2025 Ford Bronco Sport Badlands Sasquatch Can Go Way Further Off-Road Than Anyone Needs It To

You’re forced to make a choice when it comes time to buy a new small crossover for your family: Do you want a nondescript egg-shaped thing with a CVT, or do you want a real off-road capable machine with an unapologetically rugged SUV shape? If you answered the latter, your choices are pretty much limited to the Ford Bronco Sport. You might get close with a Jeep Compass Trailhawk, a Toyota RAV4 TRD Off Road, or even a Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness, but the Bronco Sport, especially in its highest off-road Badlands trim with the optional Sasquatch package, has more chops than any of those other three. There’s a lot going on here, and most of it is pretty good. 

Full disclosure: Ford flew me to San Diego, put me in a nice hotel and fed me so I could drive the 2025 model year facelifts for the Maverick and Bronco Sport.

The base model Bronco Sport makes do with a turbocharged 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine putting out 181 horsepower. I drove one and it served perfectly well as any compact SUV would. You can get a lightly dumbed-down Sasquatch package with the 1.5-liter-powered Outer Banks model as well, but it doesn’t have the grunt and torque that the Badlands model will provide, or the full-kill-mode off-road suspension. The Badlands uses a version of the turbocharged 2.0-liter inline-4 engine also found in the Maverick and Escape, with 245 horsepower in this application. The twin-clutch rear differential that made the Maverick Lobo so good is also employed in the Bronco Sport Badlands Sasquatch, but with different programming for a more off-road capable driving experience. 

While a lot of my driving in the Bronco Sport was on the road between San Diego, California and Borrego Springs, California, this little crossover doesn’t really come into its own until the pavement disappears. With a handful of hours crawling around in the desert on two-track trails, up and over ridges, and across sand pans several feet deep, this machine maintained its surefootedness. The sandy bits were handled quite easily by the Badlands’ Rally drive mode, making real good use of that Sasquatch rear differential to keep the tires churning through the loose bits. This truck doesn’t really need nuance the way a lot of off-roaders do; you can kind of just point it in the direction you want to go, and if there’s enough clearance and traction it’ll just crawl right up it. 

Borrego Springs and Ocotillo Wells are the areas Ford has used to develop its Raptor models since the first was introduced fifteen years ago, so the engineers know the area extremely well. I don’t doubt that Ford put us on a trail that was beneath even 80% of the capabilities of this little machine, but even at that level I was impressed by some of the stuff we mountain goated up and down. The deep sand was hardly a worry with the Goodyear Territory tires on. I’m sure if you bought this you could go even farther with more aggressive tires, but for factory fitment, these were damn impressive. 

After our sojourn in the deep sand, Ford took us out to some proper 4×4 trails to put the Bronco Sport’s Rock Crawl mode to the test. Driving down through some dry riverbeds really tested my claustrophobia, with deep canyon walls on both sides of the truck leaving us in shade. While you could have taken a wider vehicle down this trail, I certainly liked that the Bronco Sport was narrow enough to avoid any issue at all. Up and out of the slot canyons, we climbed to the top of a steep and craggy ridge. I’ve done plenty of off-roading that the Bronco Sport couldn’t handle in my day, but this is easily enough off-roading for the average trail or overland enthusiast. Unless you’re building a sick TJ on 35s, or you’re running a proper side-by-side, you probably aren’t doing anything that this stock Bronc couldn’t. 

When you get to the top of whatever hill you were going up, you can switch on the Bronco Sport’s hill-descent control and set the upper speed limit to as little as one mile per hour, then it’s just aim the wheels where you want them and go. I’ve been in plenty of off-roaders with this option, including a Land Rover over a decade ago, but it’s interesting to know the proper off-roady tech is trickling down to the soft roaders as well. As I was aimed down the face of a ridge held in place straining forward against my seatbelt, the truck would just creep along at one mile per hour until I prodded the throttle or brake. It’s proven technology at this point, but it’s nice to see it in a smaller and more nimble package. 

My verdict after a day with the Bronco Sport is that it is capable of tackling trails that most Americans would buy a Wrangler or full boat Bronco to drive on. You don’t need all that truck to climb a sandy ridge or bounce along a two-track, but most off-roader dudes will look at something like a Bronco Sport and laugh it off as just another cute ute. If you want to get lost out in the desert or on the trails, you can probably do 90% of what you want to in a little guy like this one, while having better on-road manners, daily driveability, and fuel economy than the big boys. 

One part of the Sasquatch package that I really like are the front fender deployable tie-down points. If you’re hauling a kayak or something on the roof, these give you a place to anchor off of, which is really nice. There are a matching pair of D-rings on the rear bumper that can be used to tie off the rear of whatever you’re strapping down, and double as hard tow points if you bite off more than you can chew off road. When I was a teenager with a snowboarding and kayaking habit, I could really have used these instead of running the ratchet straps through the interior of the car by the door openings. They’re extra trick on the Bronco Sport, because they magnet into the body when you aren’t using them to keep them from flapping in the wind. 

By far my biggest gripe with this high-spec Bronco Sport is that it is no longer affordable. The Bronco Sport Badlands that I drove will cost you $48,490, with the $2,990 Sasquatch off-road package (which includes steel bumper guards, a brush guard, fender flares, a tow package, and all-terrain tires) and a few other options. It does well to bear in mind that this small off-roader is assembled at Ford’s Hermosillo plant in Mexico, and this price reflects a pre-tariff world. I asked Ford representatives if the pricing on these machines would change, and was told the company is still working with the Trump administration to determine how tariffs will be enforced and on which items before making a judgement on pricing. 

If you don’t need the moonroof, Bang & Olufsen stereo, or a graphic package, you can get a Bronco Sport Badlands for as “little” as $42,405 (the cheapest, least off-roady version starts at $32,385). Look, the Bronco Sport is a seriously capable little machine, and maybe the runaway inflation of the last five years has warped my brain’s sense of the value of a dollar, but that’s just an absurd price. Ultimately I liked the Bronco Sport well enough, but nobody who buys this trucklet will ever need to drive aggressive trails or deep sand like I did.

If you are going to head to a Ford dealership to buy one of these monsters, make sure you do your research beforehand, because there’s almost no way the salesperson will know anything about the different trims or packages and what they come with. You can get a Bronco Sport in Big Bend, Free Wheeling, Heritage, Outer Banks, Badlands, Big Bend Black Diamond, Outer Banks Sasquatch, and Badlands Sasquatch trims with different levels of off-road ability and very different price points. Ford doesn’t make it easy for you, does it?