Finely Aged Review: The 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo Is A Great Truck But I’m No Longer Sure It Should Be A Truck

Sometimes when I get a press car, I like to use it, take a lot of pictures, and then promptly get distracted by other things to the point where I don’t actually write the review of the thing in a timely manner. You might be tempted to attribute this to me being “an idiot,” as my rabbi, dentist, and life coach all did in that formal statement they felt the need to present to the town alderpeople, just to be jerks, I assume. And, sure, the alderpeople decided to issue a formal censure against me, and I’m not bitter about that, at all.

But that’s not accurate; as always, I have a plan, in fact plans within plans, wheels within wheels, all turning and moving and meshing together, and this time what they’ve managed to do is help me craft a sort-of review of a truck we’ve honestly already covered pretty well, but this time my opinions have mellowed and aged and matured, like a fine cheese-wine, and are now sufficiently redolent and moldy for your enjoyment.

I had this as a press car back in April, when the world was a very different place: Ozzy Osbourne was still alive, I was not yet the owner of a Citroën 2CV, and Iceland was dealing with volcanic eruptions. It was a different world! And in that long-gone world of a few months ago I drove a 2025 Ford Maverick Lobo (named, of course, for Cloud City’s own Lobot) onto the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway, and into the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Overall, I liked it, but there were a few issues that led me to think bigger things about the role of this vehicle and if it makes sense.

What Is It?

Okay, I guess we have to jump in with the hardest question here, and I think it’ll be clear why this is a hard question as I talk about this vehicle. Fundamentally, this is an attempt by Ford to resurrect the concept of a “street truck” in a mass-produced package, and I think they’re generally successful, at least to some degree. Street trucks were customized pickup trucks, ranging from compact imported trucks to more traditional full-sized American trucks, with modifications made for style and handling, usually at odds with the traditional pickup truck roles of hauling crap and driving off-road. Street trucks would make all kinds of utilitarian sacrifices to get the look the subculture defined, and that was fine – that was the whole point of these trucks.

So, how does this translate into a mass-market vehicle that is sort of best known for its flexibility and versatility and utility in its baseline variants? Well, that’s where this gets interesting, I think.

The changes are fairly subtle, but noticeable. Visually, the Lobo is a bit lowered compared to the normal Maverick, and while it’s not dramatic (0.8 inches less of roof height, a half inch in the front and a bit more than an inch at the back) – they haven’t slammed this thing to the ground so much that you’d need to drive around a dropped Skittle – it is noticeable, especially when you park next to a normal Maverick, as I was lucky to do above there.

The other big visual changes are the vertical, waterfall-style grille and these striking full-disc wheels:

The look is good! It feels somewhat special without being too over-the-top, because this is, after all, a vehicle that Ford would like to sell in quantity. In addition to the aesthetic changes, there’s a torque vectoring system for the rear and the steering rack is from the Euro-market Ford Kuga, but in most driving you’re not really going to notice that much difference. I mean, I didn’t in my combination of city, highway, and mountain road driving.

What I Did Notice

I’m going to reveal my biggest annoyance with the Lobo now, and it’s a strange one I’ve never really noticed in a car before: I think the accelerator pedal is too short.

See it up there? It’s kind of a stubby little pedal, dangling down from behind the dash like a toddler’s foot on a barstool, and multiple times as I was driving this I found my toes slipping off the bottom of the pedal.

I get that I’m short, but there was plenty of room in the seat adjustment and I could reach the brake pedal just fine and could see over the dashboard and everything, just like a Big Boy. But that damn throttle pedal was always just a bit too meager for me to comfortably use it all the time. It was annoying, and there were times where I could imagine it could have been a safety issue, if I had to accelerate in a hurry and my stupid foot slipped off the pedal.

On the positive side, the Maverick has some of the most generously-sized and accessible door pockets of almost anything I’ve driven, and this may be a small detail, but it’s one you tend to interact with a lot, so I’ll attribute a reasonable amount of value to it.

But when it comes to other storage, I think that’s where this car encounteres its greatest identity crisis. That’s because, yes, it’s a truck, but of all the Maverick family, it has the lowest payload rating at 1,045 pounds and the whole tone and feel of the truck itself seems to minimize the use of the bed for actual truck-like use.

I mostly used the bed to haul those little pollen-seed dealies that look kind of like miniature corn on the cobs. But I found I kind of needed cargo capacity, specifically enclosed cargo capacity, because I was using this for an overnight trip that required the use of conventional luggage, the sorts of things you don’t want to just leave open and banging around in a truck bed.

There’s some underseat storage, but you’re not putting a weekend’s worth of luggage for two people in there. So you end up using the rear seating area, which works if you only have two people, but it’s not really ideal.

Of course, you could basically solve this with an aftermarket bed tonneau cover or lid, and I suppose then you’d have an interesting boxy sedan with a massive trunk, and that’s great but for some reason I have an aversion to those big bed lids. It makes no sense, I know, but I do, and the whole issue with this fundamentally makes me thing that the Lobo would be better with a camper shell as standard or something like that, because the use cases of the Lobo are really far removed from the use cases where people would be filling that bed up with the sorts of stuff that trucks have their beds traditionally filled with.

I mean, you could fill it full of a thousand pounds of gravel or lumber or chili or a baby rhino or whatever, but we all know that the people who are thinking about using their Mavericks like that will very likely choose a variant that’s not the Lobo.

The result is that the Lobo is an appealing machine in many ways, but at the same time feels strangely compromised. And yes, that sense of compromise for style and intangible feelings is absolutely at the heart of the sport truck mentality, in practice, for a new car you’ve just bought as opposed to an old truck you’ve carefully customized on your own, it just feels sort of, I don’t know, off.

It feels off because it’s all almost there, just not quite. It’s like if you’re building a deck and you’re given a hammer with a brightly-colored enameled head. You can use it, but it’ll get all chipped and look like crap and, given the choice, you’d probably rather just use a normal hammer. This issue I have may just be inherent to the concept of the street truck, but traditionally street trucks were bespoke things, project cars that didn’t have daily-use expectations about them. This is a new car that starts at close to $36,000; the context is very different.

So What’s My Point, Here?

What is my point here, exactly? I think it’s that I appreciate that the Maverick Lobo exists; I think it’s a fun, stylish option for a daily driver, one that’s happily not an absolute sleeping pill like so many modern cars. At the same time, I think its status as a truck is at odds with its positioning as a modern take on a street truck, because it doesn’t lean into that street truckitude quite hard enough to justify the compromises that get made – or at least feel like are getting made.

You could just treat this like a normal Maverick, and aside from bumping into payload and towing limits earlier, you could likely do most of what you need. But, again, why would you?

Maybe you like the look enough? If so fantastic! Maybe you’re really into multi-colored stitching, like on that steering wheel there!

I’m just not sure exactly what to make of the Lobo. Maybe it represents a more realistic understanding of how a truck like a Maverick will get used, in day-to-day life.

I guess it’s okay for me to be a little confused by the Lobo. Maybe that’s the point. At least it’s a pleasant sort of confusion; it’s good machine to drive and use, and it’s not painfully boring. Maybe I should just take that and be happy.