Ford attracts younger and more female buyers with new $20,000

Rebecca and Shane Phillips are accustomed to getting looks when driving around California in their 1985 Mercury Colony Park or 1978 Lincoln Continental with longhorns on the front. But the newest head turner in their collection has been somewhat unexpected.

“The looks we’re getting are pretty neat. Everybody I’ve run into they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen something like this,'” said Rebecca, 31. “It’s always fun to drive by and somebody gets surprised about what it actually is and what it looks like.”

It’s not a classic vehicle, sports car or electric vehicle. It’s the new 2022 Ford Maverick, a small pickup truck that recently went on sale as the automaker’s least expensive vehicle in its entire lineup of cars and trucks at about $20,000.

While the vehicle has only been on sale for slightly over a month, Ford Motor says the compact truck – about the length of a Toyota full-size sedan but priced at far less than that and many other smaller cars – is already succeeding in attracting new, younger and more cost-conscious buyers like the Phillips’.

“We really are seeing a new customer coming into Ford. And that was really our ambition. We fabric was to appeal to a younger, more diverse customer. And we’re certainly seeing that,” Todd Eckert, Ford truck marketing manager, told CNBC.

Ford sold more than 4,100 Mavericks during the vehicle’s first full month of sales in October. Eckert said the company will continue to ramp-up production of the truck at the automaker’s Hermosillo plant in Mexico.

The importance of Maverick isn’t just about sales, but in attracting new customers to Ford. It may act as a gateway vehicle for customers to step into larger, pricier Ford pickups such as the midsize Ranger and full-size F-150.

Early Maverick buyers are skewing younger and more female than the traditionally male-dominated truck market, according to Ford.

Ford said a quarter of the Maverick’s buyers are women compared with 84% for full-size pickups, according to J.D. Power. The company reports more than a quarter of buyers also are between 18 and 35 years old – double the industry average for that age group. The average age of a new vehicle buyer is 48, according to J.D. Power.

The Phillips’ said they aren’t “big truck people” or even new car people but they were attracted to the Maverick because of its price, features and fuel economy.

It’s a similar story for Christopher Molloy II, who purchased the Maverick as his first new vehicle in early October. He traded in a compact Chevy Cruze sedan for the pickup.

“I wasn’t first looking for a Maverick. I didn’t know it existed,” said the 23-year-old Oregonian. “I was looking for more SUV-type. I wasn’t really expecting to get a new truck because they’re so expensive until I saw the Maverick was coming out.”

Ford surprised many with the Maverick’s low price as well as its…