Did We Just Discover the True Name of Ford’s Baby Bronco?
We’ve known for a while now that Ford is planning a Baby Bronco. This crossover will ride on the Ford Escape’s unibody platform, rather than the Bronco’s body-on-frame midsize truck one. It will offer a more rugged appearance than the Escape, but lack the serious off-roading chops of the full-fledged Bronco. What we haven’t known is what Ford plans to name it… other than the fact that “Baby Bronco” is probably not really in the running.
A poster on the Bronco6G.com forum may have discovered the answer. His search for Ford key parts in the company’s internal system revealed a vehicle named “Maverick” with a reveal date of 2020. As Ford currently doesn’t sell any vehicle by that name and hasn’t formally announced one, it seems likely to be planned for a vehicle that we know is coming, but hasn’t been officially revealed — a brief that fits the Baby Bronco to a T.
The Maverick name has been oft-mooted for the vehicle ever since Ford filed a trademark application for it in 2018. Ford previously used the Maverick name for a compact sedan in the 1970s.
That listing, of course, doesn’t settle whether the crossover would be called the “Bronco Maverick” or just “Maverick.” Ford has branched the Mustang brand out to other vehicles; jumping the name “Bronco” from a truck to a roguish crossover would be less of a stretch than going from muscle car to all-electric crossover.
