Photo: Ford
An Escape in wolf’s clothing, the Bronco Sport is often bashed by Bronco enthusiasts for not being a proper Bronco. That reasoning is fair if you ask me because a unibody crossover with all-wheel drive targets a wide range of buyers who drive off the beaten path only occasionally.
When the Ford Motor Company revived the Bronco nameplate with an Escape-based model and two Ranger-based models, the Blue Oval knew from the start that only the body-on-frame architecture is capable of handling extended off-road driving. Asking the same kind of performance from the smaller sibling is overkill, which gets us to a very fine story published by Jalopnik.
The article begins with two pieces of marketing nonsense from the Dearborn-based company, namely “unrelenting Bronco capability” and “the off-road capability that made the original Bronco a legend.” Ford can get away with these claims because the U.S. is lax in terms of advertising don'ts.
Next up, the cited publication highlights that multiple Bronco Sports have overheated after a few minutes of tackling a small hill or hooning around in the sand. In every case, the compact crossover flashed the 4WD Temporarily Disabled message before entering limp-home mode. The Power Transfer Unit, also known as the twin-clutch rear differential that enables AWD whenever needed, is the subassembly that overheated in both scenarios.
What comes as a bit of a surprise is that Ford offers a PTU cooler in the Bronco Sport Badlands, liquid cooling that isn’t up to the task of keeping the power transfer unit within the recommended temperature range.
“First of all, that’s not a small hill climb,” Bronco Sport vehicle engineering manager Eddie Khan told Jalopnik's tech editor David Tracy. “When I challenged that, he responded with: ‘Would you do that in a normal vehicle?’ I responded that this isn’t a normal vehicle, it has ‘Bronco’ in the name."
"Khan agreed, though the discussion seemed to get a little tense from there, as we weren’t in agreement on the severity of the driving condition.”
As much as I like the Bronco Sport as a crossover, it’s clearly not an off-road vehicle in the same vein as the Jeep Wrangler-rivaling Ford Bronco.
The article begins with two pieces of marketing nonsense from the Dearborn-based company, namely “unrelenting Bronco capability” and “the off-road capability that made the original Bronco a legend.” Ford can get away with these claims because the U.S. is lax in terms of advertising don'ts.
Next up, the cited publication highlights that multiple Bronco Sports have overheated after a few minutes of tackling a small hill or hooning around in the sand. In every case, the compact crossover flashed the 4WD Temporarily Disabled message before entering limp-home mode. The Power Transfer Unit, also known as the twin-clutch rear differential that enables AWD whenever needed, is the subassembly that overheated in both scenarios.
What comes as a bit of a surprise is that Ford offers a PTU cooler in the Bronco Sport Badlands, liquid cooling that isn’t up to the task of keeping the power transfer unit within the recommended temperature range.
“First of all, that’s not a small hill climb,” Bronco Sport vehicle engineering manager Eddie Khan told Jalopnik's tech editor David Tracy. “When I challenged that, he responded with: ‘Would you do that in a normal vehicle?’ I responded that this isn’t a normal vehicle, it has ‘Bronco’ in the name."
"Khan agreed, though the discussion seemed to get a little tense from there, as we weren’t in agreement on the severity of the driving condition.”
As much as I like the Bronco Sport as a crossover, it’s clearly not an off-road vehicle in the same vein as the Jeep Wrangler-rivaling Ford Bronco.
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