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Ever expect to see a front-wheel drive truck up here glad you made it yeah we are too come on maverick you can do it hey guys welcome to the happy yak ranch and usually when we come to the ranch we typically bring a full-size truck like this ram because we’re towing and hauling stuff but today we decided to bring something quite a bit smaller david what do you
Think of the new maverick you know i really like the maverick i especially like the name of the maverick i like all of ford’s names bronco mustang maverick pinto oh well not so much but in this video we’re going to find out is the maverick enough truck to be useful on a ranch first of all the 4×8 sheet of plywood test okay which everybody must do i’ve got lots
Of those yeah but also you have a job for us don’t you well being thanksgiving it’s always good to go out in the hills and cut a little firewood and the one thing about the maverick that they’ve touted is its payload yeah i say we put it to work and see if we can’t max out its payload up in the woods with firewood with big logs yeah we’re gonna load some logs in
Here and bring them home for the first test we’re gonna find out can a four by eight sheet of plywood fit in the bed of the maverick but first let’s see how it fits in the bed of a standard crew cab truck in this case the ram 1500 with a five and a half foot bed david bring it on in wow david you are a beast okay so this is very typical right so it fits perfectly
Between the wheel wells with room to spare with room to spare and it almost you know just hangs over what three inches four inches yeah now in the maverick we do have a couple of tricks up our sleeve first of all we can reposition the tailgate cables to a higher point and now andre and david demonstrate why so this kind of positioned the tailgate at an angle and
Why is that andre well so we can load it uh hopefully uh flat just barely between the side rails yeah it’s about an inch to spare obviously a narrower smaller truck and it goes over the wheel wells but this is perfect uh it just it’s flat right yeah it’s flat i mean we’re only sticking out 19 inches 19 inches so you put like a red flag here right so it’s all it’s
All legal and we could tie it down using these points actually well i’m thinking in order to get max payload out of this four tommy we’re gonna have to load it pretty high and so i think we can make some stake sides that will hold the logs in so we can strap them down and keep them from falling out on our way down the mountain so in a traditional like full-size
Truck or an hd truck you would have steak posts right you would where you could actually insert the wood into the bed that’s true and make your own side panels but we don’t have that on the maverick what we do have instead are kind of these channels which you can use for like two by sixes but david’s gonna get even more clever than that yeah i think we’ll just take
Some two by sixes and put one across the bottom to hold up the ones that are going straight up and do something a little more creative in the front since it’s interesting that the wheel wells like a regular pickup they go all the way back here but then here they don’t so we’ll have to be creative in how we get some stakes coming up here the idea here as we pile
The logs up yeah then it gives us support and they won’t fall off the side and then we can strap the top we can hook onto this right here strap over our logs and bring home 1500 pounds of firewood all right so i’ve cut myself some oak which is a strong wood stronger than pine and i figured so i trimmed these down just enough that they’ll slide through there
They’re touching here here and here and it’ll keep those locks from falling out until we can get a strap over the top all right david so welcome to the new ford maverick this is a 20 000 entry level truck this one has equipped about 26 grand what do you think you know what number one the first impression is quiet super quiet of course i’ve never really been in
A hybrid before so this is pretty nice driving a and a hybrid for the first time when we’re stopped here you hear a light hum and that’s it yeah nothing so what’s going on is we have a 2.5 liter four-cylinder that powers the front wheels and that’s made into an electric motor as well so at slow speeds yeah it’s all electric yeah nothing’s going on now of course
If you want the hybrid you have to get the front wheel drive which i’m a little bit worried about going up the mountain but you seem pretty confident well you know we’ve taken the f-150 up two-wheel drive up there once before rear-wheel drive though uh it was rear-wheel drive it struggled but i think the difference between rear-wheel drive and front-wheel drive
Will make all the difference so you live and work this ranch you have always been the proponent proponent of an eight-foot bed no now for some reason you seem pretty excited about the four and a half foot bed why is that you know everybody goes into town for their groceries and julie loves having a little small easy to park vehicle and i think this might be just
A ticket for her she can put she can go buy furniture that she refurbishes and put it in the back and go to the grocery store and carry all the grandkids in the back i think this is a win-win for for a lot of people well guys i think we’re pushing the maverick hybrid front-wheel drive to its limit today so if you get the turbo for eight the little four-cylinder
