If you didn’t already see, David and I were in Long Beach yesterday and saw Ford’s prototype Universal EV Truck driving around Junipero Beach.

I’m gonna straight up plagiarize David for a second here because he said it better than I could myself: “If you’re not excited about Ford’s upcoming Universal EV platform — which Ford developed secretly at its West Coast Skunkworks with the goal of offering a competitive sub-$30,000 compact pickup truck among other frugal EV options — you should be.”

Though some petrolheads may not be ready for EVs, I know that I’ve been thinking a bunch about adding an electric car to my fleet, both on account of how expensive gas is in LA and because it sounds pretty darn nice to have a car that you basically don’t have to do maintenance on. This truck we saw driving around the beach would give me that daily relief of operating an EV, and would be a steal at a sub-thirty grand price, but the biggest sell to me is just how small it is.

A Bunch Of Guesswork Based On A Tire Size-Reference

The benefit of having a camera nerd on staff here is that I have a camera that shoots 30 photos per second and a lot of knowledge of how to process that data. The benefit of having an engineer like David on staff is that he actually remembers how to do math, while I struggle to remember to move my finger half an inch from the camera’s grip to the shutter button. Using both of our skills, we can calculate some things, here. But it might all be wrong.

Here’s David’s initial, back-of-napkin strategy with the photo used to calculate it:

[Ed Note: This really only works well if a photo is taken from a distance. Or else, the angle between the camera and the front/rear of the truck and also the tires ends up screwing up all the math. The photo below is the best shot we had from a distance, and approximately at the center of the truck’s wheelbase. All the math here is approximate. -DT]. 

My primary camera is a Sony A1 that has a 50MP sensor, and it was attached to a super high resolving Sony GM 70-200 2.8 II, a combination that allowed me to zoom in and see in clear detail that the tires are Michelin 245/50 R 20s, which are 29.6 inches. That’s our reference measurement.

Here’s David discussing how he used that.

[Ed Note: Instead of doing some basic algebra (which I’d have been delighted to do), I just found a software online that lets me put in a reference measurement for the tire diameter, and it projects measurements across the truck as I desire. The one issue I was having is that the shadow in the wheel wells makes it hard to identify exactly where the the sidewall ends and the treads begin, so what I did is I used another photo Griffin had (the one that showed the sidewall clearest) to figure out the dimension of the little circular stripe in the sidewall; figuring this out also has the added benefit of allowing me to not have to worry as much about tire deflection (since the overall diameter isn’t exactly 29.6″ from the bottom of the tire to the top due to load). Anyway, here’s what I mean:

So if the overall tire diameter is 29.6 (that’s what I entered for the red measurement) then the diameter of that inner circle is about 26.83 using basic ratios in that photo. With that circular stripe diameter, I calculated some length and height figures of the truck, first using the front tire as reference and then using the rear:

The figures are quite similar. If you average them, you end up right around 64-inches tall and about 195-inches long. -DT]

To put that height into perspective, a tech sheet of the 2026 Ford Maverick lists its height as anywhere from 67.7 to 69.45 inches across all trims. So height-wise, this appears to be a bit smaller than the Ford Maverick. And just to cover our bases here, the Ford Ranger’s height is listed as 74.4-75.9”, and the F-150 regular cab is between 75 and 77″.

To double-check the height, here’s an overlay of the ~30-inch tire stacked on top of itself just over two times. To help you better resolve it, I reduced the opacity of the base image and put a red square over the truck so that you can better resolve just the height of the tires. Yes, the graphic is ugly, but Photoshop is Torch and Pete’s department; I’m just a camera guy.

In the interest of transparency, while this is an anti-AI publication, I plugged some data into the horrible and damming ChatGPT while I was waiting for ChatGP-David to crunch his numbers, and its calculation said that the truck should be 66” with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 inches. 66 is about what I got using the silly tire-stacking method above, and it’s also roughly what David got when he just drew a bunch of lines in Microsoft Paint.

I also did the length.

With that image, you can see that the truck is roughly 6.5 tires long, which means the total length would be 192.4 inches. Obviously, this and all other math is approximate. The photo was shot at 52.7 mm on a 35mm full-frame sensor, and a “normal” field of view on a 35mm camera is a focal length of 50 mm.

