2025 Ford Expedition: New friendly features and a Tremor for legit off-roading

Ford has engineered the 2025 Expedition with an eye to putting it at the top of the large SUV class in which it has usually been a contender. With loads of tech that works well and is controlled easily, friendly features and a highly capable new Tremor off-road edition, it offers plenty of justifications for its pricing.

SAE Media was hosted by Ford in Louisville, Kentucky, for a drive of various Expedition trim levels, including a first-hand view of the Tremor's off-road prowess. Among the useful features is the new Split Gate, of which the top 75% lifts like a traditional SUV liftgate. The utility comes in with the lower 25%, which drops like a truck tailgate and can support up to 500 pounds for your football tailgating or other purposes. And avoiding a potential user annoyance is available Open-on-Approach, which opens both gate portions by merely standing near the back of the Expedition. The design of the upper part of the Split Gate, by the way, evokes the apocryphal quote from Henry Ford about color options on the Model T: “Any color the customer wants, as long as it's black.” Exterior designer Jill Dougherty said the development team wanted the split gate to stand out proudly on most color combinations. The contrast is most stark on SUVs with one of the two available white body colors. For the paranoid, it sort of evokes a police vehicle from behind.