Prepare yourself, the overfender nationals have reached a new level. Japanese widebody kit maker Liberty Walk is best known for making bolt-on widebody kits for modified street Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Nissan GT-Rs. Trucks might possibly be the furthest thing away from what Liberty Walk does, even though trucks have a strong history of bolt-on overfenders of their own. Yet, here we are with a Liberty Walk widebody kit for a modern Ford Bronco that you can buy now. And it looks good.
The overfender treatment has long been controversial and has largely tracked with the cyclical evolution of the widebody kit. Some of the first widebodies were inspired by the fender flares of race cars in the ‘70s and ‘80s, then the fiberglass bling craze of the ‘90s and ‘00s, until we finally got the overfender mania of the modern day. In the middle of every era, there have been great widebody kits, often inspired by racing and chasing lap times rather than aesthetics. But the prevailing purpose of widebodies has always been style.
In the case of the Bronco, Liberty Walk’s fender kit works shockingly well. Where most of its kits go on delicately designed supercars with clearly defined design theses, the Bronco is a big, industrial brute of a vehicle. So while the Liberty Walk kit for a Lamborghini Aventador or a Ferrari F40 might be jarring because of the way the exposed rivets and generally sinuous shapes of the Liberty Walk kit contrast against the beautiful, clean designs of the supercars, it works for the Bronco. I’d even hazard to say it looks like it could’ve come like that from the factory.
It is one of Liberty Walk’s less intense kits but actually might have the most mass appeal of all of them. For $3,080, Bronco owners have an option for an extremely high-quality fender kit that will toughen up their rigs visually. Maybe we’ll start seeing these on trails stateside soon.
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