2021 Ford Bronco Review | Why Did They Choose Independent Suspension?

hello everyone and welcome as you can see we are sitting inside of the new ford bronco and you're wondering jason this is like this very capable off-road vehicle what the heck are you doing sitting in traffic look i wanted to do a video that was representative of what owners would experience and what what they would actually be doing with their ford broncos so here we are sitting in city traffic in austin texas no we are actually going to take this thing off-road but today we're going to be testing out mostly on-road and learning about this vehicle so there's seven different series of ford bronco that you can choose from quite a bit of customization you can get it with a 10-speed automatic or with a seven-speed manual you can get it with a 2.3 liter inline four cylinder or you can get it with a 2.7 liter v6 now the vehicle we are sitting inside of is uh beautiful if you're looking at this shade of blue i think it is a great looking vehicle and this is the first edition with the 2.7 liter v6 twin turbo so you've got the 2.3 liter with a twin scroll single turbo charger good for 325 pound-feet of torque and 300 horsepower if you use regular gas those will be a lit bit lower numbers but it is cool that the option to use regular gas is there and it just derates it a bit so with the v6 the 2.7 liter twin turbo single scrolls for each of those turbo chargers you are getting 330 horsepower 415 pound-feet of torque so not much additional horsepower just 30 extra horsepower over the four-cylinder so on the top end they're probably not going to feel all that much different but because this has so much more torque on the bottom end this is going to have better acceleration now something worth mentioning the camera that is recording me is mounted on ford's own mount so they have integrated mount up on the dash here they also have a usb power source which is really cool so you can plug your camera in or whatever else you're using so they've got both usb outlets there which you can choose from keep your item charging which is awesome and then they have the mount itself so i do not have my camera stabilized if there's a lot of shaking that's just going to be indicative of how well this mounting system works i intentionally turned off stabilization i just want to see how well the mount itself works so uh if you're like man this this footage is really shaky and terrible it's like hey that's all part of the plan that's part of the test all right that's what we're figuring out so we're here to do now just as a very first early on impression of this vehicle the first thing that you notice is just kind of the presence and the size this thing is massive this is a big vehicle uh even sitting in it feels huge but standing out beside it it feels enormous uh and and it is not light as a result like this is this is a heavy vehicle depending on the trim and you know whether you're going two-door four-door which engine you pick which transmission you pick this can weigh as much as 5100 pounds so you know more than an f-150 uh depending on you know the specs so why might you want to choose automatic versus manual well the manual has a really cool thing in that it has a crawler gear so you can put it in four low and then you can put it in this crawler gear and its crawl ratio is actually 94.75 to 1 meaning that your engine spins 94.75 times for every one time your tire spins which is amazing so you can basically just crawl along super slow with a manual transmission not worry have to worry about stalling out not have to worry about slipping your clutch which is really cool for off-road use of course with the automatics the crawl ratio isn't quite as high still very good you've got that four low the difference being of course since you have a torque converter you don't have to worry about slipping a clutch like you do with a manual so you can get away with a lower ratio there and still have really really good off-road control now it's pretty obvious what vehicle the ford bronco was built to compete against these days the jeep wrangler basically hasn't had much competition aside from maybe the fj cruiser for a little while but it doesn't have much competition especially these days and so ford is bringing that competition with the bronco and one of the unique differences of the ford bronco versus the jeep wrangler is that it has an independent front suspension and a lot of people you know decide one way or the other oh this is crap this is great but let me just talk about some of the decision making of why they went with that independent front suspension and also it's worth mentioning that both the front and the rear are dana axles both the front and the rear do have locking differentials and if you do get the sasquatch package which we are riding on it does have position sensitive uh bilstein shocks uh so you can have you know softer travel for you know that that normal zone and then if you start to get a really high impact and you start to get a lot of travel it can firm up that damper so you're not you know bottoming out and that kind of thing hitting the bump stops but why go with the independent front suspension well first of all one advantage of an independent front suspension is that you have lower unsprung mass so of course we have that big heavy axle uh that solid axle uh that is weight that is not held up by the suspension and so in that case you know the more weight you can hold up with the suspension the more the suspension can do its job that's the easiest way of thinking about it so it's going to be more compliant it's going to be more comfortable if all of the weight is on top of the suspension rather than below the suspension in which case it's not doing you any good on top of the unsprung mass another advantage is that with an independent suspension what happens to one wheel doesn't impact what happens to the other wheel so if you have a solid axle and you you hit a bump that bump goes across that entire axle and so it impacts both sides of the vehicle and so you know obviously from comfort standpoint that's not ideal but also from a high speed stability uh standpoint that is not ideal and so they have this thing called haas with this bronco like high off-road speed stability something along those lines point is they want this thing to be able to drive fast off-road and an independent front suspension will give you much better control in those scenarios where the whole thing isn't just vibrating and shaking it's individually choosing you know how to maneuver over these bumps and as a torture test uh they took a stock ford bronco and they put it through a thousand mile baja race and stock bronco the only thing that happened to it according to ford is they had two flat tires which of course you're going to get some flat tires doing these long off-road thousand mile you know trips but very cool from a durability standpoint that it was able to make it through and they got third place so they did really well and they were the only like stock vehicle competing in that another advantage of an independent front suspension and something that is very apparent today is that it allows you to use a modern steering system rack and pinion steering system rather than like what jeep is doing with the wrangler which of course they have the solid front axle and they're using recirculating ball steering and the the difference being that really you're you're on center feel and you know your your communication i wouldn't say there's a lot of communication to the steering wheel but the directness is there where you know it it feels connected and i'm on road like this is the perfect way to test out how this steering feels because when you have an off-road vehicle the steering feel is going to be terrible like that's just a fact if it is designed to be really good off-road you're going to have these big tires they're gonna have a lot of play in them you're gonna have suspension with a lot of travel so everything is working against steering feeling really tight and really connected but going over to an independent suspension allows you to use that rack and pinion steering system and it's gonna feel a bit better like in and it does actually i'm impressed with this i i feel like for sure the worst steering experience i've ever felt uh was what in a lifted uh jeep wrangler two-door jeep wrangler all stock equipment like all mopar equipment um but the steering you know you've got one to two inches in the center where it's just doing nothing you can move that wheel a bunch and it's not doing anything and with this it actually is like any small movement is actually changing the steering so i find that impressive not that the steering feels good but it's direct it's responsive and on center it actually you know doesn't have much play to it which is cool because the reality