In the optics world, normal means it looks more or less one to one compared to the human eye, having proper compression and very little distortion. The focal plane on the image should be pretty much flat, and I have nice lenses that have very little pincushioning or barrel distortion. Knowing this about my gear, I’m confident that the image (and therefore my calculations) are as accurate as they can be outside of a studio situation and without Ford’s internal tech specs in front of me.

David calculated 195″ and the aforementioned horrible ChatGPT is proving its worthlessness by constantly spitting out different calculations for me despite prompting it identically multiple times. At one point, it told me it’s 255 inches with a margin of plus or minus 8 inches (21.2 feet), and later it said it was 246 inches (20.5 feet). If that ain’t a reason to never trust a chat model, I don’t know what is.

So between David and me, there are only a few inches of difference. Referencing the Mav’s tech sheet again, it’s 199.8” in length at the shortest, and 200.9 at the longest. The Ranger is 210.6-210.9”, and the F-150 is 209.4 for the 6.5-foot bed and 228.1 for the 8-foot. So using our longest calculation, the new truck is about 5″ less than Ford’s current small-truck offering.

It’s also worth noting that I saw the Telo truck last year, and it’s overall dimensions are 152″ L × 73″ W × 67″ H.

What’s this new Ford truck’s width?

I Don’t Know.

There are probably a couple of smarter ways to calculate this, but what I did was use one of David’s videos and some of my photos and plug them into Polycam to generate two photogrammetry models, which you can see below.

As you can see, it’s very imperfect, as David really only shot one side of it while the car was at the stoplight, and my model was all from one perspective with one long lens that gave it insane compression (178 mm for most of these shots, firmly in the telephoto range that flattens details and features immensely). The benefit of apps like this, though, is that they have ruler functions built in! The bad news is that we had nowhere near enough data, so I wouldn’t trust it.

As you can see, it’s under the impression that the car is roughly 37 inches in width, which is smaller than, like…everything ever. And it calculated the length as being roughly 124 inches as well. So why am I showing it to you when it’s worthless from a data perspective? I don’t know. I just think photogrammetry is really cool.

Our Best Guess At The Ford Ranchero’s (?) Dimensions

This thing is seriously small, and I think that’s seriously exciting. Personally, I’m not a truck person because I’m a city boy now. Practically everyone I know, from all walks of life, has no use for a truck, and certainly no room for it in the city limits. But that being said, trucks are seriously useful.

When David and I went on the road trip to Moab, I was driving behind him the whole time in a brand new F-150 Tremor (review to come, I’m working on some things here, okay?) and it was an absolute dream come true, lugging all my camera gear and basically an entire autobody shop in the bed for the duration of the trip in case David’s craftsmanship on the WWII Jeep proved shoddy.

Combining the practical utility of a truck with a car-sized footprint, the ease of ownership of having an EV, and a super-low price tag just feels too good to be true, and yet, it very well might be. So to end this article here, I’ll once again echo David’s thoughts on the matter from his piece last night: “If you’re not excited about Ford’s upcoming Universal EV platform [yada yada yada], you should be.

[Ed Note: Five inches shorter in length seems plausible, but five inches shorter in height than a Maverick? That does seem quite small. That’s about the same height as a Tesla Model Y…

Anyone buying that? I’m not sure. I have little trust in my crude measurement method, and I’ve found in life that such unreliable methods are really best paired with intuition and not trusted on their own. My intuition says this $30,000 EV truck (we’ll call it a Ranchero for now) won’t be 64″ (five inches shorter than a Maverick) but probably closer to 66 — so, three inches shorter than the Maverick, a couple inches taller than a Tesla Model Y. Then again, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 XRT is 64″ tall…

And I could see this being roughly the dimensions of an Ioniq 5 XRT with a bed.

In any case, whether it’s 64″ or 66″ tall, the point is that the new Ford EV is almost certainly shorter in length and height than the Maverick — the Maverick! That’s a tiny truck already by today’s standards, and now it seems we’re getting even smaller. The minitruck is back, folks, just as the car gods prophesied. I, for one, am excited. -DT]