THE BRONCO IS BACK

THE SUV THAT O.J. MADE FAMOUS IS GETTING A MAKEOVER, THANKS TO A FEW OBSESSED FORD EMPLOYEES

- KEITH NAUGHTON

Dan Schaffer, a four-wheel-drive engineer at Ford Motor Co., gets into an SUV, points it up a steep and slippery dirt hill, and hits the gas. It lurches into action, but halfway up the 45-degree climb it bogs down. Schaffer pounds the pedal, and it continues its ascent, as if it had just been catching its breath.

At base camp below, a group of middle managers hoots and hollers as the vehicle tops the hill at this off-road course north of Detroit. “Did you see that?” says Tom Patterson, an advanced product strategist. “That was amazing. To see it in action, in motion, that’s just so sweet.”

They’re cheering on a Ford Bronco—now available in “cyber orange”—and they’ve been waiting a while to do it. The group, known as the Bronco Underground, has agitated for years inside Ford for the return of the SUV, which has been out of production for more than two decades and is best known for the white model that O.J. Simpson drove that June day in 1994. In their free time, and without any boss’s approval, they sketched and modeled a reborn Bronco that played on its ’60s heyday; they drew up business plans, begged for space in factories, and tried to convince management that there was still life left in the brand.

The project seemed doomed because of recessions, fluctuating fuel prices, and changing consumer tastes—until gas got cheap a few years ago and Americans fell in love with the Jeep Wrangler and other retro SUVs. But Ford, which had made an ill-advised bet on small cars a decade ago, didn’t have one. That gave the Bronco Underground an opening.