You’ll have heard about the tactic of joining those you cannot beat, but what about, for want of a better word, becoming them?
It isn’t something that’s obvious at a glance, but this is the approach Volkswagen has taken for the second outing of its Amarok pick-up truck, which is not only larger, more capable and plusher than the understated original, but also entirely different in terms of DNA.
A little history: when the first-generation Amarok launched in 2010, it did so with an in-house body-on-frame construction and a range of VW’s proprietary powertrains, of which the beefcake 3.0-litre V6 TDI was by far the most popular. With easier drivability and a more hospitable cabin than its rivals, the Mk1 sold well, especially considering its maker had no prior experience of building mass-market pick-ups/bakkies/utes around the world. However, volumes weren’t quite high enough to ensure that a successor would follow, as the figures illustrate. In a good year VW would shift around 90,000 Amaroks. Ford, on the other hand, has averaged 350,000 or so units of the Ranger, which sells particularly well in the UK.
In this age of colossal and unexpected automotive industrial partnerships, if you’ve already worked out where this is going, well done. If not, you quickly would, were you given some time to poke around the squared-off, brutish new Amarok, which goes on sale early next year. Climb aboard and you’d notice that the massive, portrait-oriented infotainment screen isn’t something VW has deployed anywhere else, and the style of gear selector and door handles are equally unfamiliar. And then, with a bit more digging – opening up the bonnet, nerdishly inspecting the windscreen scrawl, turning over some fittings – there it is in writing: FoMoCo.
Lurking beneath the Amarok’s exterior is the recently updated Ford Ranger, with its revised T6 platform. We’ll come onto the immediate consequences of this fact in a moment, but it’s worth stopping to appreciate its significance in the broader sense. With Volkswagen having invested so heavily in EV strategy, its ability to develop ICE-based legacy products has been hamstrung, particularly in respect to lower-volume commercial vehicles. Equally, Ford has a good platform for its larger electric vehicles and you’ll find it underpinning the Mach-E SUV, but for smaller cars it’s already well off the pace, unlike VW, which has its own MEB platform. It means the two companies are ripe for technology and hardware sharing, and the new Amarok is the very first fruit of this partnership. None of this is breaking news, of course, but it’ll strengthen the hand of two global car-making giants considerably.
For Amarok, Ford has clearly led the project, which began in 2018 and has mostly taken place in Australia. Is it a canny bit of badge-engineering from VW? Not quite. Of the body, only the roof, wing-mirror caps and door handles are actually shared. Though architecturally identical, the interior is also appreciably different, and engineers from the German company were seconded to Ford, having particular input into the refinement qualities of the car’s suspension and EPAS. Even so, as something leaf-sprung and live-axled at the rear and with true agricultural intentions, anybody hoping the new Amarok will move with the grace of an air-suspended Touareg (or, for that matter, the downright silken new Ford Ranger Raptor, with its independent back axle and clever dampers) is going to be disappointed.