2024 Ford Bronco Heritage Edition First Test Review: Old-School Cool
Adding a splash of retro style on top of the Bronco’s throwback design turns Ford’s off-road SUV into an instant classic.
Pros
- Makes an already great design even better
- Soft, squishy fun
- Two-door actually fits a family of four
Cons
- V-8 thirst, four-cylinder performance
- Basic build quality misses
- No such thing as a cheap Bronco
The idea of a Ford Bronco Heritage Edition seems absurd on its face. All modern Ford Broncos are throwbacks to the 1966 original. Could a retro-themed special edition be anything other than a lame marketing ploy to separate buyers from more of their money?
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The answer, as your eyes have probably already relayed to your brain, is yes. The Bronco Heritage isn’t your typical stickers-and-badges special edition. It’s an awesome design exercise. Splashes of white paint, steel front and rear bumpers, and steel-look wheels elevate the Bronco’s good looks to high fashion. The aesthetic works magic on candy-colored Broncos, but even basic black becomes special with the Heritage treatment. Go ahead, Ford, have more of our money.
What You Pay vs. What You Get
Although there’s no such thing as a value-priced Bronco in 2024, you can justify the Heritage Edition as a good deal relative to the rest of the lineup. Build a base Big Bend trim with similar equipment and capabilities as the $53,740 two-door model photographed and tested for this story, and you’ll spend roughly $1,400 more without replicating the vintage style.
Heritage models come with two or four doors, manual or automatic transmissions, and four or six cylinders, but they’re always well equipped with heated seats, passive entry, the Co-Pilot360 driver assistance suite, and the Sasquatch package. That creatively named off-road kit turns the Bronco into a legitimate rock crawler with locking front and rear differentials, a front bash plate, a two-speed transfer case with a pavement-friendly 4Auto mode, and 35-inch Goodyear Wrangler Territory MT tires that do as much for style as they do for capability. A Bronco on knobbies has so much more presence than one rolling on street tires.
A Tough Truck With a Soft Side
As tough as it looks, the Bronco is a big softie when it comes to road driving. The Sasquatch pack’s longer suspension travel and softer tire sidewalls soak up road impacts with a relaxing squish. As you brake, corner, and accelerate, the 4,712-pound two-door dives, rolls, and squats. Don’t call it sloppy, though. The body movements are exaggerated compared to your typical mall-crawler crossover, but you quickly come to know just how much rock and roll to expect. That predictability gives you a sense of control. Along with steering that places the truck exactly where you want it, the combination of softness and precision makes the Bronco Heritage drive a lot like a Bronco Raptor without the power.
The populist powertrain in our test vehicle combines a 10-speed automatic transmission with a 300-hp turbocharged four-cylinder that delivers punchy performance. We rode the Bronco to 60 mph in 7.3 seconds at the test track and held on for a nose-down 133-foot stop from 60 mph—not bad for an overweight off-roader with the base engine. The optional 2.7-liter V-6 unlocks another 30 horsepower for an extra $2,145, but that strikes us as a lot of money for not a lot of power.
If you’re assertive with the throttle, the EcoBoost 2.3-liter inline-four has the giddy-up to feel quick in traffic. With revs and big gulps of gas, it delivers confident acceleration and a satisfyingly growly exhaust note. Just be sure to budget for the V-8-like fuel economy.
A Toy You Can Play With Every Day
Between the squishy-fun suspension and the high-energy engine, the Ford Bronco Heritage Edition is a delightful little toy for big boys and girls who never grew up. It’s also an escape for those of us looking for any chance to push back against our adult responsibilities. In another nod to the 1960s, the Bronco is the rare modern two-door that you can use as a family vehicle. The rear seat offers plenty of space for two kids capable of buckling their own seat belts, and there’s reasonable cargo space behind them for daily errands. In a Target parking lot at rush hour, the 100.4-inch wheelbase makes the two-door Bronco as easy to park as the Ford Bronco Sport cute ute.
A white dashboard and throwback “Bronco” script logos carry the retro theme into the cabin where you’ll find the Heritage Edition’s single design miss. The cloth seats are supposed to evoke plaid, but they manage to look neither vintage nor modern. If they remind us of any time period, it’s some forgotten moment in the mid to late ’90s that has yet to become fashionable. A traditional plaid pattern isn’t an original idea, but it is timeless, just like the Bronco’s basic shape.
The Heritage Edition also does nothing to improve on the Bronco’s rough edges. It’s too easy to find wobbly interior panels, crude seams, and hard plastics in an SUV costing this much coin. On the plus side, wind noise around two-door’s hard top is quieter than in earlier Broncos, which is impressive since two-doors with painted roofs have an extra hole punched in the rear section to create a removable sunroof over the second row.
They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To
With the Bronco Heritage Edition, Ford has taken a good thing and made it even better. Dressing up the Bronco’s classic shape with design details that pay tribute to the 1960s makes for a fantastic-looking SUV. The result is a new truck that feels as fun and free-spirited as a classic with modern conveniences, performance, and off-road capability.
I fell in love with car magazines during sixth-grade silent reading time and soon realized that the editors were being paid to drive a never-ending parade of new cars and write stories about their experiences. Could any job be better? The answer was obvious to 11-year-old me. By the time I reached high school, becoming an automotive journalist wasn’t just a distant dream, it was a goal. I joined the school newspaper and weaseled my way into media days at the Detroit auto show. With a new driver’s license in my wallet, I cold-called MotorTrend’s Detroit editor, who graciously agreed to an informational interview and then gave me the advice that set me on the path to where I am today. Get an engineering degree and learn to write, he said, and everything else would fall into place. I left nothing to chance and majored in both mechanical engineering and journalism at Michigan State, where a J-school prof warned I’d become a “one-note writer” if I kept turning in stories about cars for every assignment. That sounded just fine by me, so I talked my way into GM’s Lansing Grand River Assembly plant for my next story. My child-like obsession with cars started to pay off soon after. In 2007, I won an essay contest to fly to the Frankfurt auto show and drive the Saturn Astra with some of the same writers I had been reading since sixth grade. Winning that contest launched my career. I wrote for Jalopnik and Edmunds, interned at Automobile, finished school, and turned down an engineering job with Honda for full-time employment with Automobile. In the years since, I’ve written for Car and Driver, The New York Times, and now, coming full circle, MotorTrend. It has been a dream. A big chunk of this job is exactly what it looks like: playing with cars. I’m happiest when the work involves affordable sporty hatchbacks, expensive sports cars, manual transmissions, or any technology that requires I learn something to understand how it works, but I’m not picky. If it moves under its own power, I’ll drive it.
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