Believe it or not, this is perfectly normal behaviour from many modern vehicles with eight, nine or even 10-speed automatic transmissions. It’s even more common with torquey turbo-diesel engines which can jump one or even two gears on a light throttle without affecting performance. Put simply, there are more gears on offer than the vehicle actually needs. Don’t forget, once upon a time, a three-speed transmission was quite common.

So why have nine or ten gears in the first place? Because when the vehicle is heavily loaded or towing three tonnes of caravan, those extra gears come in very handy for keeping the engine in its torque zone and ensuring it can still go up hills at highways speeds and take off from a red light without over-exerting itself. And when cruising on the highway, the vehicle can select a really high gear and lower its engine speed, which reduces fuel consumption markedly.

The last decade of dual-cab four-wheel-drive utes have emerged as the tow-vehicles of choice, and you see them everywhere filling roles exactly like the one you have planned. Popular models include the Ford Ranger you’ve nominated, Toyota HiLux, Mazda BT-50, VW Amarok, Mitsubishi Triton, Nissan Navara and Isuzu D-Max. But there are also cheaper alternatives including makes like the South-Korean made Ssangyong and various Chinese brands like LDV and Great Wall.

Just make sure you know exactly how much you need to tow before making a decision as some of the cheaper models don’t have the same outright towing capacity and even if they do, some of them don’t have the engine performance to make towing as easy as it should be. For parts availability, the Toyota would be king in really remote areas, but any of the major brands are pretty well covered in Australia.

Meantime, don’t rule out ute-based wagons such as the Ford Everest, Isuzu MU-X, Mitsubishi Pajero Sport and Toyota Fortuna. These offer better ride comfort when unladen thanks to more sophisticated rear suspensions and most have as much or almost as much towing capacity as their ute brethren.

It doesn’t sound right, does it? While it’s possible for an engine to be perfect one minute and blown up the next, you’d expect some sort of warning that this was about to happen. Which begs the question of why didn’t the Ford mechanic spot that there was a problem.

Probably the best advice is to have the engine independently inspected to find out what broke or went wrong. From there, you can work out whether you were just unlucky, or the dealership missed something or somehow contributed to the engine’s demise.

For the record, these engines won’t tolerate being drained of oil for more than about ten minutes. Due to the design of the oil pump, leaving the engine drained for more than that length of time means the pump won’t work when the engine is restarted and the engine will blow up soon after. Plenty of mechanics have been caught out by this, but surely not a Ford dealership…