I'm referencing accidents that I have personally witnessed (seen a lot when I was commuting 900 miles a week through Atlanta) and that my three emergency response friends have seen.
That same website also shows that a bunch of cars and small SUVs (including 4 Mercedes on a list of 21) that had the lowest fatality rate in accidents, while the highest fatality rate goes to Hyundai, Kia, Scion, and Chevy (Hyundai having 3 on a list of 21).

It's not completely fair to compare Cruze and Elantra to an Impreza and a Focus when you consider the Impreza and Focus have sporty models with a rally pedigree. I guarantee that the later two's higher fatality rate was due to excessive speeding / racing. Of course there's good examples and bad examples within every manufacturer.

ill give you that on the impreza, as its a low volume car all together and the sti could have skewed the results. the focus however, was only counting the 2011-2014 model years, the st didnt go on sale until 2013 and was a low volume model so i doubt it had a big impact on the results (the sample size was over 1,000,000 cars). the rs wasnt counted in the results, since it wasnt on sale yet.

Ah, you're right!

Either way, size isn't the only factor in vehicular safety and the new Ranger was properly named as a Ranger. :turned:

I don't know about stats, but I do know that a focus and a f-150 met here about 4 days ago, the f-150 driver was treated and released, they buried the 3 occupants of the focus yesterday. Now there's some real life stats for you.

IIRC, overall wheelbase, bed length, legroom and headroom was about the same on the outgoing Ranger compared to the Tocoma, Frontier and Colorado. The only real dimensional difference was width, where the midsized were around 4" wider.

Well, the Tacoma and Frontier's V6 engines had excellent reliability AND power in their V6's. The older Ford 4.0 OHV was a pretty decent truck engine even if it did top out at around 160 hp. I wasn't as impressed with the newer 4.0 SOHC, but it was still relatively reliable. Still, it put out around 205 hp, while the Tacoma was doing 240ish and the Frontier 265. I loved my Frontier, I bet I redlined the engine every single day, beating the snot out of it for 11 years before I finally got rid of it only because I needed something larger.

But Ford did put a crappy engine in the Ranger. I had the 3.0 V6 for 18 months, it was nothing but trouble and underpowered to boot. I'd have traded it back for my 2.9 V6 in a heartbeat. I've never owned a car/truck for that short of period of time, but the 3.0 was that much of a turd I sold it as soon as I had enough to get something else. I'd love to know how many hours I spent troubleshooting and working on that thing, all engine related too. After that I had the 4.0 OHV, which like I said was a relatively good engine. Not much hp, but it was torquey and did well as a small truck engine.

The only reason I have a f150 instead of a Colorado/Canyon, Tacoma or Frontier is tow capacity. The tongue weight and GVW on my small TT is too high for either of them.

I don't know of a good one they used in Ranger. The 4-cylinder was a joke. The diesel couldn't hardly move the truck itself, let alone a load. The 2.9 V6 was Ok I guess, but wouldn't go the distance. The 3.0 Vulcan was garbage. And the 4.0 Cologne engine ate timing chain guides like candy and made very little power. The final SOHC version of the 4.0 was decent, but still had issues with the timing set and the occasional bottom end failure. A very long history of "just OK" engines plagued the Ranger.

However, back in the days of the Ford 4.0 V6 and Jeep 4.0 I-6, both of those engines became legendary because everything else on the market was actually worse.

I, too, came to this F-150 I'm in from a 2013 Nissan Frontier CC 4x4 and as far as Nissan goes, they had their fair share of issues. The payload was miserable. The rear ends were prone to failure. And the paint was razor thin and would scratch if you even looked at it the wrong way.

I wish they would spend their time on making a more affordable truck instead of adding a new line. Truck prices are outrageous

I did grenade the spider gears in my Frontier, but it ended up being the OK because I replaced the locker with a True Trac....best mod ever!

IIRC my payload was right around 1,100 lbs on my 2005. I know that after having just at 2,000 of sand in my Ranger, and the same amount of gravel in the Frontier that the Frontier handled the weight way better. I never had a problem with the paint, I even off-roaded it quite a bit on tight trails and never did get that many "kentucky pinstripes".