Ford started its attempt at a street truck revival with the Ford Maverick Lobo. Now we have confirmation via our friends at Motor1 (link at the bottom of this article) that there’s at least one production-ready-looking Ford F-150 Lobo out in the wild. Well, there are at least nine, judging by the window sticker in the photos we’ve seen. It looks like there’s a whole new front fascia with a lower air dam for the Lobo version, a set of side skirts, and black 22-inch wheels with a set of low-profile all-season tires. To completely give the game away, the truck is badged as an F-150 Lobo on the front fenders.
- Base Trim Engine
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2.7L EcoBoost V6 ICE
- Base Trim Transmission
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10-speed automatic
- Base Trim Drivetrain
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Rear-Wheel Drive
Surprisingly Not Cartoonish
Back in the day when street trucks were in the zeitgeist, they tended to be over the top and drastically lowered, but it appears Ford is keeping things conservative. The prototypes are even double-cab models, while Ford’s SVT-developed performance trucks have traditionally, and logically, been two-door models.
The F-150 Lobo is lowered, but you’ve seen a lot of trucks on rims with bigger suspension drops. Hopefully, that’s because Ford wants it to be a sleeper. With the Maverick Lobo, there wasn’t a power bump over the other top trim models. The Maverick is limited to four cylinders, and Ford doesn’t have anything in the US to consider a small performance engine. However, Ford has plenty of options when it comes to big engines and room to play with turbos and superchargers under the F-150’s hood.
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Engine Options For The F-150 Lobo
An obvious entry-level choice if Ford wants to have one is the F-150 Raptor’s 450-horsepower twin-turbo V6, then an upgrade to the Raptor R’s 720-hp supercharged V8. It would make sense to use those performance engines for production scaling reasons and tune them to a street bias where torque isn’t quite as important as it is for going off-road, unless it’s used for towing. However, Ford’s performance trucks typically had upgraded versions of the truck’s original engines, with the second version of the F-150 Lightning (not to be confused with Ford’s current electric pickup truck) having a supercharger and churning out 380 horsepower in 2001 with a shorter final drive over standard F-150s.
We would bet on Ford not going as nuts to drop the costly Raptor engines in the Lobo, instead opting to tune its 325-hp turbocharged 3.5-liter V6 or stick with the 5.0-liter V8 that already makes 400 hp
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Lobo As A Format
If we look at the Maverick Lobo, Ford has done as much as it can with the existing truck and as many parts off the shelf as it can, and keep it affordable. That includes raiding the European Focus ST for its front brakes, upgrading to a quicker steering rack and lower, harder suspension. To speed up the standard eight-speed transmission, the Maverick Lobo skips third gear in sports mode to make for quicker shifts while forsaking smoothness and economy. Part of the reason we believe Ford didn’t upgrade the power is because there’s enough to have fun, and its 2.0-liter Ecoboost engine is already well known to tuners.
If Ford is translating that to the F-150 Lobo, it shouldn’t be as expensive as the engineering purpose-built wonder that is the Ford F-150 Raptor. Ford may give the engine a bit of a tune and/or maybe shorten the final drive ratio for acceleration, but we’re tempering our expectations and not expecting Raptor-like power. However, we had a blast driving the Maverick Lobo, and hope like hell Ford pulls off the same trick with the F-150 Lobo to keep it affordable and make tuning relatively easy.
Source: Motor1
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