some guy flipped his ranger onto it's roof last friday on the highway not far from here. the paper said by the time EMS got there he had crawled out of the vehicle. anyway the pic showed that the front of the cab + windshield were kind of crushed .. but the super cab part was totally intact. the truck was balancing on it! so the bottom line is that the super cab part was very very strong and acted as a roll bar. guy was a lucky dude.
it looked like a late 90's model.

 

I dont know if they have it in your market but I know in both Alaska and Minnesota(so for either cold people or for everyone) there was a commercial that shows a ford ranger rolling over like....10 times and it was used as a seatbelt use commercial and I think that it held up relatively well.

 

the supercab portion of Rangers do hold up very well.....we (the fire department i am on) had a 2wd Ranger extended cab ('00) roll over this past Friday....it flipped side to side 6 times (you could see the divots it took out of the highway each time it hit and based on the witness accounts) and then slid about 100' on its top....the cab was intact...only thing caved in was the windshield area....the driver was standing outside the truck when we got there....

 

I doubt it is constructed much differently at all from a standard cab ranger. The rear pillars of an ex-cab are just big and supportive as on an standard cab. The extended cab has the extra vertical steel in the extra doors but that is supporting the extra roof. The front of the cab is identical. So basically, they are more than likely proportionally the same when it comes to holding up in a roll-over. The Ex-Cab might have a slight advantage with the weight spread out over more surface area, but in grand scheme of a roll-over, it isn't going to make a huge difference.

 

i think it makes sense because you have about an extra foot of vertical support of the roof so right there you have alot of extra strength

 

I've seen that here!!! in alabama...

 

It isn't equal though. The roof itself is bigger. If that amount of vertical support was added to the regular cab roof, yea it would be significant. But that added vertical support is supporting the extra size of the roof too.

 

Dude, what?

The extended cab ranger has the support of the doors, the windshield frame, and the rear of the cab.

the single ranger has the rear of cab support and windshield frame. The doors arent used like in the extended cab ranger(except for the fact they keep it from easily collapsing).

And the extra support of the extended cab ranger isn't somehow negated but a bit extra of roof. that's only something like 50 lbs that is added in weight on top.

So the extended cab by virtue of having more vertical support is stronger.

 

Never mind, it is whooshing over your head and I don't feel like re-wording the same thing again.

 

Don't kid yourself dude. You may be radio signal expert but I deal with the strengths of beams all day and point loads and other physics of structures.

Explain yourself, clearly, as to why the single cab is stronger. I measured the weight wrong(since its whats under the beams thats improtant, not above

 

yeah i dont get why having more roof would matter?, it still has more vertical support regardless... single cab has like aaron said, 2 inches of vertical support in the rear where as the extended cab has another foot in width, so if it lands on the roof a foot will hold up better than the 2inch support

 

All I can say is that my super cab kept me alive when my truck rolled. Whether it's stronger or weaker than a regular cab, I don't really care. It's strong enough, and I hope the regular cabs are also.

 

Aaron, you are looking at it from a construction perspective, which is something I won't even go near because I'll freely admit I know nothing. But this isn't building construction. This is a vehicle and it is different.

Lets look at a standard cab and the distance from the A-Pillar to the the B-Pillar as a baseline. The weakest point is the A-Pillar on pretty much any vehicle because it is thin and angled. The proximity of the B-Pillar to the A-Pillar will have a direct effect on how much the front occupants are going to get crushed, its a simple triangle and the closer the B-Pillar is, the less surface area there will be to crush vertically.

If you spread out the distance from the A-Pillars to the next furthest pillar, you are going to have less protection and more intrusion in the passenger cabin. This would be the case in an extended cab without that new pillar in the middle (doesn't exist really). If you just take the B-Pillar and move it back two or three feet, you will have a lot more vertical intrusion since you are moving the strong vertical support further away from the weak angled A-Pillar. This is why the safety and strength is NOT equal when you change the size of the roof, because the support on each side is also NOT equal.

Now lets look at an actual ex-cab design. There is a new B-Pillar where the old one used to be. This makes up for moving it back. There is now a C-Pillar a little further behind that one. Your distance from the A-Pillar to the B-Pillar is now the same as on a regular cab making the vertical intrusion roughly equal. A vertical load placed on just the B or C pillars is not going to be much different than one on the regular cab B-Pillar. In those areas, the crushing is mostly angular as the vehicle is rolling and there is not going to be much measurable difference between an Ex-Cab and standard cab since the forces are the same. In fact, the rear wall provides a lot more lateral protection than the B-Pillar ever could.

So in conclusion, it all balances out.

 

it may in fact balance out .. but.. i'll say this. in this case the truck ended upside down and balancing on the super cab roof. the A-pillars were caved in and the windshield was also smashed. so in a regular cab more than likely the rear end of the truck would be angled more up in the air if you can picture that. with the super cab it was balanced on a perfectly intact level surface.

it's really hard to know how any vehicle will act in a given accident.. it's just that this one was amazing since the super cab part was hardly damaged at all. even the small side windows were still there untouched.

 

About halfway thru I got terribly bored. Let's agree that it's not that important and rolling trucks is bad.

 

I'd be equally if you started going on about steel work in building construction. You do that. I do car accidents. So I agree, lets just leave it at "don't test it!"

 

i'ld rather be in my supercab then a regular if i roll. i still wanna roll bar tho

 

and let's all wear seatbelts. i lost a friend who was driving an explorer and we are sure he would not have died if wearing a seatbelt. the explorer rolled and what killed him was being thrown around the inside of the truck. the truck itself held up pretty well.
am sure that fireranger will agree. my wife also an emt said so many people got hurt by being bashed around inside their vehicles during a crash.

 

FireRanger i totally agre with you... up to a point. In a 4 door ranger i would have to say you are correct, since the B pillar (the middle one) on a 4 door ranger isnt really a pillar at all, its just where the 2 doors come together, but in a 2 door ext cab, that extra pillar there really adds structual support more so than on a regular cab. you gotta remember, the more area you have to spread out the load, the better off you are...