The Street Truck is Back
And its cool, but is that enough?
Like the Ford Lightning before it (not that Lightning, this one), the new Ford Maverick Lobo seeks to be a more street-focused truck and bring back some of that old school cool. The OG Lightning was a lot cooler than the Lobo, but we take what we can get these days.
The old Lightning had a 380hp V8. The Lobo has a... checks notes 238hp four pot. Yep, that's less horsepower than the previous year's Ecoboost engine. I would have loved to see the V6 from the Edge ST dropped into this package, but that's a way bigger undertaking, so I get why they stuck with the smaller engine. That said, the 250-hp variant of Ford's Ecoboost four cylinder made the Maverick a surprisingly quick and fun little truck, so I expect the Lobo to continue that trend.
Fortunately, the Lobo is more than an appearance package — it's a parts bin package! It takes bits from the Euro-spec Focus ST, Bronco Sport, and Mach-E and tunes them specifically for the little truck. Ford put some legitimate effort into this project and I have to applaud them for it. Those wheels alone would sell this truck like hotcakes, so to see this as a legit performance variant (minus the engine) is a pleasant surprise.
The problems arise when you get to the pricing chart. When the Maverick originally launched, Ford was excited to tout it as a sub-$20,000[1] vehicle for the masses. A few years later, the very barebones XL model starts at more than $26,000 and the Lobo and Tremor trims are now north of $40,000.
When the Maverick was a $20,000 vehicle, much could be forgiven. The interior is utilitarian, but actually pretty nice for that price. On a vehicle in the mid-30s and low 40s? Not so much. Maverick Lariat, Tremor, and Lobo variants are now falling far behind the pack as far as interior quality. Mazda gets you a near-luxury experience for the same money, and even Kia and Hyundai are putting out very nice cabins in that range. A $40k price tag is even getting close to knocking on the door of real live luxury brands. Ford has never been known for nice interiors, in fact they're often quite bad, but this is getting to be a real albatross around the Maverick's neck.
The 2025 facelift does change the interior slightly, but it's mixed news at best. A full-digital gauge cluster is finally available, and the center screen now forgoes the awkward cubby in order to make the screen larger. It feels like this bigger screen was indented to fill that space from the very start, so it's puzzling that it took several years to do so. However, that new screen now houses all of the HVAC controls, leaving only a few physical buttons left on the center stack. Automakers across the industry have slowly started to admit that their push to digitize every control possible was ill-fated hubris at best, and gross incompetence at worst. Let's hope Ford learns this lesson as well.
My personal bone to pick with the Maverick (and most American cars, for that matter) is that adaptive cruise control is only available on the top trims. It's not even an option on XL and XLT trucks. A $24,000 Honda Civic has adaptive cruise control (and a nicer interior). Japanese brands made this tech standard years ago, so you shouldn't need to option a car well north of $30,000 to get what is a rather basic feature these days.
The Maverick Lobo will almost certainly sell well, and probably at a healthy markup for a while. Now that Ford has taken the value proposition out of the Maverick equation, they are leaning a lot harder on these special trims to sell the truck, but it just can't compete at the price point that it needs to. The cheap Ford Maverick always seemed too good to be true, so Ford needs to put its money where its mouth is and up the quality game for the second generation.
It was never less than $20k, destination pushed it over the line. ↩︎