Ford Explorer

The Ford Explorer is Ford's mid-size SUV, launched in 1990 for the 1991 model year as the four-door replacement for the two-door Bronco II. The Explorer was the vehicle that mainstreamed the mid-size SUV segment in North America — by the mid-1990s it had become Ford's best-selling non-truck vehicle and a defining American SUV nameplate.

Across six generations the Explorer has moved between body-on-frame (first three generations, Ranger-derived) and unibody (fourth and fifth generations, transverse front-wheel-drive-based) before returning to a rear-wheel-drive-based unibody platform (sixth-generation U625, on the CD6 platform shared with the Lincoln Aviator). The Explorer ST high-performance variant has been offered since the U625. The current generation was launched for 2020 and received a heavy refresh for 2025. Production runs at Ford's Chicago Assembly Plant.