By Ted Roberts, President and Chief Content Officer, Fleet Management Weekly
December 20, 2023
On December 5th, I attended the grand opening of Ranger Design’s new fleet-upfitting and manufacturing facility in Ladson, South Carolina. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and that added to the excitement of the event that included a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the local mayor’s office.
Plenty of talented Ranger Design employees were on hand for the event to show off the beautiful new 62,000 square foot facility. This facility is their third expansion in the past 10 years, and it will provide Ranger Design with additional warehousing capacity and will be a one-stop-shop for resellers and fleet managers, offering design, manufacturing and upfitting services for commercial EV and ICE vehicles.
The new facility boasts 15,000 sq. ft. of dedicated warehouse space with six continuous production lanes that can average 10-15 units per lane. The base output was established at an impressive maximum of 24,000 vehicles per year, that is also scalable by adding shifts or moving sub-assembly work offline.
According to Ron Cowie, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ranger Design, “Our geographic expansion into the Southeast U.S. and the build-out of our fleet upfit solutions capabilities are a significant part of our overall growth plan. It positions us for new opportunities and enables us to better serve our current customers.
“This $1.5M investment will allow our current distributor network to participate in local fleet projects that include installation, reporting and logistics. Also, it will enable us to better serve our North American Mercedes-Benz fleet customers, as well as providing an option for large fleet customers with regional needs,” added Cowie.
Located just a couple of miles away from a Mercedes plant that builds Sprinter vans, Ranger Design is working with Mercedes to provide content that they will be installing prior to the van being shipped.
The goal of Ranger Design’s team is to make things easy. From initial design, to manufacturing, installation, to delivery, they have a team solely dedicated to engineering, coordination, and project management for their fleet customers. They say that part of making it easy is also creating agility to be able to help fleet customers with not only ship-thru needs, but also with dropship and local upfits.
This state-of-the-art facility has been two years in the making, and the company sees January 2024 as their true starting point. Ranger Design’s future is looking bright, and Fleet Management Weekly congratulates them on this fantastic new facility.
