In 32 years of driving, Jay Whitehurst has never owned a truck. He’s also never owned a Ford.
But after moving from New Orleans to a hay farm in rural Mississippi, lugging cans of diesel for farm equipment and animal food in the back of his Kia Soul just wasn’t going to cut it. That’s when someone told him about the Ford Maverick.
“I didn’t want a big truck,” said Whitehurst, who works in radio broadcasting. “When the Maverick came out, I salivated. I test drove a 2022 model year and walked away thinking, ‘Yeah, I think this is the truck for me.’”
Whitehurst is one of thousands of customers who got their Maverick trucks faster thanks to expanded production capacity installed in late 2023. This expanded capacity helped increase U.S. sales to 12,443 in January, up nearly double compared to the same month a year ago. January sales even topped that of the larger Toyota Tacoma.
Timothy Bruggeman of Shawnee, Kansas, picked up his Ford Maverick Hybrid late last year – his second Maverick. He saw smaller pickups and even test-drove a Maverick while living in Brazil for his job as a power-plant engineer in 2022. When he returned to the states, he found a Maverick XLT at his local dealership to hold him over until his hybrid model was manufactured.