I get that to a degree - but somehow GM offers V8s in their big SUVs and manual transmissions should get better mileage. I know new autos are pretty good at that but they are still heavier and weight is a big factor in mileage. And somehow Toyota manages to offer manuals and still meet cafe.
The round shift dial is really unrelated. That is just making the controls weird for no reason. It you want to manually down shift it is not intuitive and you need to take your eyes off the road.
They can blame cafe all they want but I’ve been buying only Fords for since the early ‘90’s and and they are managing to make me look elsewhere just by not offering some basic things.
This is an interesting point; other automakers are continuing to offer V8 options while still abiding by the rules.
Now this is a total guess (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong); but I believe this is due to Ford's choice of R&D and budgeting. FoMoCo has for the past decade spent millions of dollars in joint ventures with companies like Robert Bosch GmbH to create and improve the EcoBoost line of engines. This technology continues to be a major initiative for Ford and they want their ROI for the money spent.
Additionally, because the EcoBoost 3.5L specs were better than the V8 offered up until 2014; someone probably made a judgement call and decided it was cheaper to sell the Expy with only the EcoBoost option and not have to spend money creating and offering a V8 option.
On the other hand, GM has spent a large amount of R&D on technology to shut down half of the cylinders in a V8 during light usage. Just a different approach to the same end of increasing gas mileage across a fleet.
Also, (this is total speculation so please jump in and correct me) I believe CAFE regulations treat passenger cars and light trucks differently. Remember, the gas mileage requirement is across the entire fleet, not by model. With FoMoCo's decision to stop selling passenger cars, I'm speculating that they needed a different way to meet the CAFE numbers, since they wouldn't be able to include passenger cars in the calculation.
I would also speculate that Toyota meets it's CAFE numbers across the fleet partly because they continue to offer passenger cars with high MPGs; but also due to their offering of Hybrid options across almost all of their passenger cars. CAFE dictates what the manufacturers overall fleet must equal out to; whether or not people actually buy the offerings made is a different story.
As far as not offering the manual transmission in the new Ranger, I believe that is just a result of lack of market demand. I recently read an article where they mentioned that the last full-size sedan one could purchase with a manual transmission was a Honda Accord and they've dropped the option for the upcoming refresh.