2023 Ford Maverick Tremor Review: A class of one

Imagine, for a moment, that you really need a pickup.

You tow or haul constantly. You work in an environment where durability is critical. You have worn boots every waking hour since before you can remember, and possibly the hours before that.

If this is your life, you will not tootle on down to the nearest Ford dealer and buy yourself a Maverick. You will certainly not be interested in the rooty-tooty little Maverick Tremor, the new factory off-road model, $31,665 MSRP, with its cute little tow hooks and its one-inch lift over the base Maverick, with its serious-like-a-puppy black trim. 

You might spot a Tremor in a parking lot of your local Lowe’s and give a double-take, as your narrator did, when you see the Muppet-colored highlights on those 17-inch wheels.

That orange paint is clearly there, you would think, to help a person find their valve stems. 

What kind of person would lose track of their damn valve stems, you would ask yourself, shaking your head.

Reasonable question. But if you have to ask it, the Maverick is not for you. 

This is not so much truck as car in truck form. What an older internet would have called a pickup gone smol. The cab and body are a single unit, like a Honda Ridgeline shrunk in the wash. There is no ladder frame, merely a unibody that shares components with the Ford’s Escape crossover. Each of the Maverick’s two available engines is a four-cylinder. The base model is front-wheel drive. The base tow rating is a mere 1500 pounds.

The sum is perhaps the most logical answer for those who want a pickup but do not expressly require one for even occasional use.

The name rings so many bells. (This one. That one. Even a James Garner one!) The Maverick itself launched in late 2021 as a ’22 model. With the Tremor version, you might ask why Dearborn would off-road prep a light-duty trucklet for a demographic that historically spends little time on dirt. Outside a PowerPoint deck, the best answer is a point to the countless off-road packages fitted to small trucks in the past.

Plus, perhaps, a reminder that most owners of full-size dirt rigs—your Jeep Wranglers and Ford Raptors and such—do not exactly hit Baja every week.

The American car market: We buy what we like, for better or worse.

This site has covered the Maverick before; the basics remain solid. The interior is mostly hard textured plastic that feels inexpensive but also appropriate and durable. The 54-inch bed is genuinely small, maybe 30 inches too short to swallow a motorcycle with the tailgate up.

The $2995 Tremor package is available only on the upper two of the Maverick’s three trim levels (XLT and Lariat) and only with the Mav’s optional Advanced all-wheel-drive system. It brings the aforementioned lift and hooks, but also Falken all-terrain tires, off-road-specific drive modes, a torque-vectoring rear differential, and a front skid plate that allows for a steeper approach angle.

The steering is relatively quick but somehow carries a whiff of farm implement, which is nice. A 250-hp, 2.0-liter turbo four and eight-speed automatic is the only available drivetrain for the Maverick Tremor; the 2.0-liter can be a little coarse and moany, but it gives linear torque and nice, predictable throttle response. The eight-speed is often annoyingly abrupt, especially in take-up from a stop, and shifts can be sloppy and slappy.

In spite of all this, the Mav feels strangely and happily truckish in a way that—don’t laugh—recalls other trucklike non-trucks. Think Land Rovers, Mercedes G-wagens, modern Land Cruisers. The bones hide their roots well, something in how the whole package carries itself.

The hitch: No one who watches the used-car market can drive a Maverick without thinking about how the same cash would also buy a lightly used midsize pickup.

Same for truck people. My friend Zach Bowman is a journalist and former construction worker; he has spent his adult life driving and repairing used vehicles with cargo beds, and he drives a diesel Ram every day. A few weeks ago, I texted him a picture of our Tremor tester with some lame joke about the Ford Escape.

He shot back a quick reply:

“The Escape somehow makes you feel bad about life. The Maverick is the opposite.”

2023 Ford Maverick Tremor Lariat

• Price: $31,665 / $37,465 (base XLT / as-tested )
• Powertrain: 2.0-liter turbo I-4; eight-speed automatic
• Output: 250 hp @ 5500 rpm, 277 lb-ft @ 3000 rpm
• Layout: Four-door, five-passenger, unibody pickup
• Weight: 3800 pounds (est.)
• EPA fuel economy: 20 city / 24 mpg highway, 21 mpg combined
• 0–60 mph: 6.0 seconds (est.)

The Maverick’s appeal, we agreed, is hard to pin down but rooted partly in price. The base model, a 191-hp, front-drive hybrid, is just $23,690. Hagerty’s test Tremor, a loaner from Ford, was $37,465 with options, the other end of the scale.

“Thing is,” Zach said, “that’s basically F-150 money.” At that point, he asked, why not bring home a stripped-out new half-ton, with a normal bed and real work ability?

