How Well Does the 2025 Ford Expedition Tow?

Key Points

• With plenty of power from its high-output twin-turbo V-6 engine and a stable, easy-to-drive demeanor, towing in the latest version of the Ford Expedition is a breeze.
• Ford’s super-cool trailer tech (Pro Trailer Hitch Assist and Pro Trailer Backup Assist) are neat features, but they may not work with your towing setup.
• The new Ford Digital Experience is less useful and not as easy to use as older Ford multimedia systems.

We’ve named a lot of Ford trucks to a lot of our favorites lists over the years, and for towing, they tend to have special advantages. Ford has made a point of making sure towing is one of its trucks’ strong suits, crafting robust platforms to handle big workloads but also introducing new technology aimed at making towing easier, safer and accessible to the inexperienced.

It was with these ideas in mind that I used a new 2025 Expedition Max SUV for a 10-day jaunt to the lovely autumnal hills of the Pocono Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania, towing a sleek 2025 Airstream Globetrotter camper for a long week of enjoying some semi-off-the-grid living. The thousand-mile round-trip voyage was a good test of the Expedition’s towing abilities, systems and fuel economy, and taught me some things about the capabilities (and limitations) of Ford’s latest towing tech.

Related: 2025 Ford Expedition Review: A New Day for the Big Guy

The Ride: 2025 Ford Expedition Max Platinum

Lugging our aluminum luxury can down the highway was this, a 2025 Ford Expedition Max. The “Max” bit means that this is the extended-length version. Think of it as Chevrolet Suburban-sized versus Chevrolet Tahoe-sized: same truck, two lengths. My test vehicle was a Platinum trim level, which strangely is now a mid-level trim instead of the top luxury trim it used to be (the Tremor off-road and the King Ranch Western-themed versions both sit higher than the Platinum these days). All Expeditions are powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6, but when you spec a Platinum, you can also order up the Stealth Performance Package, which brings the high-output version of the engine.

The high-output engine delivers 440 horsepower and 510 pounds-feet of torque, routing it through a 10-speed automatic transmission to all four wheels with standard four-wheel drive. The Stealth Performance Package also brings with it the optional electronic Continuously Controlled Damping suspension, a high-flow sport exhaust system, 22-inch tires on dark-painted wheels, and a black appearance package inside and out. It gave my Expedition a wicked look and silences critics of the ‘25 Expedition’s new tailgate styling, which is controversially painted black regardless of what color Expedition you’ve selected. Finishing it off was the Heavy-Duty Trailer Tow Package, enabling 9,000 pounds of trailering capacity with a weight distribution hitch or without one. Preferring safety, I made sure my trailer came with a weight distribution hitch, which is important to have when towing a rig this large for stability and load-leveling purposes.

Picking up the Airstream from a friend who rents it out for such purposes, I headed to the scales to see just how much my truck and trailer combo — plus gear for 10 days of campground living (you know, the essentials, like an e-bike, espresso machine and toaster oven) — weighed. I believe in full-comfort camping — none of this “roughing it” ridiculousness. The Expedition itself rang in at around 5,800 pounds, the trailer at (dry, its tanks were empty), and with gear and passengers, the combined rig tipped the CAT scales at 13,264 pounds. This is safely under the 15,600-pound Gross Combined Weight Rating for the Expedition Max 4×4, but it was still an excellent test of the truck with a sizable dual-axle camper in tow.

The Route: Ann Arbor, Mich., to East Stroudsburg, Penn.

The route was relatively easy: Drop down from Ann Arbor into Ohio through Toledo, then east on Interstate 80 all the way to East Stroudsburg, Penn. It was highway driving all the way with some twisty, tight two-lane roads at the very end. The route also headed up into the Pocono Mountains, so there was some elevation change from the flatness of Ohio to the hills of Pennsylvania, with long uphill and downhill grades and plenty of semitruck traffic along the way providing a moderate challenge for towing. Nothing to it except to do it.

Unexpected Trailer Tech Setbacks

Hooking up the trailer should be easy with the Expedition’s various systems, but the two most useful, most amazing ones that I’d hoped to test didn’t actually work for me. The Pro Trailer Hitch Assist, Ford’s near-magical AI-based system that automatically backs the truck up to the trailer coupler using cameras and software, kept glitching out because it kept identifying the bright red bucket that the trailer’s jack was resting on as an “object in path,” then deactivating. Time and again. So there was no automatic hooking the truck up to the trailer on this trip, which was a bummer; thankfully, the Expedition’s predictive lines in the rearview camera views and super-clear high-resolution displays proved excellent in getting the trailer hooked up to the truck.

