The new Ford Explorer is based on a Volkswagen - so can it wear the Blue Oval with pride?

Auto Car

2 days ago

Open gallery There's enough Ford magic to make the origins of its platform a moot point
Blue plaque at Trafford Centre commemorates Ford's factory on the site
Explorer's official 354 miles and 3.4mpkWh didn't seem unduly optimistic
Explorer was comfortable and supple, but road noise can intrude at times
Steve's simple plan turned into a long day
Heritage collection in Daventry is nirvana for fans of the Blue Oval
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It was a bright, beautiful April Fool's Day. At 6.30am, a magnificent golden orb lit the eastern horizon with a brilliance we probably won't see more than a dozen times this year.
The breeze was sweet and the air so clear you could practically see blades of grass on the horizon.
Despite the beleaguered state of the retail motor industry, the news feeds were already filling with car companies' traditional April Fool spoofs: a free tattoo for every new Volkswagen owner, BMW to launch an off-road version of the M2 – that sort of thing.
And in Manchester, the Volkswagen ID 4 in which I was about to cross the country had turned into a Ford.
To be fair, we've known for years that Ford was basing its first all-European electric cars – the Explorer and the Capri – on the VW Group's excellent and well-proven MEB platform, the same component set used to underpin the ID 3 and ID 4.
This was undoubtedly a pragmatic decision, given that Ford urgently needs to do better in the European EV race. And despite a nine-month production delay, the project is turning into a modest – if not yet profitable – success.
Selfishly speaking, Ford's MEB decision didn't suit me. Outside the limits of the impartiality needed to be a fair-minded road tester, I'm a Ford fan: my grandfather was a pioneering Ford dealer in the Australian bush, we had lots of family Fords and my first new car was a Cortina 1600E.
My view of Ford is that it may make everyman cars, but it also does things first – such as the life-changing Model T, the first affordable V8, unitary steel construction, MacPherson struts, the original Mustang, the GT40, the first 'computer-designed' Cortina, all those fast Escorts and much, much more.
I simply didn't enjoy the notion of a me-too European Ford based on a rival manufacturer's mainstream product. Especially a Volkswagen.
After all, it's not so long since the glorious, game-changing Ford Focus was forcing all comers – and most prominently Ferdinand Piëch's Mk5 VW Golf – to ride, steer and handle better to meet a much-elevated industry standard.
When James Attwood's 2025 Ford Explorer long-termer – a £50k, two-wheel-drive long-range model – arrived a few weeks ago, it became clear it was high time for me to get over myself.
Especially since Attwood had pronounced it a good machine, distinct from the various VW Group models with the same underpinnings.
A workable plan seemed to be to immerse the Explorer – and myself – in as much Ford heritage as we could find in a day, to see how well it fitted. Or how well it didn't.
The simple plan was to take it on a day-long journey starting at Trafford Park, Manchester, where Henry Ford made 300,000 Model Ts for his first 20 years of British business from 1911, before moving to Dagenham in the early 1930s and turning the Manchester place over to the manufacture of Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engines during the war years.
From there, we would roll across the country to Ford's heritage centre at Daventry, to associate the Explorer with as many of its ancestors as possible under the eye of curator Len Keen.
Then we'd continue south-east to Dunton, the research centre that nowadays doubles as Ford's British HQ, ending our journey beside a statue of the founder, Old Henry, erected at Dagenham in 1944 and now overlooking Dunton's main entrance.
This drive would be typically British: plenty of motorway, plenty of potholes, some sinuous A- and B-roads and some recharging episodes, with all the parking and service area manoeuvring this involved.
Photographer Jack and I arrived in Manchester the night before our journey was to begin, hoping that an unsuccessful meeting with a steam-driven 22kW Geniepoint charger outside our otherwise-comfortable Trafford hotel wasn't an omen of things to follow.
For no good reason it wouldn't function, which meant our journey couldn't begin with a full tank, as it were.
One thing the hotel did have, bizarrely, was a parking line of about a dozen used, obviously recently imported Yankee cars for sale via eBay. Evidently the vendor was using the hotel car park for selling.
We photographed our Explorer beside a US-market Explorer of a very different persuasion, wondering at Ford's tendency to spread familiar names over models of different characters and layouts.
Before departure the following morning, I rang the Geniepoint helpline to report the charger failure on behalf of other arriving hopefuls, to be greeted by a polite woman with a voice full of concern, who reset the charger there and then.
