Video: We Just Caught Ford Testing The Baddest Bronco Of Them All: The New Warthog!

It's definitely coming — we're just not sure when yet

We know Ford wasn’t stopping with the regular Bronco, and we may see these sooner than you may expect. (Photo: TFLcar)

2021 Ford Bronco production is set to kick off in Michigan soon, but that doesn’t mean development is letting up. Quite the contrary, actually — now that we’ve seen the “standard” Bronco, enthusiasts are now hungry for the Raptor-esque version. I’ve long referred to that elusive high-performance beast as a Bronco Raptor, but I may actually be mistaken. General consensus among the community is that this is actually a Bronco “Warthog”, and it’s set to be the true halo of the Bronco family.

If the Bronco Sport is the “Baby”, then this is Big Daddy Bronco.

In case you don’t spot the difference from, say, a Badlands or a Wildtrack, there are four massive clues sitting just above the chunky off-road tires. Those massive fender flares redefine the proportions for what appear to be 37-inch tires. That’s a step above the Sasquatch package buyers can expect to see when the Bronco arrives next summer.

Jeep’s Wrangler Rubicon 392 (shown here in concept form) will be the Warthog’s main rival. (Photo: Jeep)

While I missed the mark on the name, I’m still confident the Ford Bronco Warthog packs one of the company’s EcoBoost V6 engines under the hood. Odds are, given the car’s side and its relative proximity to the rest of Ford’s SUV lineup, our money is on the 3.0-liter twin-turbo unit from the Explorer ST. That would give the Warthog quite a boost, and more importantly keep it competitive with the impending Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392. The engine makes 400 horsepower in the hot Explorer, but engineers could likely tune it up a bit to get it closer to Jeep’s 450 horsepower Hemi.

Will it break the bank?

Keep in mind, we’re still months away from seeing the standard Bronco on the ground in large numbers. It will be many months again until we see a Bronco Warthog. It may emerge sometime in the 2022-2023 model year range, and come with an expectedly high price tag. The current crop tops out over $60,000, so Ford could price this somewhere near the $65,000 to $70,000 range. That’s only a guess at the moment, as we’ll have to wait until Ford formally announces the Big Daddy Bronco’s production.

See the Bronco Warthog for yourself in our prototype hunting video below: