The Ford Everest: Big, Bold and Built for Australia

Business, Cars
July 15, 2025

The Ford Everest: Big, Bold and Built for Australia

By Henry Tilman

The Ford Everest: Big, Bold and Built for Australia

There’s a particular kind of car that turns up everywhere in Australian life without ever feeling like it’s trying too hard. School car parks. Boat ramps. Worksites in Port Melbourne. The freeway on a Friday afternoon with a caravan attached. The Ford Everest is all of those things simultaneously, and the fact that it manages to do all of them without feeling like a compromise in any direction is genuinely impressive.

It’s been around since 2003, shares its bones with the Ranger ute, and has quietly become the large SUV Australians are buying in larger numbers than anything else in the segment.

Ford Everest Sales: The Numbers Make the Case

The Everest was Australia’s best-selling large SUV in both 2024 and 2025, outselling the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado for the second year running. In 2024 that margin was comfortable, with 26,494 Everests finding homes. In 2025 it was considerably tighter, with the Prado closing the gap significantly on the back of its full-model redesign, but the Everest held on. Fifty-five units separated the two for the year. Winning is winning.

Sitting fifth overall in the VFACTS 2025 annual results, ahead of every other SUV except the RAV4, is a result that would have seemed ambitious for the Everest a decade ago.

The Ford Everest Is Built for the Conditions We Actually Have

Ford’s engineering team developed the Everest with heavy involvement from their Australian operation, and the local testing program is reflected in how the vehicle handles the kind of conditions that would embarrass a European-developed SUV. Corrugated dirt roads, beach tracks, loaded towing on the highway, and the school run on Wednesday morning. It doesn’t ask the driver to manage it differently for each of those tasks.

The current generation, which arrived in 2022 and won Wheels Car of the Year in its launch year, brought a proper ladder-frame chassis, a rear locking differential, and real low-range 4WD. These aren’t soft-roader features dressed up in off-road marketing. They’re the actual hardware required to do the actual things buyers are using these vehicles for. Worth noting that as of August 2025, all two-wheel-drive Everest variants have been discontinued due to NVES emissions regulations. The lineup is now 4×4 across the board.

Engine options are a 2.0-litre turbo diesel making 154kW and 500Nm, and a 3.0-litre V6 turbo diesel producing 184kW and 600Nm. Towing capacity is 3,500kg on both. The V6 is the one to have if towing is a serious part of the brief, not because the four-cylinder falls short on paper, but because the V6 makes the job feel effortless in a way that numbers don’t quite capture.

How the 2022 Ford Everest Changed the Conversation

The third-generation model that arrived in 2022 was a genuine step up rather than an evolutionary refresh. The previous Everest was competent but starting to show its age against an increasingly competitive segment. The new one reset the conversation. Better interior, better technology, better dynamics, proper off-road hardware rather than the token stuff that fills a spec sheet without changing real-world capability.

It was the first Ford to win Australia’s Wheels Car of the Year since 2004, which is either a long overdue acknowledgement of how good the vehicle is or a reminder of how long it had been since Ford built something truly impressive here. Probably both.

What’s New in the 2026 Ford Everest

The 2026 range has been reshuffled. A new entry-level Active comes in at the bottom, while the Ambiente and Trend have been cut. The Sport, Tremor, and Platinum carry over. Manuals are long gone and the 10-speed automatic is now standard throughout. The Sport gets the choice of four-cylinder or V6 for the first time, while the Tremor and Platinum remain V6 only. Both the Sport and Tremor gain the 360-degree camera as standard, and Tremor buyers no longer have to tick an options box to get the premium seat pack.

Pricing starts around $59,000 for the Active and climbs to just over $92,000 drive-away at the Tremor end of the range.

Ford Everest Safety Ratings and Features

The Everest holds a 5-star ANCAP rating and the safety kit is decent across the board, not just reserved for the expensive variants. Autonomous emergency braking, blind-spot monitoring, lane-keeping assist, and adaptive cruise control are all standard. These utes spend plenty of time on school runs and supermarket trips, not just remote tracks, so it matters that the safety equipment isn’t an afterthought.

Inside, the 12-inch touchscreen, digital instrument cluster, and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard on every variant. Seven seats come as standard on most of the range, with the Active starting at five and offering seven as an option.

The Ford Everest Ownership Case: Warranty, Servicing and Costs

Ford backs the Everest with a 5-year unlimited kilometre warranty and its Service Price Promise program, which locks in capped servicing costs upfront. For a vehicle at this price point that families are depending on for everything from interstate trips to the weekly shop, knowing what you’ll pay to run it over five years is worth something. It’s one of the areas where the Everest has an edge over the Prado, whose servicing costs are considerably higher.

Who Should Buy a Ford Everest?

The Everest works best for families who need genuine seven-seat capability alongside real off-road ability and a serious towing capacity. If you’re regularly loading up for camping trips, towing a caravan or a boat, or simply need a vehicle that can handle whatever a busy family life throws at it without being babied, it earns its keep.

It’s not the cheapest seven-seater. At the upper end of the range you’re spending the better part of $90,000 on a family SUV, which is a number that would have seemed absurd not long ago. But the Prado costs more to buy and more to service, and the Everest gives you the better interior and more modern technology for the money. In a segment where the competition has either gotten more expensive, moved upmarket, or in some cases disappeared entirely, the Everest is well positioned.

The fact that Australians bought more of them than anything else in the large SUV segment for two years running suggests the buying public has largely reached the same conclusion.