Ford's ute combines beauty with brawn

The Ranger Wildtrak has serious pulling power. Photo / Dean MacKenzie

Vehicles like Ford's new Ranger Wildtrak are blurring the line between grubby workhouse and weekend warrior, giving buyers a better choice for what essentially needs to be a true multi-purpose machine.

Ford has entered the 4WD fray properly with its new Ranger Wildtrak - a hardy dual-cabber with enough wick to do the business on the farm and enough bling to foot it with the scourge of urban assault vehicles in our cities.

Dripping with Tupperware and added extras, the Wildtrak is probably one of the better looking 4WD utes on the market. It's going up against the excellent six-speed Navara oil burner and the Hilux, so it has to be.

Sitting atop the Ranger range, the Wildtrak's eye-candy add-ons might make it more Kohi than Kaikohe, but it doesn't detract from its core business - doing the business.

Powered by a lazy, slightly rowdy, 115kW 3-litre, four-cylinder common-rail diesel making a solid 385Nm from a mere 1800rpm, the Wildtrak comes packing either a five-speed manual or auto with overdrive.

The manual tested here ran Ford's kosher 4WD system with real low ratio and auto-locking hubs - no drama if you need to haul weighty stumps out of Middle Earth.

It boasts 214mm of ground clearance, so even with fat mates in the back and a full tray, it was impressively effective on the mud, although its 18-inch crossover rubber wasn't best suited to the application.

At $59,400, the Wildtrak is around $5000 more than the XLT wellside variant. It boasts the aforementioned 18-inch rims as well as side steps, a tough tub liner with a lockable, retractable tonneau cover, roof and tub rails and rear window sails - even puddle lights on the massive rear view mirrors - all adding up to make it a very tidy truck.

But this is part of its downfall: the bolt-ons make it very big. Negotiating inner-city carparks turned into a far more harrowing experience than with its XLT stablemate, and parking required luck and genius.

On the inside, the Wildtrak really steps outside the work hack realm. Alcantara-trimmed seats are the most noticeable addition, with a tarted-up binnacle housing a pitch and roll gauge, temperature (in and out) and a compass. The stereo will even talk nicely to your iPod.

So is it worth dropping an extra five large on a tweaked-up ute? The XLT does everything it's supposed to, and is easier to drive around town without view-obscuring rear sails.

But it comes down to wants, rather than need - both are a touch on the agricultural side (and that's the point) - but the Wildtrak variant looks a lot better and has no shortage of extras.

What it will come down to for those in the market for this kind of machine is "what are the other dads taking to footy on Saturday morning?"