2025 Ford Expedition Split Tailgate Developed In Secrecy: Report

The automotive world is a super competitive one, with companies constantly working to develop new, improved products touting unique and useful features that beat the competition. We’ve seen this time and time again, and just recently, the 2025 Ford Expedition debuted with a new feature that conjured up quite a lot of press – a split tailgate, which functions much like a regular tailgate on a pickup. The top three-quarters of the liftgate raises upward, while the lower portion folds down, and it can even support up to 500 pounds. As it turns out, this particular 2025 Ford Expedition feature was developed in total secrecy, however.

According to the Detroit Free Press, the idea for a split tailgate came from Ford designer Micah Jones, who attended his son’s soccer games and noticed that some of his fellow parents were using the back of their SUVs as a tailgate apparatus. “They would do that every week, every game. It was nice because you could really glean from their experience,” Jones said. “They had their water bottles or their soda next to them, they had some snacks around them. Basically, they used the floor of the vehicle to put things. That really inspired us to use our flat space really wisely.”

Interestingly, Jones and his fellow 2025 Ford Expedition designers opted to keep the process of developing a split tailgate a big secret, hiding it away in confidential design studios in Dearborn. Only certain employees have access to those facilities, to the point where even CEO Jim Farley and Executive Chairperson Bill Ford must have an invitation and an escort to get in.

We’ve seen this process in action before, as Ford announced back in 2022 that it would be developing future models with smaller, dedicated teams – much like it did with the last Ford GT. We last saw this in action with the Ford Maverick, which was developed in the same manner, behind locked doors and in secret with some pretty lofty goals in terms of MSRP and fuel economy.