Turbo you can get it in all-wheel drive oh can you yeah yes it does have 191 horsepower yes it has a 2.5 liter gas engine has an electric motor has a planetary ecvt i think our limitation right here tommy may be the tires they’re an all-season tire not a lot of tread on them and our gravel’s dry right now and so just getting traction on this gravelly area might be
A little difficult i don’t think it was meant to climb mountains and get logs now we don’t have a huge amount of ground clearance hopefully enough for this kind of breaded-out trail but we shall take it slow yep this will be a challenge for us kind of see how it manages the terrain slipping a little bit but this is the steepest part right here and i feel one tire
Grabbing and then the other one will crap come on maverick you can do it come on maverick come on come on buddy wow that traction control really is you can really feel it grab one side and then the other wow look at that pull this right up through all that great work so what i did is i kept it right around five miles an hour get my foot in it traction control
Off in slippery mode and like you said you could feel it kind of send power both directions and we were able to get up even with front wheel drive no way no way i could not believe that thing climbed the steep grade probably about 25 degrees in front will drive only now we do have one more steep spot up here it’s not quite as gravelly so we’ll see how she does
All right that sounds good david so andre do you you know how it got its name maverick was it because of a top gun movie no as good as top gun was it wasn’t because of the movie it was because of the maverick was not necessarily what we term it today as someone who kind of thinks out of the box and maybe goes a little farther than the rest but it was about the
Calves that didn’t get branded because they could avoid they were quick enough fast enough they could avoid getting roped and so they’d end up out in the in the range without a brand on them and they have to go round up the mavericks after uh all the rest have been branded and that’s why on the original maverick name plate that they had on the cars back in the
70s it had a little longhorn uh right above the v and that was because of the maverick uh roots so david as we climb up toward where the firewood is it’s getting kind of narrow here right it is narrow because we don’t get we don’t go up here very often the yaks do climb all the way up here but uh we’re gonna be going through a gate into an area that’s been burned
Uh what was it 2013 when the big fire came through almost came down to the house but it stopped just right up here so all these all this timber has been falling over because it starts to rot over time after it burns the bottom does and then they they fall over over our road so we’ve been struggling to keep the road clean so that’s what we’re gonna do today ever
Expect to see a front-wheel drive truck up here glad you made it yeah we are too all right so you can get a good perspective of what it looks like up here very narrow trail we’ve got a series of logs and david has cut him up already looking good david so we’ve got a few of them here and then we’re going to keep going and there’s a whole bunch more up there i’m
Going to get some chainsaw action and going to see how the ford maverick performs under load another cool thing about the ford is that it’s currently running right now but because it’s a hybrid it is dead silent and also because of the hybrid we can charge up our batteries while the truck is running and still enjoy the peace in nature until david fires up his
Chainsaws of course david when they introduced the maverick ford told us that some of these tie-down points yeah they tested to the same standard as a super duty truck wow so it’s supposed to hold a lot of tension so it’ll hold logs piled up eight feet tall then well i hope so hey man redo it underneath myself well if that didn’t work what the your wife’s
Gonna say andre yeah what’d you do today your clothes are all messed up and black i’m gonna tell her that roman had me at the coal mine all right onwards so far the maverick is handling the load beautifully let’s keep going uh yeah let me make sure i’ve got traction off and slippery mode engaged come on i got it i got it now the issue with the maverick is
The more you load up the bed the less kind of off-road worthy it is on like a two-wheel drive truck with rear-wheel drive because all the powers on the uh all the traction from the front wheels and of course we’re loading up weight in the back that right there is probably 250 at least at least 250. holy moly tommy this is just we’ll close oh sorry for it
Nice are you ready okay move it up to the shoulder okay okay so a long time ago like many decades ago in the 1960s ford had a model of pickup called the unibody and the unibody wasn’t actually unibody was a body on frame truck but it was one continuous panel that connected the bed to the cab and one of the issues with the unibody back in the 60s is if you
