Ford Explorer review: You won’t feel short-changed despite this electric car’s VW roots

The new Explorer has a claimed range of 355 miles and an efficiency of 4.23 miles per kWh - Stuart Price

Criticised for arriving late to electric vehicles and its over-reliance on profits from antediluvian US pickups, commercials and combustion-engined cars, Ford has certainly been a slow burner in the electric vehicle (EV) field. This might be something to do with the Ford family, which holds the controlling A-shares for the firm and is particularly averse to selling vehicles at a loss.

Certainly the 2011 Focus Electric didn’t pull up many trees and it was quietly dropped in 2018, along with the C-Max. The 2019 Mustang Mach-E has done steady but unspectacular European business of about 25,000 a year and lately EV sales have fallen as early adopters and fleet sales can’t make up for the general public’s disdain towards the big switchover.

And while rivals such as the Stellantis Group have made a convincing case for sharing fuel-agnostic platforms across its 14 brands, Ford has had no one to share with since it got rid of Jaguar Land Rover to Tata in 2008 and Volvo to Geely in 2010.

Ford hopes that the Explorer will help give the company a foothold in the burgeoning EV market

Ford’s European business model of high-output, low-profit small and medium cars such as the Fiesta and Focus simply doesn’t cut it in the new EV world. Even combustion cars cost much more to build these days, which is why the Fiesta was canned last year and the Focus goes next year.

So, building on its existing commercial vehicle sharing agreement with the Volkswagen Group, in 2020 Ford and VW signed a joint development agreement based on VW’s MEB electric platform. The Explorer is the first result, Ford’s take on the VW ID.4/Skoda Enyaq. There’s an ID.5-style coupé version to follow, which is rumoured to revive the revered Capri name.

Is this a good idea? VW and Ford are major competitors, while the finances of these sorts of joint agreements between rivals can quickly unravel, as we saw with the Ford-Fiat agreement to build the second-generation Ford Ka between 2008 and 2016. On the other hand, the investment required to design, source and build your own EV in a far-from-booming European market is sketchy at best.

A better Volkswagen?

So, is the Explorer a better VW ID.4? And, much more relevantly, is it a viable contender in an already crowded EV market?

While most of these vehicles are largely similar, the Ford is a handsome contender. A year’s delay while new battery chemistry was sourced and sorted gave the design department a chance to refine the details and it shows. The style is transatlantic, but none the worse for it, with a low roofline and a large blank grille, plus copious noodling around the C pillars (behind the rear doors), which seems to be a favourite choice in the current designers’ Toolstation catalogue. On 20-inch wheels as standard for the upper Premium specification, it sits well visually, while the inclusion of proper door handles (unlike the Mach-E) shows a practical common touch.

Ford Explorer: a handsome contender

With all the launch cars being pre-production vehicles, there were some varied panel gaps, especially around the bonnet, and the body sealing wasn’t entirely consistent, with some wind noise from some of the doors and around the screen.

The Explorer is 4,468mm long, 2,063mm wide including the mirrors (1,946mm with them folded), 1,630mm high and has a 2,767mm wheelbase. In rear-drive Premium form it weighs 2.102 tonnes and will tow up to one tonne (1.2 tonnes for the 4x4 model).

The range starts at about £40,000 for the Standard rear-drive car with a 52kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which has a range of 239 miles and a 168bhp motor. That car will arrive in the UK at the end of the year.

For the moment we’re offered an Extended Range rear-drive model with an 82kWh gross/77kWh useable battery and a 282bhp/402lb ft motor at the back; the top speed is 112mph with 0-62mph in 6.4 sec.

The Premium version of this car costs £49,975 and has a range of 355 miles and a claimed efficiency of 4.23 miles per kWh, though driving relatively gently on a mix of Slovenian roads including steep hills and a short stretch of motorway yielded an efficiency of 3.88m/kWh, which equates to a real-life range of about 300 miles. As ever, sustained high speeds and low temperatures banjax the range and it’s a little penny pinching of Ford only to offer an efficiency-boosting heat pump as an optional extra on all models.

The Premium version of the Explorer costs £49,975

The top model is twin-motor Extended Range in Premium trim only, priced at a whisker under £55,000. It gains a 99lb ft motor on the front axle and the total power is quoted at 355bhp. The 79kWh battery gives this 2.179-tonne 4x4 model a range of 331 miles with a 112mph top speed, a 5.3sec 0-62mph time and an efficiency of 3.74m/kWh. I saw 3.61m/kWh, which gives an on-test range of 285 miles.

