A refreshed Ford Maverick was caught testing by spy photographers in Dearborn this week, giving us our first glimpse at what Ford has in store for the first round of updates to its Escape-based trucklet. Considering how popular the Maverick is, it’s pretty obvious that Ford doesn’t need to fiddle too much with its existing formula, but even good cars need tech enhancements, and that appears to be the focus (small F) of Ford’s efforts for its baby pickup.
We’re looking at three different trucks here, to stem any potential confusion. The exterior bits we’d expect to be revised with a mid-cycle refresh are appropriately disguised on all three of them. Not all of the covered parts are equally likely to be altered — sometimes the use of camo itself is a misdirect — but new front/rear bumpers and lighting elements are likely.
The silver truck appears to be a well-optioned street model (a Lariat, most likely) with a correspondingly robust interior package. You can see it here (below left) next to a 2024 Maverick Tremor (right), which is also based on the Lariat. Quite a bit of the prototype interior is hidden by camo, but we can clearly see that the new screen fills the space where the cubby once was atop the center stack. The wheel and controls appear unchanged.
The other two prototypes appear to be an off-road trim (perhaps the refreshed Tremor; below left) and a test mule for advanced safety and/or autonomous driving tech (below right). The former is rocking a new set of Goodyear Territory RT tires (the 2024 Tremor wears Falken Wildpeaks), suggesting either a change in tire supplier or perhaps a new (and/or upgraded) off-road trim in the works. We’d sooner suspect the former than the latter.
The teched-up mule is equally mysterious. Keep in mind that Ford could be using this prototype as a testbed for just about anything (including projects completely unrelated to the Maverick itself), but considering how robustly this prototype has been up-fitted with various electronic gizmos, two things seem plausible. One is that this is a mule for Blue Cruise. Ford already packages Blue Cruise in CUVs built on this platform, so its inclusion on Maverick is not out of the question, however, even with a price tag approaching $40,000 loaded up, the little pickup seems an unlikely candidate for premium semi-self-driving tech.
The other likely explanation is that we’re looking at the early build of a new camera/blind spot system designed for towing. Those beefy sensors at the corners appear to be for radar or lidar, and the door-mounted cameras are pointed in the same direction, suggesting they’re for monitoring or redundancy. This looks an awful lot like the setup Ford just implemented on the updated Super Duty. Since it’s designed to help make towing less intimidating, it would be a solid candidate for inclusion on a “newbie” truck like the Maverick, but given its limited towing capacity, the practicality would likely be limited.
We’re calling this a likely 2025 model given the level of polish we see here, but that timing is far from guaranteed. We hope to learn more soon. Stay tuned.
Source: www.autoblog.com