The Power Ranger, aka What Could Go Wrong?

[Jake]

sorry for the occassion buddy.  glad to hear you're making the best of it though.

we had a '96 explorer 4.0.  not the same vehicle of course, but a lot in common, including all the memories that came rushing back when i looked at that dashboard.  we dumped ours at 110k due to tranny issues but aside from that, it was a truly gas/oil kind of vehicle.  hopefully this pickup doesn't have any surprises.

we would see up to 24mpg in ours on flat highway at a conservative 65-70.  the lumbar air-bladder in the driver's seat would leak but still hold air long enough to get an hour out of before you had to engage the pump again.  on long ascents it preferred the O/D off or it would hunt around a lot.

That dash lasted through the final years in the Ranger - all the way to 2011 or 2012. They got a lot of use out of that tooling.

Good to know the older 4.0 drivetrain could do so good on gas! Hopefully the newer variant is just as solid. You would have had the 4.0 OHV engine and 4-speed trans - this has the 4.0 SOHC and 5-speed auto, which came out in... 2001? We'll see how it does for economy with that extra gear.