If the Ford Bronco were any other car, we’d probably have a new one by now. Released in 2021, the revived 4×4 has hit the point in its lifecycle when it would benefit from a mid-cycle refresh. If you live in the Bronco ‘Tuber-sphere, you may have even seen some wild speculation circulate before the 2025 and 2026 models came out, but neither brought the visual or mechanical overhaul (not to mention the V8 or hybrid) some fans expected.
Instead, Ford has simply soldiered on with more minor, year-over-year enhancements—and that’s expected to be the norm until the Bronco is replaced with an entirely new model—likely near the end of the decade. Automotive News hinted at this last summer when it published a Ford brand update that stopped shy of confirming it outright. Now, Ford has done that for us.
“It’s been a lot more incremental.” Bronco engineer and development driver Seth Goslawski told The Drive in an exclusive, one-on-one interview. “I want to call it smaller stuff but, you know, in ’25 model year we we changed a lot in the interior where you have the all digital cluster now. You have the rear HVAC for the automatic transmissions—and that was all direct customer feedback that came back,” he told us.
That strategy has gone hand-in-hand with the company’s racing efforts. Since 2021, Ford engineers have been secretly testing new Bronco upgrades at the NORRA Mexican 1000 in Baja—a classic off-road endurance rally with a low barrier to entry for factory vehicles.
This has given Ford carte blanche to develop suspension and powertrain upgrades in an environment more extreme than the vast majority of its customer trucks will ever see. Some of those upgrades have been higher profile than others, and Goslawski says Ford has one of those in store for the 2027 model year, promising us that it will be “obvious.”
“So yeah, there’s been incremental changes every year—some larger than others,” he said.
Naturally, we asked whether that would remain the case until it’s time to tear the whole thing down and redesign it from the ground up—and Goslawski confirmed it in no uncertain terms—twice, in fact:
“Yeah. Yep,” he said.
In Ford’s defense, sales have been strong and getting stronger. Even if it hasn’t yet dethroned Wrangler, its presence has shifted the market significantly. Why mess with a good thing?
With this strategy, the Bronco is bucking a larger industry trend, but Ford had an existing role model in Wrangler. Jeep’s 4×4 likewise enjoys long product product cycles with mostly incremental changes. There have been exceptions, but broadly speaking, until Ford revived the Bronco, Jeep was largely content with slow-rolling the Wrangler’s development. With the Bronco’s reintroduction, Jeep got itself into gear.
Competition betters the breed, as the saying goes.
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