Review of the ‘25 XLT Hybrid AWD

First and foremost, the truck is phenomenal. I would highly recommend this truck to anyone that needs a light duty pickup truck.

The Good: It snowed about 6-9 inches here in MD pretty quickly and most government and school has been closed for 2 days. This was the perfect opportunity to take it out in the snow and give it a test run. It handled phenomenally well. I’m massively impressed with the handling in the snow. I live in an area with some super steep hills with stop signs, which as anyone knows that’s experienced with snow, this means hard to stop and hard to get moving again. The maverick didn’t even struggle. I drove it out on the slushy and untreated roads in the slippery mode, and I couldn’t even tell it snowed out. I did everything short of gunning it and yanking the steering wheel to get it to spin and slide and I couldn’t. Most vehicles I have will cut the throttle if the traction control kicks in, and this vehicle slipped a tiny bit and immediately recovered with no reduction in power the entire time. I’m very impressed with the AWD capabilities.

Next, the screen. It’s huge. I love it. The wireless CarPlay has my wife a little upset that she doesn’t have it 🤣.

Aside from that, this is my first Maverick and I’m impressed with the vehicle overall. I won’t dig into all of it, because I wanted to note the big changes from ‘24 to ‘25, but I love the space, storage, interior, etc.

The Meh: The climate controls were moved to the screen, and at first I was extremely hesitant because I despise the idea of navigating through screens to do what a simple button push can do. However, I will say that Ford nailed the implementation. The climate controls persist at the bottom of the screen and it doesn’t matter what page you’re on. While I still believe physical knobs and buttons are the way to go, I’m extremely impressed with their implementation.

The Bad: Starting off with a little lighthearted one, the water bottle storage in the door is annoying. It doesn’t really fit anything we have super well. I wish they had also removed the door pocket cover and left that whole area open for storage. Oh well, it’s not the end of the world.

Onto the more serious one, the Blindspot Indication System. I’ve never owned a vehicle with blindspot indicators and generally am opposed to the idea. Maybe I’m a bit of a snob or a purist but I don’t really like them because I find people generally become overly reliant upon them. At the behest of my wife, I opted for the BLIS because she wants to feel safe if she ever drives it. She has a blindspot indicator in her vehicle and it operates like this. When vehicles are in your blindspot, a little light comes on. When she turns the signal indicator stalk to a position to indicate a lane change, if there is someone on her blindspot, the light will flash and the audio is cutoff with a warning tone indicating someone is there. The Ford Maverick only has a blinking light and does not implement the tone for blindspot indications and I believe they really dropped the ball on this one. The warning tone is implemented in the cross traffic system, the pre collision braking, etc, but not in the blindspot system.

Lastly, it was a slight nuisance that Ford really doesn’t allow customization options a la carte when building a vehicle. I wished I could have paid for just the leather seat upgrades without upgrading to a higher package. As such, I ended up purchasing Mabett seat covers and I can’t stop raving about them. While they were a pain to install, it was worth every hour and every penny.