The Ford Maverick Lobo Is A Pick-Up That’s Serious About Corners

The high-performance pickup truck is nothing new, but recent entries in this class have tended to be off-road, dune-bashing beasts – think the Ford F-150 Raptor or Ram RHO. This, though, is the Ford Maverick Lobo, and it’s a very different interpretation of the performance truck.

Around the turn of the century, there existed a niche but popular genre in the US truck market known as street trucks – pick-ups that were unashamedly about on-road performance. Think of the Ford F-150 Lightning (the original, not the modern EV), or the Viper-powered Dodge Ram SRT-10.

The Maverick Lobo is Ford’s effort to revive this scene, but because it’s based on the company’s smallest North American pickup, there’s no supercharged V8 or snorting V10 here. It gets the same 2.0-litre EcoBoost turbo four-pot as other four-wheel drive Mavericks, making 238bhp and 277lb ft of torque, which it sends to all four wheels.

Unique to the Lobo, though, is a seven-speed automatic gearbox, which is intended to provide better-spaced ratios than the standard truck’s eight-speed. It sends power to all four wheels. It’s the chassis where Ford has really focused its efforts, though.

The Lobo rides on tweaked suspension, sitting around 28mm lower than standard at the back, and 13mm lower up front. The rear axle now has a twin-clutch system, which allows the truck to vector torque between individual wheels, keeping things tight and reducing understeer.

It even has a dedicated Lobo mode which brings this torque vectoring tech into play while loosening the grip of the stability control. Ford says this is for track use only. Yeah, sounds like a drift mode to us. Topping off the performance tweaks are six-piston front brake calipers taken from the Focus ST.

Street truck looks are courtesy of beefed-up bumpers and sills, a black roof, and those 19-inch aerodisc-style wheels. The inside, meanwhile, gets stitching in Grabber Blue and Electric Lime.

All this costs from $36,595, or around £28,600. This is totally irrelevant to us in Europe, where the Maverick isn’t available. We can, however, buy the Ford Ranger MS-RT, which pairs a similar street truck vibe with a meaty V6 diesel engine.