Back in 2018, plans to develop the Ford Maverick struck some employees as wildly ambitious considering the goals and timeline.

Brand manager James Gilpin understood the skepticism.

“They were hearing, ‘Okay, we’re going to do something that's never been done before,’” recalls Gilpin, who was then the product manager responsible for marketing the new vehicle. “We’re going to create the lowest-priced truck in America, and lowest starting price in the Ford showroom. We’re going to build it on a unibody platform. And we’re going to do it in record time.”

There was one more major aspiration, too: seeing the Maverick win the prestigious MotorTrend Truck of the Year award.

“That was our moon shot,” Gilpin says.

The high-stakes project was launching at a time of tremendous transformation. Ford had begun phasing out its sedan business to focus primarily on manufacturing trucks, SUVs, and electric vehicles. Many former passenger-car team members had been assigned to Maverick, and they worried about the challenges of launching a standout new product.

But the team’s leaders saw the Maverick, which revived the name of an affordable Ford compact “import fighter” from the 1970s, as pivotal to the company’s future.

“We desperately needed a winning solution to bring new customers into Ford and then grow them within our product portfolio,” recalls Chris Mazur, former chief project engineer for Maverick. “We had a very strong truck business, so the thinking was: How do we leverage our strength in this space?”

The team did that with an unorthodox approach to product development.

Adopting a Startup Mentality

“I credit our senior leadership for giving us the space to operate more like a startup inside this century-old company,” Mazur says. “To make the Maverick happen, we had to break many of Ford's conventional linear approaches. We had more point-of-view ownership and decision-making authority.

“In that environment, you can move the team to a bias for action rather than a bias for process.”

A major part of that approach was housing the entire team — people from design, engineering, electrical, manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, and other functions — in a large windowless room at Ford’s Product Development Center in Dearborn.

“We created what we called ‘neighborhoods,’” says program manager Tim Farmer. “We had a finance neighborhood, a program management neighborhood, a manufacturing neighborhood, and so on, all with street signs.”

The team also removed cubicle partitions to better enable real-time collaboration and covered the walls with key documents, such as engineering milestones, Built Ford Tough messaging, and a whole wall of information about the Maverick and its target customers.

“That gave you the full availability of all the knowledge in the room,” Gilpin says. “You could also simply talk to the people involved, which really sped up the decisions.”

Reaching a New Market

The team had a few clear mandates for making the Maverick meet the needs of a new target customer, typically an urban or suburban driver trying to decide between buying another car or making a first-time truck purchase.

Mazur notes that many of today’s midsize and larger trucks no longer fit easily into standard garages and parking spaces.

“So we put a lot of effort in trying to right-size the Maverick to make sure it's easy to park and maneuver,” he says.

It also needed to be versatile and reliable, he adds: “It has to be efficient enough for the daily commute, but still capable for weekend activities, too.”

It also had to do this while delivering a comfortable, car-like ride with an EPA-estimated fuel economy rating of 40-plus miles per gallon in city driving — without trading off its towing and hauling capabilities.

Above all, it had to be affordable without seeming cut-rate. “There's a fine line between simple and cheap, so engineering for that high perceived value was the key task,” Mazur recalls.

Finally, for competitive reasons, the team was tasked with taking the Maverick from concept to showroom far faster than typical industry timelines that can exceed five years.

“Our target was try to do it in roughly 36 months,” Farmer says.

Given all those challenges, it’s no wonder that some employees initially faced the task with trepidation. But team leaders emphasized the unprecedented chance to build something without relying on decades-old decisions and processes.

“When we started, we said, ‘This is probably the greatest opportunity we've ever had. We get to start from scratch,’” Gilpin says. “And the Built Ford Tough messaging kept everyone aligned around the vision that we're building a real truck.”

Shooting for the Top

Aspiring to win the MotorTrend Truck of the Year award also galvanized the troops. Gilpin ordered and mounted movie-size posters for internal inspiration, declaring the project the MotorTrend champion while it was still in development.

“That became a rallying cry for us,” Farmer recalls. “We were saying ‘Why not? Why can’t we shoot for that? Let’s go.’ And that became our North Star.”

Of course, the team was disappointed when the newly introduced Maverick and its standard hybrid powertrain narrowly lost the 2022 MotorTrend Truck of the Year award to the electric Rivian R1T, which was the first electric truck to cross the Trans-America Trail.

However, plenty of other accolades came pouring in. That same year, the Maverick won the North American Truck of the Year Award™, as well as many others. Most recently, the Maverick Lobo won the 2026 North American Truck of the Year Award at the Detroit Auto Show. In addition, the Maverick received the 2026 Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Award in the compact-truck category for the fifth consecutive year.

Meanwhile, the Maverick is mighty popular with customers as well. The Maverick nameplate is sold more than any Ford nameplate except F-Series, Transit, and Explorer.

Despite the Maverick’s successes, development team members still remembered that early moonshot goal. They finally achieved it in December, when the Maverick Lobo won the MotorTrend Truck of the Year for 2026. MotorTrend judges trucks based on six key factors: value, safety, fuel efficiency, design advancements, engineering excellence, and performance.

“The Ford Maverick absolutely nails all those criteria,” MotorTrend editorial chief Ed Loh noted in a television interview.

MotorTrend specifically praised the compact street truck’s smooth ride, impressive fuel efficiency (an EPA-estimated 42 miles per gallon in the city with the 2.5-liter Hybrid FWD), strong towing capacity, FlexBed Storage System, and updated technology. The publication also cited the recent enhancements to some Maverick models, such as adding available Pro Trailer Hitch Assist and Pro Trailer Backup Assist capability.

Overall, the new Maverick is “both a great truck and a friskier, more fun commuter,” according to MotorTrend technical director and writer Frank Markus.

Those were welcome words to the 50 or so members who were part of the original Maverick development team, with some long-time employees calling it their favorite project ever.

Farmer, who has worked at Ford for nearly 30 years, puts it this way: “I've done three different programs cradle to grave, and I've done a lot of programs in between, but I’ll always remember the Maverick. It's something in my career that I’ll always be fond of when I look back.”

Anne J. Stuart is a Massachusetts-based business journalist whose first car was a refurbished 1970 Ford Falcon, the predecessor to the original Ford Maverick.

*Actual mileage will vary.