Omg First Car! Options

[buttface96]

Got my first car (well truck for that matter)

anyway its a used 01 ford ranger, had about 60k miles on it, not too bad, but I love it so far. It was basically an early 17th bday present and we got it in total for about $8k





I love it so far!!! not sure what im going to do in my modding of it... any ideas?

[lostboyz]

Its nice truck, looks like its in good shape

Don't mod it. There are a few minor things you can do that just a few boosts in HP but I wouldnt do anything exterior. Get a decent exhaust and maybe a decent audio system.

[buttface96]

Yeah definitely an audio upgrade... I'm not going to do anything for a while (mainly because I have to pay for insurance....and I'm currently jobless lol....)

[lordvader129]

id lose that plastic bedliner, leave it open or get a rhino lining if you are gonna haul stuff

[grim_d]

slam it on 20's

[lostboyz]

id lose that plastic bedliner, leave it open or get a rhino lining if you are gonna haul stuff

I had a similar ranger dosent necessarily have a plastic bedliner, it just has those side things to protect the top part.

[buttface96]

Yeah my dad was kind of worried about the bedliner, IO guess if water gets under it, that it can rust the hell out of the bed...

I prolly wont have the time of money to do this for a atleast a few months... got insurance and gas to pay lol

[yaazz]

Thats a nice truck.
The only thing I don't like about rangers is how severely underpowered they are. The Vortech 4.3 in S-10's have a lot more power.
That said I think Rangers look a lot nicer then what Chev/GMC have to offer

[lordvader129]

The only thing I don't like about rangers is how severely underpowered they are. The Vortech 4.3 in S-10's have a lot more power.

depends which model you get, the v6 s10s have more power than the v6 rangers, but the 4cyl rangers have more power than the 4cyl s10




but then again who wants a truck with a 4 banger, lol

[lostboyz]

I dont know what mine had but I had an 04 ranger edge, and it was by no means under powered.

[twistedsymphony]

meh... late model fords and chevys don't do it for me

if you want a REAL pickup buy an old Chevy K10 Stepside, anything older than an 88 will do.

for the 80s up to present you're better off with a Toyota pickup/Tacoma IMO though the F150 in the early 90s wasn't bad either. The current line up of light trucks on the market blows, even the Tacoma and Wranger are crappy versions of their former well built selves.

As for this truck... you couldn't have picked a worse vehicle in terms of fuel economy. ...and there's no reason to own a 4x4 in California unless you plan on off-roading, and if you're off-roading then this is very much the wrong truck to do it in. I hate digging on your choice of vehicle but I guess I just don't understand why anyone would buy this truck? The only people I know who own rangers are those who needed/wanted a light pickup and had a hard-on for Ford.

I could easily name 50 vehicles I would have spent $8K or less on before this one, but, to each his own I guess.

As for modifications... again not the best vehicle for that either... I guess it depends what your goals are for this truck
are you going to attempt to off-road it? or do you want it to just LOOK like an off-road vehcile and make it into a "mall cruiser", are you more of bling-happy paper-gangster, or a gun-toting hick... or do you have no clue what you want and just want to throw more money at it?

Some words of advice on car modifications... you will almost NEVER get your money back, and depending on what you do. Lots of people will consider modified vehicles worth LESS than unmodified ones (in general, unless you're a pro: modification=abuse or damage to future potential buyers). If you don't outright OWN the vehicle then don't do any modifications that you can't undo... and most importantly, think about what you really want, spending money on parts is money you will almost NEVER get back, at best you'll make back 1/4th of what you put into it and that's if you bought stuff that has a high resell value and you know how to work ebay... Oh yeah and modifications will void your warranty and your insurance wont pay for damaged after-market parts (some will, but only if you tell them about it, most others will cancel your insurance if they find out your car is modified).

If it were me I would have had the modifications/ultimate goal in mind before I even bought the car, then I would have found something for a few grand cheaper to give me some extra cash to actually do something with it once I bought it. But hey... not everyone thinks the same way I do (they tell me that's a good thing).

This post has been edited by twistedsymphony: Apr 19 2008, 06:31 AM

[buttface96]

As for this truck... you couldn't have picked a worse vehicle in terms of fuel economy. ...and there's no reason to own a 4x4 in California unless you plan on off-roading, and if you're off-roading then this is very much the wrong truck to do it in.

I seriously question the choice of most first time car buyers... I could understand trading off flash and performance for practicality, but most go for neither...

I hate digging on the OP's choice of vehicle but my fiance owned an 01 Ranger, it's not a BAD car but I can't think of a single stand out feature that would cause me to choose it over any other car... I could easily provide a list of 50 other cars that I would purchase before a ranger for the same or less money that do things better.

