The online configurator for the Ford Bronco is live, the Blue Oval has announced, where the full selection of colours, interior materials, options and accessories can be seen. The company says that more than 190,000 reservations have been received for the sixth-generation off-roader across both two- and four-door variants.
The Wildtrak trim variant is the most popular, making up 26% of all Bronco reservations, according to Ford United States consumer marketing manager Mark Grueber as told to Autoblog. The next most popular is the Badlands variant, accounting for 20% of reservations, with the remaining 54% divided between the base, Big Bend, Black Diamond, Outer Banks and First Edition variants.
A little under half of all reserved Bronco units have been specified with the optional Sasquatch off-road package that consists of 17-inch beadlock-capable forged aluminium wheels with 315/70 mud terrain tyres, electronic locking differentials, 4.70:1 final drive ratio, high-clearance suspension, position-sensitive Bilstein dampers and high-clearance fender flares.
The four-door Bronco turned out to be the more popular of the two bodystyles on offer, accounting for two-thirds of all reservations held while the two-door made up the remaining one-third. The company had expected the four-door to be the bigger seller, though the two-door saw a greater number of buyers than expected, noted Grueber.
The 2.7 litre EcoBoost V6 engine also proved more popular than the 2.3 litre inline-four, though no details were offered. Despite earlier calls from the public for the Sasquatch package to be made available with the manual transmission, and the company having confirmed as much.
It appears that there weren’t all that many manual Bronco buyers to begin with; this accounted for just 10% of reservation holders for the four-cylinder Bronco, which is currently the only engine choice for the manual. That said, the Bronco’s manual gearbox take-up rate is still a lot better than that of other cars, Grueber noted.
The company has been monitoring Internet forums and posts as part of researching future product offerings for customers, alongside direct feedback from customers as well as from their dealers, Autoblog reported. The manual gearbox Sasquatch option was already in the works, and its launch timeline was brought forward as it was among the most requested features after the Bronco was revealed.
The reason the manual gearbox and Sasquatch package combination will only be ready in late 2021 is that Ford is still conducting final tests for this powertrain combination, Autoblog said. The company will continue to depend on customer-sourced information to determine if future options and features will be made available to the buyer. One popular request is the white roof as shown at the debut, and this will be available in 2022.
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