Later, I used Ford’s online configurator to build a bare-bones F-150, no options, cheap as it gets. The nearly $36,000 truck that resulted was a single-cab, two-wheel-drive two-seater with no tow pack, a 6.5-foot bed, vinyl floors, and a payload cap of 1935 pounds. A base Maverick has a 1500-pound max payload, the Tremor, 1200. Compared with the F-150, however, the Mav is far easier to park, quieter inside, and rides better. It cannot match the metrics of even a midsize truck—a Ford Ranger, a Chevrolet Colorado—but it will fit in almost any garage.

Metrics, of course, drive this corner of the industry. Tow rating might be the only one here that matters to ordinary people. A Tremor can pull just 2000 pounds. It cannot be optioned with the Maverick’s available 4000-pound tow package.

Do those ordinary people know what that number means? A Toyota Camry can tow 1000 pounds. Most compact crossovers will lug between 1500 and 3000. Honda’s Odyssey minivan will drag around 3500 pounds. Bring home a Mav, you are pulling jet skis, small camper trailers, and boats too short for the neighbors to start calling you “Captain.” You could rent a U-Haul car trailer and hound the classifieds for vintage hoopties, but only if you get the tow pack, which means no Tremor.

Even then, you’d be limited to towing cars made mostly of air. U-Haul’s auto transporter is around 2200 pounds, which leaves 1800 pounds for . . . not much. An early Lotus Elise, maybe?

Again, these aren’t knocks; if you need more pickup than this, you’re looking elsewhere anyway.

Your narrator has needed exactly one pickup in his life, or maybe I just wanted the thing so badly that it felt like a need. A while back, I dove into an Oregon Craigslist and bought a low-mile 1990 Chevrolet K1500 Cheyenne short-bed—a rust-free, single-cab “grandfather” truck with a 350, rubber floors, and a clutch pedal. After I gave the Chevy new fluids and maybe $900 in parts, it helped move my small family across the country, from Washington State to East Tennessee.

I have loved other vehicles as much but never more. When I bought that Cheyenne, I told my wife it was to make our move easier, that we’d sell as soon as we were settled in the new place. That truck had no A/C, crank windows, and only two seat belts—genuine speed bumps if you have children and a spouse and like going places with them. 

A year after we landed in the Volunteer State, that Chevy was still in our driveway, parked next to my wife’s Volkswagen GTI. Selling it just seemed like a good way to make myself unhappy. The K1500 was a tool, a cross between an old dog and a cheap Camaro, always there and willing to help, stupid-simple fun to work on and huge fun around town.

A short-bed single-cab is only so useful, but still, we did so much. We towed cars to other states, hauled motorcycles and motorcycle parts and furniture, and took garbage to the dump. I replaced the clutch at home and fixed a cold-idle misfire, and finally, after acknowledging painful financial truth, sold the Chevy to its current owner, a gentleman farmer from Kentucky. Not a month goes by where I don’t talk myself out of calling him and trying to buy it back.

The Tremor isn’t the same, won’t hit anything like the same notes. People will be drawn to it anyway. Even now, more than a year and a half into production, some Maverick models are heavily backordered, demand outstripping supply. Order a hybrid right now with no dealer markup or “market adjustment,” you’ll wait months. Ford Escapes, for what it’s worth, sit on dealer lots by the dozen. There is no line to buy a Ranger or an F-150.

Cheap practicality is some of the pull here but not all. The only sure-fire takeaway, it seems, is that trucks mean something to this country, and not always for the reasons we like to think.

Again, I don’t need a pickup. But the brain goes funny places when you spend time in one, no matter how small.

And so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go stare out the window for a few minutes. When that’s done, I have to sit back down at my desk and try very much to not pick up the phone and call a very nice man in Kentucky about a machine that once felt very much like a horse.

Begging, like mascara on your valve stems, is never a good look.

***

2023 Ford Maverick Tremor Lariat

Price: $31,665 / $37,465 (base / as-tested*)

Highs: Easy to park, easy to see out of, easy to like. As much pickup as most people need. A way to get light off-road chops without buying another anodyne CUV/SUV/WTF blob.

Lows: Transmission can be irritatingly abrupt. You have to resist flipping the table when your Ford dealer uses the terms “market adjustment” and “six-month wait” in the same sentence.

Takeaway: A good thing, as Martha said. If you want something like this, nothing else will do—because there’s really nothing like it on the market.

*Tremor package ($2995) with mandatory Advanced all-wheel drive ($2220). Includes Tremor appearance package ($1495, with “carbonized” roof, door handles, and mirrors), splash guards ($180), Ford CO-Pilot360 safety assistance system ($650), and spray-in bedliner ($495). 

***

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