Photo : Ford ( Ford )

Ford just released a teaser image of the 2020 Ford Bronco, and it looks boxy and upright, and there appears to be a spare tire on the back. Just as the off-road gods intended.




Earlier today, Ford dropped a press release with some juicy information about future product plans, and in the document was the teaser image you see above of the “2020 Ford Bronco.”

You can’t see any sheetmetal, but the teaser does show an angular shape, prominent fender flares, what appears to be a spare tire hanging off the back, and almost perfectly horizontal hood and roof surfaces. It all looks very Wrangler-esque, which is a good thing, because for the longest time, we were all worried the Bronco would be essentially a rebadged Ford Everest (though Ford’s former Vice President did later say it would be unique from its overseas sibling).


I called up my Ford P.R. contact to see how locked-in and official the shape shown in this picture really is, because it does look too good to be true. He told me that this is not a production car, and may actually be a clay design buck (he said he wasn’t sure). “Since we’re so far away from actual production of the vehicle, we don’t have vehicles yet,” he said, “because we’re still trying to figure out what it’s going to look like, so [designers] use clay to...create different design themes.”

But, while that isn’t a production-level Bronco under the tarp, the shape we see here is similar to what we should expect from the vehicle when it debuts. “Yeah, there might be some changes on it,” he told me, “but it will look similar to that. That’s the design theme for Bronco.”

“What’s under the tarp isn’t super important,” he went on saying. “It was used as kind of a teaser image... to show the shape of what we were trying to convey.” When I asked if it would be okay to assume that the shape here is an indication of what the new Bronco will look like, he said: “Yeah, absolutely.”

So yes, it seems promising that the amazing shape we see in this teaser will carry over to the production model. God I hope it does.