Charging is at a maximum of 135kW which is low against rivals, although Ford claims a 10 to 80 per cent charge is achievable in 28 minutes. The larger battery of the 4x4 model will accept fast charging up to 185kW and will charge the same in 26 minutes. Both cars have an 11kW alternating current (AC) charger on board so can be recharged on street charging posts. And while tailpipe emissions are CO2-free, if you take into account the CO2 expended in creating the electricity to charge it, the Explorer’s emissions are about 30g/km.

Inside job

It feels as though someone took the much-maligned VW Cariad-based Golf 8 software and applied a degree of logic that wasn’t there originally. There’s a 15-inch portrait touchscreen in the centre which moves up and down to enclose a reasonably secure cubby hole underneath. So large is it that in its highest position it obscures the heating vents.

Touch tiles and swiping functions control the screen and it is customisable up to a point. So much, much better than VW’s original, but it still requires learning. Not all the functions are simple and you frequently find yourself deploying the nuclear option of the home button, which takes you back where you started from.

The Explorer also monitors your driving and will admonish and turn off the screen if it detects you are spending too much time with your eyes diverted from the road, which is good for the rest of humanity but not much cop if you’re stuck for the right road out of an eight-exit roundabout in the middle of town.

The centrepiece of the interior is a movable 15-inch portrait touchscreen - Stuart Price

That said, the screen does allow a degree of exploration without losing you completely. In modern parlance that might be described as “playful” but I suspect this isn’t where Ford would have chosen to start from if it had designed this vehicle from scratch. There are VW screens, VW indicator/wiper stalk and gear selector and a VW Group key fob; that last one must have hurt when senior Ford management did the Explorer final drives before sign-off.

Some of it is pretty good, but the VW “haptic” buttons on the steering wheel are far too easy to inadvertently press and end up with the wheel-rim heating coming on or, more seriously, the cruise control deploying which sends the vehicle surging forward. No surprise, then, that VW is looking to drop those switches for the next-generation ID models. I wonder what Ford will do.

One bonus is the heater controls being separate buttons – and at least Ford remembered to illuminate the volume slider switch, unlike VW.

The front seats are comfortable and supportive, although in their lowest setting your feet stick straight out in front of you like a toddler on a swing.

In the rear there’s head and knee space for three adults across. The seat backs fold one third/two thirds onto their bases, giving an almost flat load space.

The rear seats have enough leg and head room for three adults - Stuart Price

The boot measures a respectable 470 litres with the rear bench upright and 1,460 litres to the roof if you fold them. Under the boot floor there’s a sizeable space for charging cables.

The boot holds 470 litres with the seats upright - Stuart Price

While the facia has a tidy design with clever panel intersections, the door trims are over-simple light grey plastic looking like the prototype of the real thing and completely at odds with the style and colour of the rest of the upholstery. And although the Band & Olufsen stereo is great, cumulatively the materials don’t match the easy-going elegance of Renault’s Scenic, the style and innovation of Peugeot’s E-3008 or, at the upper end of the market, the hewn-from-solid quality of Audi’s Q3, for example.

On the road

Off the mark the Explorer, in whatever guise and driving mode, feels almost brutally fast, although the rear-drive model has less staying power at higher speeds. It’s more than quick enough for a family charabanc, but you need to plan your overtaking.

The more powerful 4x4 model is naturally faster, but the accelerator pedal control is refined so you can drive it smoothly. This is not the sort of electric hot rod that Tesla’s Model Y represents.

Behind the wheel, the explorer is "almost brutally fast" - Stuart Price

Both cars feel well worked, with progressive major controls and well-integrated braking as the regeneration function gives up to the friction linings at low speed. There are no steering wheel paddles to alter the amount of regeneration, but you can increase it with the B setting on the column-mounted gear lever. There are further settings in the sub-menus.

The ride is generally good, too, even though all the cars wore 20-inch tyres. Damping control is mostly assured and while the suspension is passive and unadjustable, the compromise works well; only the most sharp-edged bumps and potholes report into the cabin.

