Engineering Excellence
The packaging brilliance of the Maverick continues to impress, offering more rear head- and legroom than the larger Toyota Tacoma, plus nearly 90 percent of the short-box Taco’s bed capacity in an overall package smaller by a foot in length and about half that in height and width. The result is a tidy, affordable vehicle that’s vastly more capable, comfortable, powerful, and efficient than like-sized predecessors like the Ford Courier.
Some savvy engineering work went into truckifying the Escape’s hybrid all-wheel-drive hardware to earn a 4,000-pound pickup truck tow rating. (A $745 4K Tow package is available on XL, XLT, and Lariat models with AWD.) This involved adding a transmission oil cooler and upgraded cooling fan. That electronic planetary combiner transmission can generate some heat, as Evans discovered when the front tires broke through what looked like solid dried mud into a morass. Minutes spent spinning the wheels in the goopy ground trying to rock the truck free prompted a transmission temperature warning. (Of course, any upgraded cooling package isn’t too effective at 0 mph.)
As in most vehicles, the drive mode typically defaults to Normal at startup, but the Maverick is smart enough to flash a message, “Normal mode selected, resume Tow/Haul (or Lobo, etc.) mode?” Senior editor Aaron Gold noted, “It’s little touches like that that remind me Ford knows the truck business.”
Our short wish list for future engineering upgrades includes better responsiveness when using the shift paddles with the EcoBoost engine, better sensing of hands on the steering wheel, and maybe a slightly less flatulent engine note in Lobo mode.
Advancement in Design
The Maverick’s midcycle restyle is subtle and now differentiates more models than ever with grille and ornamentation revisions, all of which heighten the Ford truck family resemblance. There were some mixed opinions about the Maverick’s new front fascia design, and many noted the Lobo’s grille seemed to be conjuring the ghost of Mercurys past, but it’s an undeniably clean look overall. And kudos to Ford for offering five actual colors (plus four stops along the white-black continuum).
Ford denied us the coolest wheels in the lineup, speccing our Lobo with the optional ($100) conventional-spoke wheels instead of the super cool standard turbofan-styled ones. We dig the Lobo’s monochrome body-color fascias and lower rocker cladding set off by a black roof. This look definitely lends it a lower, meaner, “street truck” look.
Much of the design brilliance resides inside the Maverick, where Ford employs patterns, textures, and color to make objectively hard plastic appear upscale. The faceted soapstone look of our XLT’s dash inserts still looks cool. Many accent pieces that were orange in our yearlong test truck have been replaced by bright blue ones in the contender trucks, and some of us prefer the former. But we applaud the Lobo’s use of blue and yellow seat stitching (expressing Ukrainian solidarity, perhaps?).
The upgrade to an all-digital instrument cluster was not universally acclaimed, with engine temperature and fuel gauges transitioning from high-precision physical needles to clumsier LED segments that illuminate in 1/8th increments, though color schemes coded to the drive modes add interest in the larger 8.0-inch digital cluster.
Efficiency
Ford’s Maverick fairly easily aces this criterion, with the hybrid models ranked as the most efficient combustion-powered pickups available. Indeed, the EPA city/highway/combined mpg numbers are impressive: 42/35/38 for the front-drive model and 40/34/37 mpg with all-wheel drive. Even the 2.0-liter turbo EcoBoost models manage to eke out 30 mpg on the highway (except the off-road-focused Tremor, whose knobby tires and elevated ride height drop that number to 27 mpg). Having averaged 35.7 mpg over nearly 24,000 lead-footed miles of Michigan-based driving on our front-drive 2023 XLT Hybrid, we can vouch for those EPA figures.
Value
We tested 2025 models, but the value picture changes slightly for 2026, when a front-drive EcoBoost model rejoins the lineup priced $1,000 under the Hybrid, lowering the price of entry on a turbo Maverick XL to $28,840. Turbo all-wheel-drive pricing has dropped to parity with the hybrid front-drive’s $29,840—a $125 savings. Upgrading from XL to XLT costs $2,500, while Lariats open at $37,565 for the turbo and $39,785 for the Hybrid (down $920 and $350, respectively). Even with every factory option, a Hybrid Maverick limbos under the average new-vehicle transaction price by about five grand, and the cost to operate it will also grossly undercut that of a typical new truck, if our two-year test truck’s $0.12/mile fuel and $0.02/mile maintenance costs are any guide. (Better budget for double that fuel bill with a Lobo or Tremor.)
Safety
The Maverick comes standard with most of today’s latest safety gear, including forward automatic emergency braking, lane keeping, and seven airbags. NHTSA awards it five stars in frontal and side impacts, but a four-star rollover score limits the overall ranking to four stars.
The Maverick’s basic architecture predates the IIHS moderate overlap test, so its overall Moderate ranking precludes Top Safety Pick status. But front occupant results were all good—it was the rear-seat dummy chest-loading and kinematics that drove that lower ranking—so we’re willing to accept these ratings in a class of truck expected to use the rear seats less.
Best of the Year
Back in 2022, when Ford introduced the Maverick, it was an open question whether Americans would accept a truly compact, crossover-based pickup truck. All those sales later, the answer is, “Yes, they will, if truck experts design it and build it.” Now the Maverick lineup has been further refined, improved, and broadened to become even more appealing to even more people. And that’s why MotorTrend is seizing this opportunity to name Ford Maverick our 2026 Truck of the Year.