is a lot of people are going to be driving these on-road and shouldn't your on-road experience be good and yet there's also advantages to the independent suspension off-road as well uh and you know maybe articulation is something people might think it might be sacrificing and yet ford says versus the jeep wrangler they've got about 17 more 17 more articulation so over 10 inches in both the front in and the rear of articulation uh for each of these wheels now you can also pair with this front independent suspension a disconnecting front sway bar so that allows you even more articulation uh it brings up its rti uh which is just a measurement of like how much articulation you can have between the left and right wheels so by disconnecting that sway bar now they're much more independent and so you can go up you can have a greater difference between how high your left wheel is versus how low your right wheel is or vice versa the acceleration is actually pretty decent and then the braking uh was a little sketchy sketchy in that the limit of of braking on these giant you know all-terrain tires it's not anything like a summer tire you know it's gonna it's gonna be a lower g-force for emergency braking when you've got these all-terrain tires that are designed for all kinds of different trains rather than just roads in hot weather now it's worth discussing the differences between the two-door and the four-door because i absolutely love the way the two-door looks and in some areas the compromise actually isn't that bad in other areas it kind of is so with the two-door rear leg room actually isn't a huge difference it's all it's like 0.6 inches more that you get with the four-door as far as rear leg room however you do have one less seat back there so this is only seating for four versus the four-door has seating for five of course the four-door does have significantly more cargo space and significantly more cargo space once you fold the seats down so if cargo space and passenger space is a concern obviously the four-door is the way to go the thing that i found to be a bummer with the two-door is that it has a significantly smaller fuel tank and both cars get very similar fuel economy right so it means your range in the two-door is significantly less so it's got a 16.9 gallon tank in the two-door and i believe it's a 20.8 gallon tank with the four-door so about four more gallons and these things get terrible fuel economy so you know with the sasquatch package some of these are getting 17 on the highway so if you've got 17 miles of you know miles per gallon and 17 gallons to work with your highway range is pretty poor so you're only getting maybe 250 miles before you need to stop at the gas station before you're starting to get worried about possibly running out and just to comment on the fuel economy like i get that these things are going to have poor fuel economy just based on the shape and the size like if you look at it this thing's massive it's shaped like a brick of course it's not going to get great fuel economy but it is like kind of a bummer when you hear ford talking about you know like the new maverick which is a front-wheel drive uh hybrid but it's a pickup truck nonetheless and it's getting 40 mpg right like both of them are going to have a somewhat similar mass and yet this takes twice as much energy to move a certain distance and then along the whole lines of like ford and you know trying to have this sustainable look with the f-150 lightning with the mach e with the maverick going for that sustainability factor and then coming out with something like this is like okay but are you kind of just like messing with us because a ford mock e gets about 100 mpg equivalent so the amount of energy that it uses this gets you know around 20 mpg so this takes five times the amount of energy to travel the same distance as a machi and they're of similar mass so i feel like that's pretty disappointing like a fifth as efficient i mean like i could i could understand you know like it's not even as efficient as a wrangler i feel like in competitive specs this has good power to it and really good torque but efficiency wise it is significantly lacking in the ford bronco now one of the things that's cool about the bronco is just how modular it is so you can take off the doors you can take off the roof there's sections of the bumper that you can take off if you need you know like a better approach angle if you need to be able to get over a big rock you can take a portion of the bumper off so it gives it you know the ability to just kind of plow over stuff i do also like that it's got sacrificial rockers that are modular you can replace those and they're built to hold the full weight of the car so there's a lot of thought that's gone into durability and safety as well so ford says that if on vehicles where you can remove the doors there's less stringent safety precautions that you have to take from a regulation standpoint um but they ignored that they went with you know even though yes we can take the doors off we want to be as safe as any other vehicle that doesn't have that loophole that says hey just because you can take the doors off obviously it's probably going to be a bit less safe if someone hits you ford didn't want to do that so it has full side curtain airbags um and and just like the modularity of it too again it's just pretty neat there with the off-roading of you know you're going to hit your rockers right that's just going to happen and so having that brace there that's replaceable is nice i've been on press trips where we have messed up vehicles for that very cause that there wasn't this like sacrificial rocker guard there we're going over rocks and bumps and stuff like that and you crash into the side of the vehicle so it's it's cool that they've thought about these things genuinely from a standpoint of like the customer can go out there and do it so what's this thing like to drive well overall i think the the easiest impression to say is that it's really comfortable i'm also surprised at how quiet it is i was expecting it to be really loud because i've driven in jeep wranglers and i feel like they have pretty loud interiors overall this has been really nice this has got you know the solid roof on it and they've got some sound deadening put onto that roof as well to help kind of cancel out some noises you've got really big noisy tires on this thing and the noise level inside here isn't that bad it's also very very comfortable from a suspension standpoint so i feel like you know it feels similar to the ford raptor and that the ford raptor has just got all this suspension travel pretty soft set up and as a result you feel really comfortable on road and that has the same tendency in this vehicle and you know there's a lot of body movement right like if you do anything sharp or quickly you've got pitch you've got roll it's it's going all over the place right but that's kind of what's expected when you have tires and lots of suspension travel like this vehicle has so comfort is good noise level inside the cabin is good steering honestly considering uh you know the the purpose of this vehicle steering's fine like it's it's fantastic all things considered i don't really have major complaints from a driving standpoint even visibility i've actually been pretty impressed with because i thought from the outside the front windshield looks a little small but you've got really good visibility out the front really large windows to your side decent visibility out the back of course backup cameras and different views with cameras as you're backing up here we'll get up to a bit higher speed so you get a bit more tire noise now we're doing about 60 and so the tire noise is definitely coming through but it's not painful i i don't think there's anything wrong with it oh remember when i was talking about it having really bad fuel economy right now on this trip which which started off fresh we've gone 12 miles and we've used a gallon so we're getting 12.6 miles per gallon uh so far while we've been driving this so yeah it's atrocious the fuel economy is terrible all right so let's just test out response of the automatic transmission paired with this 2.7 liter so i've got my foot off the accelerator and i'm just going to punch it we're going to see about how long it takes so floored it and then we're at full torque it seems so there's a good delay in not only the shift but also waiting a little bit for that torque to come on uh the bigger delay seems to be the transmission shifting and then once it shifts the torque actually does come on pretty quickly overall on road i'm pretty impressed with it i like almost everything about it uh minus the fuel economy that i'm getting but aside from that it's been a pleasant experience driving this thing on the road thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 410,884