I guess I just don't understand why anyone would buy this truck? The only people I know who own rangers are those who needed/wanted a light pickup and had a hard-on for Ford.

1. Its NOT a 4x4

2. Gas milage is decent, not extravagent, but decent (about 17mpg) (V6 3.0 liter)

3. We were looking for a small light weight truck with low milage... I don't know if you've done any used car shopping for a lightweight small pickup here in socal, but this deal was a steal. Most decent tacoma's, s10's, frontier's, rangers, sonoma's, etc all were too expensive for us (0ver 11k for most decent vehicles) We spent about 4 months of searching for the right small pickup and this was it (especially since the dealer only wanted $7k for it, and it had under 60k miles on it, and test drove just fine.

4. Maybe if YOU searched around here for a decent light weight truck you might find something better;)

[47_M450N_47]

I dunno about the Rangers being less powerful than the S10. Sure the numbers say they are, but I think the Rangers are geared better. My grandad has a '04 S10 (4.3 Vortec) and I have a '99 Ranger (4.0 V6). My Ranger would easily burn out longer, and it got up to 100 a lot faster too. They both apparently have governors to keep em from going over 100 because we couldn't get either over that, but mine was considerably faster getting there.

EDIT: Nice truck by the way, I love my little Ranger. I've got 136k miles on mine so far and haven't had many problems out of it. Mine came with the plastic bedliner in it. I took it out last year sometime and the paint was all black from where the plastic had been rubbing against it but there wasn't any rust under there. Maybe mine's just unusual I dunno.

This post has been edited by 47_M450N_47: Apr 19 2008, 07:45 AM

[hamwbone]

start saving up for that water pump

dont worry now, just remember this thread

[twistedsymphony]

1. Its NOT a 4x4

2. Gas milage is decent, not extravagent, but decent (about 17mpg) (V6 3.0 liter)

3. We were looking for a small light weight truck with low milage... I don't know if you've done any used car shopping for a lightweight small pickup here in socal, but this deal was a steal. Most decent tacoma's, s10's, frontier's, rangers, sonoma's, etc all were too expensive for us (0ver 11k for most decent vehicles) We spent about 4 months of searching for the right small pickup and this was it (especially since the dealer only wanted $7k for it, and it had under 60k miles on it, and test drove just fine.

4. Maybe if YOU searched around here for a decent light weight truck you might find something better;)

Rather funny that you say it's hard to find decent cars for sale in your area... when I was searching for my truck and my car I found oodles of ebay and craigslist ads for well priced vehicles in SoCal, enough that I considered flying out there to drive something back east.

I was in Chatsworth on business last week and as we drove by a lot with pristine used cars I lamented to my co-worker the fact that anything over 5 years old in the north east is rusted to junk and jokingly commented that I should open a used car dealership in NH where I do nothing but import cars from California. Heck there was even a Cherokee I saw with a for-sale sign on it in a mall parking lot that I seriously considered buying and driving back because of the cheap price and great shape it was in.

Even with the dire used car market in the north east I still managed to find a 99 Tacoma RC 4x4 for $7K which is exactly what I was looking for minus a few amenities that I would have liked. I'll admit that I got a good deal on my Tacoma, but most of the other ones I saw for sale were still only about 9-11K and I could have picked up an S10 even cheaper if I didn't hate GM so much

Toyotas cost more because they're worth more, and their worth more because they last longer, with regular maintenance you can easily get 225K miles out of one of their engines without any problems.... but I digress.

As for Gas Mileage I would hardly consider 17MPG decent... my lifted V6 Toyota with the engine running like garbage and in dire need of a rebuild got 18 and my current 99 Tacoma gets 23-27 depending on how I drive it and if I'm in 4x or not. anything below 20 is a gas hog IMO. the fact that this truck is RWD and still only get 17 is puzzling to me. "decent" would be over 24, and "excellent" would be over 30.

This might just be semantics but even the US Government considers anything below 22MPG to be a "gas guzzler" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Tax_Act#Gas_guzzler_tax

Modern engine management can do fantastic things for fuel economy. For instance: My fathers Z06 corvette, a 5.7L V8, got 28MPG highway...

I'm not trying to be a dick, all-round it's a decent truck, but I don't see it has having any stand-out qualities vs similar vehicles on the market. If you like it, that's great, do let my car-snobbery get in the way of your enjoyment

If you don't mind my asking... what exactly are you going to use this truck for?

This post has been edited by twistedsymphony: Apr 21 2008, 06:53 PM