Making a yielding turn on a red light. In-and-Out Burger. Jennifer Aniston. All things that you will find in the United States of America, says Neil Briscoe, but sadly not here in the UK. And to that list you can now, alas, add another — the Ford Maverick.
The Maverick is the smallest and lightest of Ford’s truck lineup, smaller than the Ford Ranger and positively Lilliputian next to the mighty Ford F-150. In fact, it’s not technically a truck at all. While its bigger, beefier brothers are based on hefty separate chassis, the Maverick is actually based on a car platform. It wouldn’t be too fanciful to describe it as a pickup version of the Kuga SUV.
That means, obviously, that it’s a little less capable than the bigger trucks. The maximum payload, for instance, is 680kg. That’s almost half what a Ford Ranger can lug. The load space is also quite compact, measuring 934 litres up to the gunwales, but it’s a useful space with plenty of tie-down points, storage cubbies, and electrical sockets. There’s a full metre of width between the rear wheel arches too, so I reckon you’d be surprised just how much cargo the Maverick can lug.
The littlest truck comes only as a double cab, so it’s also practical for daily life. Space in the rear seats is decent, but perhaps not what you’d call exceptionally roomy. Children will be fine, and teens will complain, but then don’t they always?
Up front, things are much better. You can have an entertaining, and lengthy, game of ‘Spot The Focus Switchgear’, and the plastics are more rugged than they are luxurious, but our top-spec Lariat model came with a two-tone cabin finish that looked smart, and the way the cabin is bolted together is just fine and dandy. A touchscreen in the centre of the dash runs Ford’s old-but-simple SYNC3 software that connects to your phone via Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. In front of you, there is an instrument pack that mixes digital and analogue dials to good effect. Down low on the centre console, there’s a rotary gear selector for the automatic gearbox and lots of useful storage areas. So far, so practical.
The Maverick is available as a hybrid, using the same 2.5-litre hybrid powertrain as the Kuga
and the lamented Mondeo Hybrid. Sadly, the one we were driving wasn’t a hybrid — production shortages mean those are thin on the ground, so we were instead testing a 2.0-litre turbo with four-wheel drive.
That’s both good and bad. The good part is that performance is peppy — with 250hp and 375Nm of torque on offer, you’ll only need around seven seconds to reach 60mph. It’s also pretty economical. Ford reckons that the hybrid Maverick should be capable of 40mpg when driven gently (a figure that would have a Ranger driver down on their knees thanking the diesel gods for sparing their wallets), and we saw an indicated high of 35mpg in US gallons, which equates to 42mpg on this side of the Atlantic. Our overall average, on a mixture of long, lonely desert roads and crammed LA streets was 33mpg US, or 39mpg Imperial. Very respectable.
Sadly, the Maverick has some refinement issues, or at least this engine does. There’s a standard-fit eight-speed automatic gearbox, but the way it responds, you’d swear there was a CVT in there, and it allows the 2.0-litre engine to rev and gnash its head off far too much. It’s fine when cruising, but as soon as you ask for more thrust, it starts yelling again in a very annoying fashion.
The ride quality also needs some work, by which we mean it actually needs some ride quality. The Maverick thumps and grumbles over anything but the smoothest tarmac, and there’s little enough of that on the California-Nevada border. It doesn’t feel baked-in, though — a Kuga, with roughly the same kerb weight, rides smoothly, so if the Maverick ever were to make it to this island, it seems like a quick re-tune and some local-spec tyres might work wonders.
There’s little enough to do in handling terms — of course, the Maverick rolls a bit in corners, even though there’s little enough cornering to be done on the California-Nevada border (pard’ner…), but the steering is sweetly weighted and accurate. The lightweight Maverick positively dances around the hefty, lumbering SUVs and planet-sized Peterbuilts with which it’s sharing Interstate 15.
The shame of it all is that we can’t have it. Just like Hyundai’s conceptually similar (and even more handsome) Santa Cruz, the Maverick is a pickup truck that feels ideal for UK conditions, but which won’t — at least according to the current Ford regime — be making that long trip east. Pity. We could have loaded it up with 680kg of In-and-Out’s finest…
Model tested: Ford Maverick Lariat Supercrew 2.0 AWD
| Kerb weight | 1,616 kg | Load bay length | 1,382 mm |
| Payload | 680 kg | Load bay width | 1,354 mm |
| Towing capacity | 907 kg | Load bay height | 516 mm |
| Ground clearance | 218 mm | Liftover height | 765 mm |
| Approach angle | 21.6° | Departure angle | 21.2° |
| Basic price | £26,500 est | On the road inc VAT | £31,800 est |
| VAT | £5,300 est | Model range exc VAT | £19,400-£26,500 est |
