who felt that their SUV had been sterilized,” says Will Neafsey, Ford’s customer studies specialist. “These other people were looking for a genuine game app vehicle. They were there, and they’ve just been more frustrated.
Ford’s plan to prevent the Ranger’s promotion in the United States from generating more confusing efforts as the small, cheap truck market was dying. But they were smart distributors and Ford designed a new one for those markets.
The Underground seized this to make another attempt to revive the Bronco. In 2006, designer Melvin Betancourt reworked the engine display concept to fit the foundations of the Ranger sold abroad. Patterson then convinced a Ford plant in South Africa that was already building the Ranger to make room for his meeting line to send a new Bronco to the United States.
But the bronze rejected the plan to import it. It was thought to be too complicated and expensive with high fuel costs due to the Iraq war, stagnant sales of SUVs thirsty for gasoline, and the economy beginning its fall in the Great Recession. “There was someone in the room, ” said Patterson about the opponents. “In fact, there were a few on board, but there were never enough suitable people. And the commercial argument for its importation simply wasn’t going to work.”
Ford would soon have to fear many other disorders. He needed a $23 billion loan for the 2009 recession without resorting to bailouts and bankruptcies that affected his Crosstown rivals, General Motors Co. Chrysler.
Management didn’t need to know more about the Bronco. In corporate discussions about Ford’s portfolio, it’s the call that may not be pronounced. “We were literally forbidden to use the B-word,” Grueber says. “The leaders were so tired that we talked about it, they said, “We don’t do a Bronco. What don’t you understand? »
The logo has fallen into such disrepute that the company has almost lost control. In 2013, the brand expired; Ford had to use the call to maintain the property. Grueber, who is guilty of naming the rights, said he told Patterson, “Hey, we’re going to lose that. If that happens, then we’ll be dead forever. The Metro has designed a plan to place a Bronco plate on the back of a “special edition” Ford Expedition that was presented at industry exhibits in Las Vegas and Florida. They didn’t need it to get too much attention, and that’s not the case. The mere fact of putting the emblem on the expedition enough to keep the Logo legally alive, the subway had provided a valid use case.
An unforeseen turning point overthrew Bronco’s fortunes in 2015. Ford Control, it was time to bring the Ranger pickup back to the United States after watching GM accumulate record sales with a couple of new pickup trucks. But the Ranger was not expected to sell enough to fill the capacity of a whole plant. The company needed some other vehicle to build at the selected Detroit suburban plant.
Ford’s president for the Americas at the time, Joe Hinrichs, asked his team to present concepts for a style that could be built throughout the Ranger. When the news reached Grueber, he asked his boss, Ed Ostrowski, who in terms of the long-term product appearance rate: “Can we do what we need with the product of the moment?” When he said “Yes,” he liked winning the lottery. »
Ford has conducted extensive consumer studies. Focus participants were asked about their impression of the word “Bronco,” with no indication of whether it was the car, the Denver football team or a wild horse. And the O.J. arrangement appeared, it doesn’t overwhelm the discussion. The subjects basically related the word to the unbridled and loose character. “It showed us that the logo was still strong and that we can bring it back without being overwhelmed by O.J.,” Grueber says.
The Metro helped through Ford’s leading operations officer, Jim Farley, who brought the 405 Freeway house on the day of the chase. Like other street drivers, Farley stood next to his car and watched as he drove the white Bronco, followed through a police car armada.
At the time, Farley was a junior executive at Toyota Motor Corp. One of his last primary projects at this corporation was the FJ Cruiser, a small SUV with retro-military taste and aspiring to face Jeep. But shoppers said it looked like a toy and Toyota took it out of the U.S. market five years ago. “The FJ’s design was running too much and its usability was compromised,” Farley told Underground. “So let’s make sure the Bronco can be used in the genuine world, a super original SUV.”
Farley’s boss, CHIEF Executive Jim Hackett, desperately wants a hit. The company, in the midst of a change of course, has been in a bad position for 3 years, with losses on the rise, a sloppy exit from the new Explorer and a dive. Now passionate about Bronco, the company has expanded its range. There is a two- and four-door version, as well as a smaller Bronco Sport style based on Ford’s Compact Escape SUV. They can be custom designed with doors that have oblong cuts that allow passengers to feel the breeze and with seats wrapped in the same fabric used on the boats. And while Ford doesn’t offer an electric or hybrid version, it suggests that this may be an option across the board.
The advent that will unfold, with performances at car shows in New York and Detroit and an occasion in the California desert at the site of King of the Hammers, an off-road race. The coronavirus pandemic forced Ford to abandon all those plans for a televised debut in July. The corporate is installed on the 13th. That’s after Tanya Brown, sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, former woman murdered from O.O. J., complained about an earlier date that Ford had chosen. Unbeknownst to the company, the company stated that it chose O.J.’s birthday on July 9. Read more: Elon Musk is now richer than Warren Buffett in the ranking of billionaires