The refreshed 2025 Ford Explorer just debuted in early February, bringing with it some revised styling elements inside and out, along with a host of new features such as the Ford Digital Experience infotainment software, bigger screens, and a revamped interior with more legroom up front, to boot. 2025 Ford Explorer production is currently scheduled to kick off at the Chicago Assembly plant in May, but now, Ford Authority has learned that it will be missing one feature, in particular – Active Park Assist 2.0.
Ford Authority came across this omission while comparing equipment lists between the outgoing 2024 model and the refreshed 2025 Ford Explorer, at which point we discovered that Active Park Assist 2.0 is no longer being offered on the crossover. This particular feature allows a vehicle to take over in parallel and perpendicular parking situations and can also be used to pull out of parallel spots, and has been offered in several Blue Oval models over the past few years.
However, many of those models have also been deleting Active Park Assist 2.0 as of late, too. Back in 2022, that began with the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which was instead shipped with an Active Park Assist Prep Kit that allowed dealers to install the parts needed for the feature when they became available, and it was joined by the 2022 Lincoln Navigator in April of that same year, followed by the 2024 Ford F-150 Lightning, as Ford Authority reported last November.
As Ford Authority reported this past February, The Blue Oval has been muling the removal of automated parallel parking from its Active Park Assist feature in general, as COO Kumar Galhotra noted on the automaker’s Q4 2024 earnings call with investors that this is one of a few seldomly-used features that the automaker plans to remove as it aims to trim another $2 billion in costs from its bottom line. In fact, removing this feature alone could potentially save the automaker a whopping $10 million annually.
We’ll have more on the 2025 Ford Explorer soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford Explorer news and comprehensive Ford news updates.
Comments
Price goes up but features and over all QC continues to go down…….lets see how the sales figures support the 2025 refresh. Im going to suggest people are moving to another brand with much better QC and away from the most recalled manufacturer in the entire automotive business.
Ford, please provide a horse with your crippled 2025 Ford Explorer.
Know a lot of people that have cars with this feature and none of us ever use it
There is a reason why Park Assist is seldom used. It’s no longer easy to use. In past FoMoCo vehicles, it was a one button push operation. I used it all the time in our MKZ and two MKTs. Now, with the Aviator(s), you push a hard button, then have to select what kind of parking maneuver you want/which side of street on the touchscreen — way too steps. Who has time for this in urban traffic? On our second Aviator and indeed this feature rarely get used due to poor user interface.