What lies beneath

It's no secret that the new Explorer sits on VW architecture, but does it still feel like a Ford? STEVE CROPLEY is on a mission to find out

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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 EVs - 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.