The other system, Pro Trailer Backup Assist, is meant to help you reverse a truck-and-trailer combination using just the pedals and a dial on the dashboard that steers the trailer in the direction you want it to go. That didn’t work for me, either, because you have to place a checkerboard sticker in a very specific place on the trailer for the rear camera to detect — and that’s exactly where Airstream puts the trailer’s propane canister housings. So no Pro Trailer Backup Assist, either. Instead, I had to rely on my years of experience in reversing truck-and-trailer combinations to maneuver the camper into its campground spot (which I aced on the first try, athankyouverymuch).

What’s It Like Towing With a 2025 Ford Expedition Max?

• Takeaway: The brakes and ride quality are great, and the immediacy of the twin-turbo V-6’s boost and the instant thrust it generates is fantastic, though it comes at a noticeable fuel-mileage and range penalty.

There is a massive amount of torque from the twin-turbo EcoBoost V-6, and combined with the 10-speed automatic transmission and the change in software brought about by Tow/Haul mode, I never felt like the Expo was struggling for grunt — quite the opposite, actually, as it always had a huge well of power to draw from, which made passing maneuvers with a huge camper behind me a snap. In addition to never wanting for power or acceleration under any conditions, the transmission’s software always seemed to have it in the right gear for whatever I wanted to do. It might not have the roar of a V-8, but the immediacy of the boost and the instant thrust it generated was fantastic. In short, the powertrain is simply brilliant.

The downside to all of that brilliance: just 9.5 mpg over 1,065 miles of towing and a range of about 250 miles. Even without the trailer, the Expedition was averaging only about 15 mpg in around-town and highway driving. Not great, frankly, and it shows that the truck is really tuned more for performance than for efficiency.

When it comes time to stop, the brakes do an amazing job hauling the Expo down with a load behind it. The 22-inch wheels and tires soak up road imperfections well, aided by the Continuously Controlled Damping suspension. It’s not an air suspension, so it doesn’t act as a leveler, and it can’t make the back of the Expo lower (which would be useful to better use the lower portion of the split gate as a bench seat), but I had no complaints about the ride quality, with or without a load.

Not Everything Is Improved

• Takeaway: Though the 2025 Expedition does many things well, the drive mode selector is awkward to use, the multimedia and information display screens are distracting and limit information, and the Ford Digital Experience doesn’t always work perfectly.

I do have complaints about the new multimedia and interior controls layout. The drive mode selector by your left knee is awkward to use, and I’m irked that Ford has nerfed the information and multimedia displays when it comes to finding useful information on the fly.

In order to switch between information displays on the 24-inch upper display screen, you have to tap the lower center display’s Widgets selector, pick what you want, and then it displays up top. The problem is that you’re taking your eyes off the road to do it. Want to switch between tire pressures, trailer status, trailer mileage and engine gauges? Simple scrolling using the steering-wheel controls is how Ford used to do it, allowing you to just switch between information screens; now it requires using the touchscreen to do that simple task, and that’s terrible when you’re driving down the highway with a $150,000 travel trailer behind you.

You also can’t have a lot of information on the 24-inch screen at one time, which is bizarre given how big that screen is. Why have such a huge panoramic screen only to leave the vast majority of it unused? And good luck figuring out how to reset a trip odometer. The instruction is nowhere to be found in any of the printed materials that come with the truck, nor in the displays, and there’s not a dedicated button. I figured it out, but it took 30 minutes of trial and error.

The new Ford Digital Experience multimedia system also doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes it mirrored the central display’s Apple CarPlay navigation info in the upper screen sometimes it was mysteriously blank. Sometimes the fuel gauge’s range reflected the set trailer when I selected it and Tow/Haul mode, sometimes it didn’t. The system still apparently has a few bugs in it, or at least the panoramic display screen does.

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The Quirky Details

• Takeaway: A squircle-shaped steering wheel takes a little getting used to and camera views show you what’s in your blind spot in place of tow mirrors, but despite missing some key things considering its price, the 2025 Expedition is a useful towing rig.

The new Expedition also comes with some things that differentiate it from its competitors and predecessors. The squircle-shaped steering wheel wasn’t an issue for highway towing, but it becomes more of an issue when you’re sawing at the wheel while off-roading or driving spiritedly on some back roads (without a trailer). But its shape is necessary in order to see the upper screen, and I don’t hate it; you get used to it fairly quickly. The camera views that show you what’s in your blind spot also help you see what’s next to a large trailer, so even though the Expo doesn’t have tow mirrors, this feature still helped me see around (but not past) the 8.5-foot-wide trailer blocking my rear view.

Overall, I found this latest Expedition to be a great towing rig. It’s missing some curious things considering its $85,970 as-tested price, however, like a digital rearview camera mirror that lets you see behind the truck when the cargo area is full and massaging seats. But it’s still extremely comfortable, quite powerful, feature-rich and mostly easy to use (the new digital experience is sadly not an improvement over older Ford systems). Put to the test on my camping adventure, it performed admirably.

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