Slovenia’s roads are mostly smooth, but on the few broken surfaces we found neither car was entirely happy, almost as if the damping couldn’t quite get over the bump it had just traversed. This jangling, nervous behaviour, like the tin cans bouncing behind a honeymoon car, was present in both models but worse in the rear-drive one.

Does it drive like a Ford? Since the original Focus the company has made a reputation for fine-handling family cars and there’s clearly a desire to continue this into the electric era. Certainly, the steering, especially as you move off the centre position, is terrific but the chassis feedback is muted and it doesn’t have the dexterity of cars such as the new Porsche Macan (or, we are told, Audi’s new Q6 which has the same chassis). I drove hard through the mountains and it felt like a competent family car, tending to nose through corners, but without a lot of joy in it. Perhaps the Capri will change that; it needs to, as it might represent Ford’s major point of difference amongst myriad rivals.

The Explorer is a unique opportunity for Ford to make inroads in the already crowded EV market - Stuart Price

The Telegraph verdict  

Considered against its VW Group rivals, the Explorer feels better thought out and more dynamic than a VW ID.4, not as sharp but more comfortable than a Cupra Born but better realised than the Tavascan, and more dynamic but not quite as comfortable as the more family-orientated Skoda Enyaq. None of that tells you much, though.

It’s too easy to get hung up on comparisons between the ID.4 and Explorer and ignore the fact that the market for battery-electric family SUVs contains so many very similar competitors that the externalities of the deal will swing the balance for most customers.

Once size and price are covered, it’ll be about the monthly and balloon payments and the dealer network. In other words, all the things that play to the strength of Ford’s formidable dealer coverage and its marketing prowess.

The wider context is that Ford has done enough in the design and dynamics to give the Explorer a distinctive personality; you won’t feel short-changed.

As to whether it will make enough money for the US giant once VW has taken its cut out of the licence agreement, well that’s between Ford and the family, but we’re already hearing that the days of the agreement are numbered. This “VW Ford” is sufficient to get Ford into the next stage of this fast-moving game and, for the moment, that’s enough.

The facts

On test: Ford Explorer Extended Range RWD Premium

Body style: five-door EV family SUV

On sale: now

How much? from £40,000 (£49,975 as tested)

How fast? 112mph, 0-62mph in 6.4sec

How economical? 4.23 miles per kWh (WLTP Combined), 3.88m/kWh on test

Electric powertrain: single permanent-magnet synchronous motor. Lithium-ion NMC battery pack from Catl, with 82kW gross capacity, 77kW useable. 11kW AC on-board charger and maximum 135kW direct current (DC) fast charging, 10-80kW recharge in 28 minutes

Electric range: 355 miles (circa 300 miles on test)

Maximum power/torque: 282bhp/402lb ft

CO2 emissions: 0g/km (tailpipe), 30g/km (CO2 equivalent well-to-wheel)

VED: £0

Warranty: three years and 60,000 miles (eight years/100,000 miles on battery)

The rivals

Peugeot E-3008 73kWh 210 GT

from £49,650

Front-wheel drive, with a 211bhp/184lb ft motor, which gives 0-62mph in 8.7sec and a 105mph top speed along with a 326-mile range. This lack of sparkle and range against rivals is because the body framing is suited for larger models so it’s heavy (2,134kg). Despite that, it drives well and the interior is a riot of interesting textures and finishes, though the peculiar i-Cockpit layout can be divisive.

Even with a maximum range lower than the Explorer, the Peugeot has a more interesting interior - Handout Publicity Material

Renault Scenic E-Tech Long Range Iconic

from £45,495

Deserved Car of the Year for 2024, not because it’s so head and shoulders above everything else in this class, but because it’s so appropriate for its market. The front-drive 215bhp/221lb ft motor gives 0-62mph in 7.9sec and a top speed of 105mph. It weighs 1,860kg with a 91kWh gross/87kWh useable battery, which gives a range of 388 miles. 150kW DC charging gives rapid fills and the interior is classy and comfortable with a decent if highly fixed-in-place rear luggage area. Unlike its lauded predecessors, this Scenic is certainly not an MPV.

The Renault Scenic E-Tech won Car of the Year 2024 - DPPI

Play The Telegraph’s brilliant range of Puzzles - and feel brighter every day. Train your brain and boost your mood with PlusWord, the Mini Crossword, the fearsome Killer Sudoku and even the classic Cryptic Crossword.