Loaded it up like this you couldn’t actually open the door because it’d be so much flex in the body now the question is can you open the rear door on the maverick even near max payload and is there a lot of flex no opens and it closes like a dream tommy it’s heavy i’m doing a stand up andre no please good let’s share we’ll share that we’ll share the work here
So now i gotta back this thing up good thing i have a backup camera genuinely is one of the worst backup cameras in the industry look at that look how distorted it is oh it just looks terrible but they gotta they gotta save money somewhere i suppose guys did you know that the maverick hybrid does not have a reverse gear in reverse it’s only using the electric
Motor to power it when i was at the event for the maverick first drive i asked the engineers well can the electric motor pull maximum load when it’s reversing they said yes even with a small trailer 2 000 pounds this thing can tell and it’s now doing it but now let’s see it climb so david did you think we’d get all this wood in the back of this little guy
Well i knew we’d get it in the back the question is can we get down the mountain with it in the back but i mean it it did squat so that’s close to 31 inches we started 34 and a half yeah i think we’re using all of our suspension in the back well we’re not on the bump stop so we still have some suspension travel yeah did it reduce our ground clearance a little
Bit yeah we don’t have a whole lot of hop that we can jump over a rock and worry about taking something out so we’ll have to be a little careful going down but luckily our trail doesn’t have any big rocks in it what was that should we see what we hit yeah we better get out and look on that one so with our limited ground clearance this was enough to actually
Stop our board momentum that rock was just a little bit much but it did all it hit was a skid plate so no damage that’s good we’re good but we did need to clear the trail off a little bit more yeah i mean that’s that is the issue when when you’ve got the ground clearance is very limited and so they do make a model called the fx4 right which has got a little bit
More clearance and off-road i guess yeah so that would be the one you really want to take out here but then you can’t get that in the hybrid so do you want the fuel economy or do you want the ground clearance well that one would have no problem doing what we did too no i think traction and power wise that would probably be a little better off at this kind of thing
But we’re just going to now have to be really conscious about uh how clear especially in the rear i don’t think the front has really changed right well that rock hit pretty much mid midsection but i think it’s just it’s taken the whole thing down enough that there it wasn’t an issue going up but it was an issue coming down was an issue coming down i think you’re
Exactly right drone is in the air we’ve got the steep downhill it’s gonna look like nothing on camera but in person it’s pretty that way just a little bit we can avoid the big rut right there pretty sizable oh though you can feel the tires really yeah really struggling to keep the load that’s taken part right here oh yeah good work though yep pretty well the logs
Aren’t coming through the back window yet that’s what i like to see got a little bit of slippage but not bad honestly david i think if you put better tires on this oh big difference for the kind of thing that you do yeah it would have a really big impact on its overall capability well i wouldn’t recommend anybody doing what we did no this is a do not try at home
Situation i think this is a good indication of what this little truck with as andre would put it it’s capable of yeah all right let me get the drone out of the sky so we’ve come to the scales we’re gonna drive on up here and see how much the maverick weighs fully loaded so you think we’ll be over five thousand pounds uh oh yeah five thousand four hundred and ten
Pounds well 5400 so the truck alone right around 3 700 with all the stuff we’re at you know 5 000 and some change with the two of us you know over five thousand pounds so we fully maxed out the little ford maverick today to the most of its capability all right andre so we are at max capacity right now um and it feels pretty good a couple of impressions though
The steering has gotten quite light like old-school american uh land barge night light and um i’m not sure i’d want to drive this truck at night because i think we might blind everybody well right now you’re slightly over gross vehicle weight so it’s a good thing we’re on the farm road and not you know actually in public well if i kick david out we would be at
Exactly the payload capacity but david’s extra 140 pounds here is what is killing our payload capacity are you at least a little bit impressed well i think we pushed it to his max today we would never recommend somebody go back in the woods with a front-wheel drive little trucklet yeah do this but i think we have proved that this maverick which i love the name by
The way is fully capable of doing what we did and uh you only can see this at tfl truck nobody else is going to do this nobody else has used the flex bed in this flex capacity we have flexed it to its max thank you for watching guys as always tfo truck.com and tfldarstudios.com for all the automotive fun you
Transcribed from video
Did We Go Too Far MAXING Out The New Ford Maverick To See If It’s Ranch Rated? By The Fast Lane Truck