Ford’s Silverton manufacturing plant, in Pretoria, is one of five global manufacturing hubs for the Ranger bakkie.
The plant is able to produce up to 200 000 vehicles a year and, based on three-shift 24-hour production, it is capable of producing up to 720 vehicles a day – or one vehicle every two minutes.
Ford this year celebrates 100 years in South Africa, and shares a number of interesting facts on how each Ranger – South Africa’s Car of the Year 2023 – is built, some of which can be seen in the attached video.
There are almost 600 robots employed on the chassis line to help maintain production volumes, with each chassis taking around three hours to build.
There are around 3 000 to 4 000 spot welds in the body of every single Ranger, and corrosion protection is provided by dipping the body in 12 chemical baths prior to painting.
Every Ranger is covered with about eight litres of Ford’s 3-Wet High Solids Paint system.
This 3-Wet paint process is to ensure durability and a chip-resistance appearance, while helping to reduce CO2 and other emissions. This is achieved through savings made from reductions in the size of paint booths, decreasing numbers of paint purging, as well as ovens required to cure the paint.
Following this, each Ranger passes through a paint scanner. This electronic eye can detect coating defects as small as 0.2 mm2, which is smaller than a needle point.
There are more than 2 700 parts in each Ford Ranger. Each vehicle undergoes nearly 1 000 quality confirmation checks before it is allowed to be sent to a dealership.
A high-pressure water test sees every Ranger sprayed with water for 20 minutes, in a controlled pressure test, to replicate a rainstorm.
The vehicle is then inspected for any signs of water ingress.
Once the final quality confirmation checks have been completed inside the factory, each Ranger is tested on the squeak and rattle track, high-speed track and rough road track, and every vehicle must complete one full pass to be approved for release.
One example of every Ranger variant is removed from the line at random, every day, and a selection of lasers and cameras are used to check wheel alignment and headlights, while a quick lap of the steering alignment test track shows if the steering wheel is on straight and the vehicle tracks straight as an arrow.