Ford Maverick
Published · Researched 2026-09-21
Ford Maverick review
The Maverick is the best idea in trucks in decades — and Ford spent its first two years trying to ruin it with recalls. A compact unibody pickup, hybrid standard at launch, priced like a Civic when it debuted. The concept is so right that a 42,000-member Facebook group exists mostly to celebrate people bolting lowering kits and vinyl wraps onto a truck that costs less than a midsize sedan. The execution, on the 2022 and 2023 hybrids, was a disaster you'll want to read twice before shopping.
Let's get the bad news out first, because it's the most important paragraph here. The early hybrids have the ugliest recall record of anything in this entire project: 22S47 and its expansion 23S27 for engine-compartment fire risk (premature engine failure dumping oil and fuel vapor near ignition sources — Ford's own advice was "park and shut off if you hear noise, lose power, or see smoke"); 25S16 for a software bug that shifted the truck into neutral without warning; and then, in June 2025, recall 25S54 — because dealers had failed to upload the correct software during the 2023 fix. Ford botched the repair of its own recall. Roughly two dozen fires were reported across the hybrid family, and lawsuits followed. MotorTrend's yearlong test of a 2023 hybrid collected five recall notices in one year. Five. The truck they still liked.
And that's the maddening thing: underneath the paper trail, the Maverick is genuinely great. The hybrid does 37–42 real-world mpg in a vehicle with a bed. The EcoBoost's 250 horses and 4,000-pound tow rating cover 90% of what full-size owners actually tow. Owners adore the size — city-parkable, garageable — and the mod culture is delightful: blow-off valves, Eibach kits, gloss-black roof wraps on a $28k truck. The downsizer stories pour in: the Ram Limited guy getting 14 mpg and driving 100 miles a day, the Wrangler owner now seeing "29ish" mpg and grinning, the 57-year-old trading down to something practical. Nobody cross-shops a Maverick against an F-150 and complains; they cross-shop it against a Corolla and realize they can have the bed too.
The 2025 refresh changed the calculus. Ford redesigned the electrical architecture from the ground up, finally gave the hybrid all-wheel drive (owners had begged for it — one Threads post about it pulled 131 likes), and added the Lobo street-truck trim. Early data shows far fewer complaints. The truck is still cheap-ish: used 2025 XLT AWD hybrids list around $30k, new Lobos around $34–36k.
What's wrong beyond the recalls: the interior is honest plastic, the 4.5-foot bed is a lifestyle bed not a work bed, and launch-era buyers got scalped by dealer markups and year-long order waits. The hybrid's e-CVT is Ford's own, not Toyota's, and that matters for long-term confidence.
Value call: the sweet spot is a used 2025 — the refresh year, hybrid AWD available, redesigned electrics, and the recall storm behind it. A 2025 XLT AWD hybrid in the low-$30ks undercuts a new one by thousands and dodges the early-car risk. Skip the 2022 and 2023 hybrids outright unless every recall is verified complete by VIN — and even then, the price gap to a 2024 ($29k) or 2025 ($30k) is too small to justify the fire-recall history. The 2024 is the acceptable budget play if the recall stack is documented done. Against the Hyundai Santa Cruz: the Ford wins on hybrid economy and price, the Hyundai on refinement and warranty calm. And note the fine print — the Maverick is North America only; Europe and China never got it.
The honest tradeoff: the cleverest truck value on sale, wearing the scariest early recall record in the segment. Buy the fixed one, not the famous one.