New Volkswagen Amarok – a Ford Ranger in VW clothes – back for another (identical) tease

The new Volkswagen Amarok pick-up returns for a new tease ahead of its arrival in 2022. Although there’s nothing new to show.

It’s a couple of years since the news arrived that Volkswagen and Ford were teaming up to share the cost of a number of projects going forward, one of which is the development of a new pick-up.

A year after that announcement, Volkswagen rolled out a tease for the new Amarok – although it’s not expected until 2022 – showing an artist take on what we can expect, and it looked very butch.

But despite the usual artistic licence of exaggeration, we could see influences from the Touareg appearing to influence the grille and VW Atlas SUV (which we don’t get in the UK) appearing to donate its wheelarches.

That tease for the Amarok is almost exactly a year ago, so when VW decided to give the new Amarok another tease at its Commercial Vehicles’ annual conference you might have expected more detail than the first tease. Which there is, but not for the pick-up.

In fact, with tiny differences, this tease is the same as the last tease, but VW’s artists have managed to drop it on a snowy landscape, which has clearly taken a year to get just right.

When the new Amarok does finally arrive, later this year or early next, it will share its underpinnings with the next Ford Ranger and be built by Ford in South Africa, although it does seem likely it could be built in the US too to avoid the Chicken Tax and sold there for the first time too.

This may be the first result of the VW/Ford collaboration to hit the market, but coming up behind will be Ford EVs based on VW’s ID models.