I watched it click into action, but its charge rate was too slow to justify our waiting. Still, it was a good sign: even when you're talking duff chargers, EV life is getting better.
The only sign these days of Ford's former presence at Trafford Park is a blue plaque in one of the many entrance halls of the Trafford Centre, a staggeringly huge and spacious multi-storey mall of satisfyingly appropriate American influence.
We found and read the plaques, then jumped back in the car and headed hot-foot for the open road, hooking up after a mile or two with the M6 motorway.
Our immediate destination, 40 miles on, was the Sandbach service area and a reassuring bank of a dozen Instavolt chargers that converted our 35% of battery capacity to 85% at a rate of 85kW in the time it took us to drink a couple of cappuccinos.
It was pricey, mind, at 89p per kWh. Ford's Daventry heritage base – also a massive parts store and the site of the Henry Ford Academy where technicians further their skills – was now an easy 92 miles away.
The car was doing unobtrusively well. It turns out to be a composed cruiser with long-distance seats and sweet steering that's notably accurate at the straight-ahead and thus not tiring for longer journeys.
There's not much road noise on smooth stuff but, like many German-developed cars, it gets noisy on the coarse surfaces that are much more prevalent here in the UK than they are elsewhere in Europe.
We cruised at around 70mph on the speedo (knock off 2mph for built-in error) because we soon established that at this speed, with a little care, you could turn 3.5mpkWh – the claimed WLTP figure; cruising just a shade quicker caused the figure to fall to 3.1-3.2mpkWh.
You become aware of the exponential rise of aero drag with speed so much sooner in an EV than you do in a petrol car.
A slightly lower speed and consequent better consumption can add 10-15 miles to the range you get from a 50kW charge while making no important difference to your journey time (this point proved by my own assiduous observations of sat-nav arrival predictions).
I was clocking such esoterics as Jack drove, proving himself expert at seeing interesting traffic ('Did you spot that new Corvette?'), which added a lot to the interest of our progress.
With miles, the Ford grew on us both. It seemed supple and comfortable, and we negated the sometime road noise by raising our voices when necessary.
Neither of us was truly expert on how this chassis compared with a VW version, but our background impression (confirmed later by Attwood) was that the ride was a bit softer yet well damped and composed. This was another good Ford sign. So was the styling: I was liking the blocky, well-proportioned shape.
We stayed an hour in Daventry, mainly because Len Keen and his two technician colleagues, Chris and Andy, were so welcoming. The Ford heritage collection brilliantly combines perfect examples of ordinary models with hero cars driven by Hannu Mikkola, Roger Clark and a dozen other road and track stars.
They also continue to preserve the Autocar-badged M-Sport Fiesta ST in which then staffer Chris Harris won his class in Wales Rally GB 20 years ago (which had an echo for me; I watched him do it).
Photographer Jack, compact of build, amused us with his claim to be the one bloke in our group who could perfectly fit Ford's beautiful silver GT40, the road-going model with wire wheels and three-eared knock-offs, that was sized for Walter Hayes, the legendary communications chief whose determination and strong influence with the Ford family led to the creation of the Ford DFV racing V8, surely the most successful Formula 1 engine in history.
On we drove through the afternoon towards Dunton in Essex, spearing east from Daventry on the evocative A45 that links half a dozen defunct British car factories (including Jaguar at Browns Lane and various British Leyland places south of Coventry).
This road also doubled for a while as a test track for 1950s Le Mans Jaguars. One story has it that Jag founder Sir William Lyons well understood the need for fast shakedowns on weekdays, but frowned on the idea of high-speed testing on a Sunday…
As we drove, this Ford was taking hold of me. Its composure was starting to remind me of Parry-Jones-era Fords, one of which (a Mondeo) I'd driven quite a lot just a few weeks before.
This felt like a European Ford, which is a compliment. In particular it was different in composure terms from the US-developed Ford Mustang Mach-E, whose engineers have just about managed to tame a pitching motion in steady-state cruising, after years of trying. This EV had overtones of Ford's European golden age.
At Dunton, Henry Ford was waiting. We arrived just before knock-off time at 4pm, which means the cornering shots we did on the entrance roundabout (see above) were a bit unhelpful to the departing workforce.
In all, we notched 230 miles at an average speed of 54mph, consuming power at 3.5mpkWh – a very decent performance. The car's economy and its real-world range were honest figures, in line with the maker's claims.
Best of all it felt and looked like a Ford, and not a Volkswagen. In one enjoyable day, the ghosts were laid to rest.
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