The 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo Is A $35,000 Street-Truck Throwback

The 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo is a new vehicle based on an old idea: street trucks. Street trucks were an American phenomenon from the 1980s to 2000s, and they were low, slinky, and fast — the antithesis of stereotypical American trucks. They’ve been out of the spotlight for years, to my great dismay. 

But life is cyclical, and street trucks are back (in the form of the Lobo only, for now). We’ll just have to see if modern America wants them. 

Why This Truck Exists

The 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo is a derivative of the Maverick, Ford’s relatively new compact unibody truck that starts at $24,000 and is based on the Escape and Bronco Sport platform. The Maverick Lobo starts at $35,255 and has some obvious performance changes from the regular truck, but output from the EcoBoost engine (250 horsepower and 277 pound-feet of torque) remains the same across the lineup. 

Compared to the regular Maverick, the Lobo is lower by half an inch in the front, 1.12 inches in the back, and 0.8 inches in roof height. The brakes are bigger, and the dual-piston front brake calipers come from the Ford Focus ST hot hatch in Europe. There’s also a transmission oil cooler, as well as a larger radiator and fan from the Maverick’s 4,000-pound “4K” towing package. 

The Lobo also gets a special drive mode and a torque-vectoring rear drive unit from the Bronco Sport, but we’ll talk more about that later. 

Ford calls the Maverick Lobo a  “new canvas for modern street-truck builds,” and that’s what it is: A starting place where buyers can choose to stay or modify to the moon. The Lobo, to me, feels like a factory-modified truck using Ford parts-bin performance parts. That keeps costs down and, if you want, lets you make the Lobo your own with modifications.

2025 Ford Maverick Lobo: The Basics

• Price: $35,255 base ($42,345 as tested)
• Engine: Turbocharged 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine 
• Transmission: 7-speed automatic with paddle shifters
• Drivetrain: All-wheel drive (AWD)
• Power: 250 horsepower and 277 pound-feet of torque
• Fuel Economy: 21 mpg city, 30 highway, and 24 combined
• Body Style: Five-seat unibody truck 

What It Looks Like

The normal Ford Maverick looks the way I want any truck to look: small, utilitarian, and cool. I look at a Maverick and think: “Nice budget buy,” which is one of my favorite compliments for a car. The Maverick is well-styled but not flashy; it’s the truck you buy when you know what you need, and it looks the part. 

The Lobo is that with a slightly higher cool factor. The grille has vertical, gloss-black slats, which matched the black roof and wheels on my truck. My tester Lobo had turbofan-style wheels, which basically look like giant dinner plates with holes around the edge — an easy “Hell yeah” from car enthusiasts, but a bold move for everyday buyers. 

The Lobo looks like an enthusiast build of a Maverick, straight from the factory. The only styling change I’d make is to offer a lowering package that slams it to the ground.

What About The Inside?

Before seeing the Lobo, I thought the exterior styling would get most of Ford’s attention. That’s where most of the organic “street truck” marketing will come from when people see it on the street, so I figured the inside would be less special. I was wrong. 

Inside the Lobo, there’s blue and lime accent stitching, as well as graffiti-splatter print on the seats. (The graffiti print is understated. If you zoom in on the photo above, you’ll see light splatters between the bolstering.) 

Ford says the mix of multiple colors references streetwear trends, where not everything has to match perfectly in order to look cool. I briefly talked to the designer behind those colors, Kristen Keenan, and she told me was a designer for shoes like the LeBron 12, Kobe 9, and KD 6. The whole vision made sense — athletic shoes always do a great job of mixing different colors that don’t totally match but look good together, and that was the goal here. It worked. 

The Lobo’s infotainment screen is responsive and easy to use, and one of my favorite features comes when you’re connecting a phone to the car. Often, I get a press car and need to hook a phone up, but the car won’t allow phone hookups while the vehicle is in motion — even if the passenger is working the phone (which is always the case for me).

In the Maverick, the system will ask: “Are you a passenger?” If you are, and you say you are, it will let you continue with the phone connection. It’s a small feature that means the world to me, since I wish for it weekly. 

