Among the many variants of the highly popular Ford Explorer, the Sport Trac was the first of many midsize pickup trucks that was a very capable hauler.

Scheduled to be phased out before 2011, the 2010 Ford Explorer Sport Trac is largely unchanged, though some packages have been shuffled. The Explorer Sport Trac, as Ford's Original Sport Truck, was ...

Ford, among others, attempted to fill that need with the Sport Trac, introduced in late 2000 as a 2001 model based on the second-gen Explorer.

One that Ford reckoned was enough to separate the two in the market. For starters, the Sport Trac was the only Ford-produced mid-sized truck to be manufactured in the United States by Ford themselves.

The Explorer Sport Trac shared some parts with the Ford Ranger, but it had Explorer-derived styling and was built on the Explorer platform, which, confusingly, was once Ranger-based.

Read this review and first test drive of the 2007 Ford Explorer Sport Trac in Four Wheeler Magazine.

Hopefully Ford will grace us with a hi-pro version that add all those little bits back on, but until then the new Sport Trac plays off the Ford truck styling theme (including the Frisbee sized ...