I fell for the Matra Rancho before I even knew its name. As a youngster playing with toy cars at a friend’s house after school, I discovered this butch-looking, totally unique vehicle in the toy box. Even at that age I had a pretty remarkable knowledge of cars and could identify most stuff on the roads, but this tall off-road-type thing eluded me.
Only in the past decade or so have I rediscovered this vehicle (in full-size form) in one of my classic car magazines, and only recently have I got round to properly researching and swatting-up about it. The Matra Rancho, then - the off-roader that couldn’t really off-road.
Launched in the late 1970s and touted as a ‘lifestyle’ vehicle before the term was even invented, the Rancho was inspired by the success of the original Range Rover, but with just the front wheels being driven by a 1.4-litre, 80bhp engine, it had about as much chance of following the Brit up a mountain as I have of actually affording a modern-day Rangie.
No matter, for the Rancho was priced rather more competitively than the two-door Range Rover, and was sold on its image rather than any actual off-the-beaten-track credentials. If you did want to traverse fields or farm tracks, there was the Grand Raid variant, complete with such niceties as wing-mounted spotlights (which wouldn’t operate with the engine switched on), an electronically-powered winch and a limited-slip differential. The Rancho X, by contrast, had its tyres firmly on the tarmac, with alloy wheels and metallic paint.
Incidentally, if you are wondering why some Ranchos have ‘Talbot’ adorning the leading edge of their bonnets, that’s because Simca (Chrysler Europe’s parent company and the foundations from which the Rancho was created) was sold off to PSA in 1978, the Rancho subsequently being rebranded as the Talbot-Matra Rancho.
So, the Rancho had a confused identity, little off-road capability and sat in a class of virtually one, being cheaper than a Range Rover but less practical and more 'specialised' than an estate car. None of this stopped the model proving a remarkable success, though, and over its short lifespan, over 55,000 Ranchos were produced.
In many ways, the Matra Rancho was the right car at the wrong time. Today’s roads are awash with so-called crossovers, upsized hatchbacks purporting to be tough and rugged but in reality being little more than con merchants. Witness Qashqai, Kadjar, Kuga, etc. But the Rancho was being a con merchant some 30 years before the first Qashqai got its alloy wheels stuck in a puddle.
So if it wasn’t for the Rancho, we might not have cars like the Peugeot 3008, the Toyota Yaris Cross, the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross and the aforementioned Qashqai. And on that basis, I really ought to hate it and rue its existence. But I don’t. There’s just something about it, and it's up there with the Spice Girls as a guilty pleasure...
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