Junkyard Find: 1993 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer 4-Door 4WD
For the past few months, this series has been heavy on imports and products from GM and Chrysler, so I decided that it was time to honor a discarded Ford vehicle here. Here's one of the most influential Dearborn machines ever built: a first-generation Explorer, found in Colorado a while back.
The first-gen Explorer was built for the 1991 through 1994 model years, and well over a million rumbled out of American showrooms. This wasn't Ford's first use of the Explorer name; it was the designation for a trim package on F-Series pickups in earlier decades. The 1991-1994 Explorers are still fairly easy to find in Western car graveyards, but have rusted out of existence in most other regions.
Today's truck is the first Explorer for TTAC's Junkyard Find series, though I did write about a 1994 Mazda Navajo (a badge-engineered Explorer that gave desperate US Mazda dealers an SUV to sell until Hiroshima could design the Tribute) back in 2019.
Our current era, in which just about every non-pickup vehicle on the American road is some flavor of SUV or SUV-shaped design, was formed by the popularity of three American trucks: the Jeep XJ Cherokee (1984), the UN46 Ford Explorer (1991) and the Jeep ZJ Grand Cherokee (1993).
By the turn of the century, the suits at every carmaker doing business in North America (and, pretty soon after that, the world) knew they had to get a complete line of SUVs or look for new jobs. We can thank or blame (depending on how you feel about the SUV-ification of the car industry) this on those three models of the 1980s and 1990s.
The XJ and ZJ Jeeps had car-like unibody chassis and suspensions and drove more like Detroit sedans than the jouncy, oil-canning, noisy trucks that had preceded them. The first-gen Explorer, on the other hand, was a bigger version of the old Bronco II, still based on the body-on-frame Ranger chassis and still riding on the F-Series-derived Twin I-Beam Ranger suspension. This was a truck, not a truck-shaped car.
Along with being much larger than the Bronco II, the most important selling point of the new Explorer was that it could be had with four doors.
The only engine available in the first-gen Explorer was the good old Cologne pushrod V6, with 4.0 liters of displacement and either 155 (1991-1992) or 160 (1993-1994) horses.
The Cologne 4.0 looked good enough next to the XJ Cherokee's ancient AMC straight-six, but the Grand Cherokee could be purchased with a 318-cube V8 when it debuted as a 1993 model. Ford made the "Rollin' in my 5.0" Windsor 302 engine fit in the second-gen Explorer (which also did away with the antiquated Twin I-Beam suspension).
The base 1991-1994 Explorer transmission was a five-speed manual, even in the top-of-the-range Eddie Bauer (three-pedal Explorers were available all the way through 2002), and a few buyers even wanted that gearbox. Most, however, paid extra for the five-speed automatic.
The thirst for fuel and truckish ride of the early Explorer didn't seem to hurt its sales numbers much versus the Jeep XJ and ZJ (the Grand Cherokee got slightly worse gas mileage, but it was a significantly bigger truck than the Explorer).
The Explorer didn't go to a unibody chassis until the 2011 model year, and it first got true all-wheel-drive (as we understand the term today) as an option for 1995.
The build tag says it was built at Louisville Assembly.
Tire size and pressure turned out to be very important in these trucks.
This car doesn't appear to have ended up in this place due to a rollover crash. It looks more like it got bent up due to being hit while parked.
For the shopping, the weekend, the safety.
Welcome to the 1990s.
Wait, you had to push a button to switch to four-wheel-drive? And you had to know when not to use four-wheel-drive? That seems complicated.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
1993 Ford Explorer in Colorado junkyard.
[Images: The Author]
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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At the time I thought it was strange that this wasn't just called a Bronco II w back doors. Of course we've now come full circle and the New Lifestyle Thing is called a Bronco.
I will say, I don't ever recall seeing an Explorer with a bench seat.