Rating: 4.9128323 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: tTfhU2g_FmE

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JeepinAroun]

17mpg won’t deter many buyers. It hasn’t deterred people buying Wranglers, 4Runners, or Tacoma. I’m not sure if it’s true anymore, but the most cross shopped vehicle to a Wrangler used to be a boat. Meaning that people would buy Wrangler as a fun vehicle. And with Bronco, many people will buy it as a fun vehicle and can afford the gas, or get an additional fuel efficient vehicle. Meaning Bronco will sell a lot to wealthy people.

[u/FuriousFieryCupcake]

All I wanna know is how to afford one in eastern Europe while being broke.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/thepaleblue]

He misses the actual answer, which is that it's built off the same T6 platform as the Ranger, which has - wait for it - independent front suspension. Building a bespoke platform for a single vehicle is pretty much out of the question if you want to remain competitive these days.

[u/djGormox361]

I'd wanna get a bronco anyways, I wanna throw it out for offroading, and use it for it's intended purpose

[u/BusRiderNYC]

I liked the Bronco up until he said 5100 lbs and 17mpg highway :(

[u/Mr_Slugworth]

Holding off for electric version.

[u/geolchris]

It's telling that he speaks all about the benefits of IFS on the road, and not much of the negs/positives for offroad.

This clearly is an enthusiast vehicle for off-road drivers. Sure, we need some on-road quality but I don't want to sacrifice off-road handling/performance for on-road comfort, that's missing the point.

I'm excited for the non-sponsored fully off-road reviews to come out and see how the IFS performs. It could be (and probably is so, based on looks) really really good, and a great modernization of tech for offroad, versus a shitty adaption of on-road tech like we've had in the past.

But this review is clearly aimed at mall crawlers.

[u/Chioster]

Can't we all just get along in this thread? And stop ragging on how the Wrangler, or 4runner, or Bronco is better than each other.

Can't we just appreciate that we now have competition which will help drive innovation and development in this segment. Competition is good! and I am more than happy the Bronco has joined in on this conversation.