No Fixed Abode: The Last Days Of Bronco

In 1996, Ford sold about 28,000 Broncos. This was the same year the Explorer finally cracked 400,000 units, the vast majority of them XLT trim or above, and each one carrying a healthy markup over the Rangers from which they were unashamedly derived.

The Ford dealership where Rodney and I worked sixty-five hours a week to earn thirty grand a year stocked at least four Medium Willow Green Explorers with the XLT 945A Popular Equipment Package (PEP 945A) at all times and sometimes even a Medium Willow Green Explorer XLT with the lowbrow, cloth-seat PEP 941A, but we did not, I repeat, we did not stock the Bronco. In fact, during my year at the dealership, I only saw two brand-new Broncos come on the lot.

There was a reason for that.

A few months ago, I explained to you that you don’t want a Jeep pickup. I gave a few reasons, but the primary one is that, for most people, a Jeep and a pickup satisfy exactly the same need — said need having little to nothing to do with actual hauling or off-road capability. Most Jeep owners don’t go off-road and most pickup-truck owners will go years without hauling something that wouldn’t fit in a Camry with the rear seats lowered.

At this point, surely some of my valued readers will point out that they just went off-road the other day in their Jeeps to help a stranded Boy Scout troop and when they all got home they decided to build a new garage and they totally used their truck for a whole year getting all that stuff.

All of you can look at this page of Land Rover Freelanders going off-road in, like, the most awesome way. I owned a Freelander for a couple of years and I took it through water up to the doorhandles and I sank to the axles in mud and I ascended steep ATV trails and you know what it doesn’t matter because pretty much EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD WHO OWNED ONE OF THOSE THINGS used it the same way you’d use a Honda CR-V.

Brief moment of irony: the Freelander was really a left-field CR-V because it used some of the platform and suspension that BL-Rover got from Honda during their period of cooperation.

The point, however, is that “corner cases” do not a general case make. By and large, the extra capabilities built into pickups and Jeeps are not used often enough to validate their existence, in the same way that most Lamborghinis are just used for shopping trips in Dubai. If you’re doing 204 mph in your Huracan, you’re the exception, not the rule.

So, with that in mind, why wasn’t the Bronco the biggest-selling vehicle in America? Return with me to the spring of 1995, dear reader, and take a ride in a Bronco with me.

The Bronco is basically an F-150 of the thoroughly-refined generation that had been so popular with buyers that Ford continued to sell it alongside the “aero” 1997 F-150 for a full year after the new truck’s debut. The styling, inside and out, was popular with truck buyers. It was durable. It was easy to drive, too, because the standard F-150 was dead easy to drive and the Bronco had a shorter wheelbase.

To sit in the second row of a Bronco was truly to enjoy one’s self because those seats were “theater elevated” above the fronts. Everybody in a Bronco could see the road. If you were willing to go to some effort to make it happen, you could even remove the top, which is the primary way the Bronco differed from the contemporary full-size Blazer/Tahoe two-door. If you lived in California and didn’t mind a little chance of rain in your cabin, a topless Bronco was a wonderful way to travel.

You get the idea. Broncos were very nice. They were available from Ford in pretty much every F-150 trim level, from vinyl-seat XL to upscale Eddie Bauer. You could get them two-toned if you liked. They should have been the best-selling full-sized thing Ford made.

Instead, they were sales poison and my dealership refused to stock them. Why? It’s this simple: Broncos, despite their high-profile endorsement by a friend of OJ Simpson in the Nineties, had a reputation as being trucks for white trash. To own a Bronco was to define one’s self as some sort of Florida hick who liked muddin’. While the Suburban quietly gained a reputation as a horse-trailer superstar and the oh-so-Grand Wagoneer ascended into the Hamptonian aether, the Bronco couldn’t escape its association with the Deliverance crowd. This continued to be the case even as ownership of a full-sized pickup gained social acceptance outside country-music circles.

It was the lack of perceived utility that killed it, I think. For most of the past century, the American upper-middle class liked to be perceived as the kind of people who ate their vegetables first. Pickup trucks had a plain utilitarian purpose and Suburbans were obviously for large families with the need to tow or carry large loads. The Bronco, on the other hand, was just for fun and the removable top made that abundantly clear. Therefore, your 4,000-square-foot tract home crowd could justify a pickup truck and they lusted after a loaded-up Suburban, but a Bronco would have been irredeemably tarred with the brush of powersports and Jobbie Nooner.

The impeccable demographics of my professors-and-hipsters neighborhood dealership meant that we didn’t even want them to be troubled by the sight of a Bronco. Well, that wasn’t strictly true; we had a first-gen 2WD Bronco that we used to plow the lot in the winter, but by 1996 nobody recognized that as a Bronco anyway — they thought it was a Scout.

Nobody ever asked me about a Bronco. I never took an order for one. The rare customer who did inquire about a Bronco was sent down to the hill-trash dealership where the owner appeared on television with an acoustic guitar and pretended to be some sort of buffoon despite having a pre-med degree and not inconsiderable credentials as a chemist. Those guys had a row of Broncos right up front and they were proud of ’em.

When a long-time friend of our dealership principal insisted on ordering a Bronco from us, we kept it in the prep shop until he came to get it. “Fucking ridiculous vehicle” was my general manager’s opinion as it drove off without our dealer sticker on the back bumper. “You’d be better off with a crew-cab F-150 Bauer.” I nodded sagely.

That’s where my Bronco story would end, were it not for Mike. Mike was the “lot boy” and general handyman at our dealership. White, rural, late forties, looked like he was sixty-five years old. He drove the plow truck and cleaned the toilets. In the spring of 1996, Mike decided he wanted a Bronco. He wanted a loaded XLT. He sat down with our general manager, who showed him in no uncertain terms that it would be impossible for him to afford one. Mike nodded his head and said nothing.

Three days later, he drove his new Bronco XLT onto the lot. He’d gone down to the hick shop and done a five-year open-end lease. He could afford the payment and he wasn’t the type of man to think much past that. He parked it up front so we could all see it. I stood there at the front door and waited for the general manager to roll in.

Which he did, around noon. He parked his white XLT 945A Explorer next to the Bronco. Looked at it. Walked up to me.

“Get Mike.” I got Mike. Mike stood before him. “Mike,” my boss said, “park that piece of shit down the street. If I see it here, I’ll have it towed. And Mike,” he called, as our lot boy slouched out to his new truck with his shoulders slumped…

“Start looking for another job.”

In 1997, Ford introduced what we’d been waiting for — the Expedition. It had four doors. No removable top. Compared to the Bronco, it was a heavy, sluggish thing with a dim, dank cabin from the mandatory tinted windows. Our customers lined up for it. The Expedition was the answer to their prayers. It was socially acceptable. It ate the vegetables first.

In 1997, Ford sold 260,498 Expeditions, many of them through my dealership. And Mike’s Bronco sat down the street, rusting slowly while he failed to find another job. Then one day, long after I’d quit the dealership, I heard that Mike had finally been fired.

“What did the boss say?” I asked my friend, who still worked there.

“He said, ‘Get out, and take that fuckin’ Bronco with you.'”

“Well,” I replied, “I’m not surprised.”