I only have two complaints about the interior of the Maverick. First, the buttons attached to the infotainment screen could be better allocated. There are six buttons below the screen, and I only agree with the placement of one of them: the camera button, which pulls up the exterior camera feeds. Aside from that, there are your emergency flashers, skip forward and backward, and a couple of other buttons you don’t need. I would’ve put the emergency flashers between the air vents and replaced all the other buttons with climate controls, since they’re what people immediately need and likely prefer tactile controls for. 

My second complaint is that the seats could be more comfortable. To me, the Maverick seats are too flat; they feel like plane seats with no bolstering to hold you in, and in a performance street truck, a lack of bolstering is even more obvious under hard driving. This complaint isn’t universal, though — plenty of Maverick buyers tell me they love their seats, so I recommend trying them out and seeing how you feel if you’re interested in the truck. 

How It Drives

It’s important to note here that somehow, the Maverick Lobo drive event happened during a torrential downpour in San Diego (yes, sunny California!). While Ford mapped out incredible canyon roads for us to drive the Lobo on, there was no way for my group to safely drive hard due to the weather. That means I’ll go over basic driving impressions here, but for hard driving, you’ll have to find someone who drove the car when it was dry outside. 

We drove the Lobo back-to-back with the regular hybrid Maverick, and I couldn’t tell it was lower while driving. The steering rack — which comes from the Ford Kuga in the Lobo — did feel heavier than in the regular Maverick, but it didn’t feel super fast.

The EcoBoost engine sounded great in the Lobo, with a regular serenade of turbo-spooling. The truck was agile, too. Some of that is probably due to the lower ride height and improved suspension, and some of that is by virtue of it being a unibody. Unibodies are more car-like, thus are often more agile on the road. 

In terms of comfort and noise, the interior of the Lobo wasn’t particularly loud or quiet, but it was echoey. I called a friend on my built-in speakerphone, not over the car’s system, and he said I sounded like I was flying an airplane. Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of license. 

The Lobo also has some cool driveability features that weather prevented us from trying out on the autocross course, such as “Lobo drive mode.” Ford says the mode improves cornering, grip, and stability, as well as minimizes understeer, and that it’s for closed courses only because it’ll feed the truck torque and reduce intervention by the stability-control system.

Many modern vehicles keep traction and stability control active, even when you’re on a closed course and use the usual controls to turn the systems “off.” Since systems like stability control kick in to make sure the vehicle doesn’t spin or do “unnatural” things — basically, putting it back in a straighter line — they make it impossible to do fun maneuvers like donuts or drifting (again, on a closed course). 

Ford was so stoked on this feature that they set up the closed autocross course, but on my autocross day, the course flooded with rain and autocross got canceled. When we returned later and the sun was out, the whole course and medical crew was packed up, so we didn’t get to test the system at all. I’ll report back one day when I finally do test it. 

Another cool feature of the Lobo is its twin-clutch rear drive unit with torque vectoring. I asked the Ford engineers about it, and they said it’s the same twin-clutch system that I’ve driven in the Ford Bronco Sport Sasquatch. It’s a great system. 

The twin-clutch rear-drive unit has two clutch packs, which control each rear drive wheel independently. This helps you in a lot of situations, off-road and on.

Off-road, it means that if you have your other three wheels without traction, one can propel the car forward on its own. On road and in situations like autocross, it means torque vectoring — which is the process of sending different amounts of torque to different wheels — can be used to help the vehicle move better during aggressive cornering.

I’ll add a helpful graphic Ford has about the on-road uses of the system: 

I didn’t get to test this system like I wanted due to the torrential weather, but I’m glad it exists.  

Does the 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo Fulfill Its Purpose?

The Ford Maverick Lobo isn’t an extreme street truck. It’s not full of horsepower, it’s not so low to the ground that you’ll scrape it, and there’s definitely room for more silliness. But Ford wants the Lobo to be a canvas for street-truck builds, and that’s exactly what it is.

The Lobo is a great starting place. I just can’t wait to see where owners take it.