For the past few months, this series has been heavy on imports and products from GM and Chrysler, so I decided that it was time to honor a discarded Ford vehicle here. Here’s one of the most influential Dearborn machines ever built: a first-generation Explorer, found in Colorado a while back.
The first-gen Explorer was built for the 1991 through 1994 model years, and well over a million rumbled out of American showrooms. This wasn’t Ford’s first use of the Explorer name; it was the designation for a trim package on F-Series pickups in earlier decades. The 1991-1994 Explorers are still fairly easy to find in Western car graveyards, but have rusted out of existence in most other regions.
Today’s truck is the first Explorer for TTAC’s Junkyard Find series, though I did write about a 1994 Mazda Navajo (a badge-engineered Explorer that gave desperate US Mazda dealers an SUV to sell until Hiroshima could design the Tribute) back in 2019.
Our current era, in which just about every non-pickup vehicle on the American road is some flavor of SUV or SUV-shaped design, was formed by the popularity of three American trucks: the Jeep XJ Cherokee (1984), the UN46 Ford Explorer (1991) and the Jeep ZJ Grand Cherokee (1993).
By the turn of the century, the suits at every carmaker doing business in North America (and, pretty soon after that, the world) knew they had to get a complete line of SUVs or look for new jobs. We can thank or blame (depending on how you feel about the SUV-ification of the car industry) this on those three models of the 1980s and 1990s.
The XJ and ZJ Jeeps had car-like unibody chassis and suspensions and drove more like Detroit sedans than the jouncy, oil-canning, noisy trucks that had preceded them. The first-gen Explorer, on the other hand, was a bigger version of the old Bronco II, still based on the body-on-frame Ranger chassis and still riding on the F-Series-derived Twin I-Beam Ranger suspension. This was a truck, not a truck-shaped car.
Along with being much larger than the Bronco II, the …
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Author: Murilee Martin
