Ford opens exclusive Bronco Off-Roadeo courses to non-owners for first time
What do you get at the Bronco Off-Roadeo?
Steve Fales, a marketing director from Canton, Michigan, traveled to Las Vegas in April 2022 with his wife for an adventure that had nothing to do with slots, blackjack or shows on the strip.
Their destination: A Bronco Off-Roadeo track for a daylong adventure that included rock crawling in a Ford Bronco, personal guides, a catered lunch and dinner and a full immersion experience that the automaker has been offering free since 2021 to new Bronco owners interested in 4x4 action.
"You go over back roads and through big ruts," Fales told the Detroit Free Press. "You start off really slow and, by the end of the day, you're doing 40 miles per hour on the side of a mountain. We hit a bump and the front tires go up, the back tires go up and you start to feel air. You feel weightless for a second. When you come back down on the tires, you come back to reality. It was addicting."
Who gets access to the Bronco Off-Roadeo experience?
Wildly positive feedback like that inspired Ford Motor Co. this month to allow more than just Bronco owners to visit its Off-Roadeo tracks, the automaker said.
Now, a half-day adventure is open to anyone who can go online to reserve a spot, pay a $795 fee, and travel to Mount Potosi near Las Vegas, Nevada; Red Cliffs Lodge in Moab, Utah; Grey Wolf Ranch in Horseshoe Bay, Texas; and Gunstock Mountain in Gilford, New Hampshire.
"Since the very first customers came through Bronco Off-Roadeo, we knew we had to open it up to guests, too, because the experience only creates more love and desire for a Bronco," said Mike Levine, director of Ford North America product communications. "Now everyone can try before they buy, and we expect many guests will buy a Bronco. Once you try it, you're hooked."
What do you get at the Bronco Off-Roadeo?
While many people likely won't use their Bronco to go off-roading through the woods, mud, sand or mountainous terrain, Bronco owners who've driven on the tracks told the Free Press they learned capabilities about the vehicle that they never expected.
For all visitors, a Bronco or Bronco Sport is provided to use for free. Guides ride with some drivers to inspire fearlessness and help teach all the proper tread lightly techniques for Bronco off-road activity. Three passengers may go along.
"It was fun and very informative. We learned a lot," said Belinda Costa, 51, a registered nurse from Lodi, California, who did the drive last month in Nevada. "We learned that to go slow over rocks, you use different settings – there's rock, climb, slippery, Baja mode. When you're rock climbing, you can set it to manual or a mode. I felt pretty confident after doing it a few times that I felt comfortable going out on my own."
She owns a 2023 Bronco and went with her husband and another couple from Lodi. When Costa's old Acura kept breaking down, they decided to go in a new direction and get the Bronco and see what off-road life had to offer.
"When I heard about this, I was like, 'What?!' It sounds amazing. Let's do it," Costa said. "So we went."
And they met people of all ages from all over America, she said.
Steve Fales' wife, Amanda Fales, a program coordinator for a nonprofit organization, said she didn't know what to expect from the trip.
"I had never seen anything like the scenery out there," she said. "Driving through the mountains was crazy. It was really cool. I'd never done anything like that. It was a little scary at times. Maybe exhilarating is a better word. We'd go down through ravines that looked like dry riverbeds. They were very steep. At one point, we had only two tires touching the ground – the front left and back right. We felt very safe because guides were telling us how to do it. We had no idea what we were doing."
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Steep climbs, steep descents
Meanwhile, Steve "Pete" Peterson of Colorado Springs bought a 2023 Ford Bronco as a retirement gift and went to Moab for a day of guided off-roading. He spent two decades as active U.S. Air Force and more than a dozen additional years working at the Air Force Academy and is an ultra runner who spends time mountain biking and fishing.
But Peterson had never tried off-roading until April 2022. He thought it was cool that Ford offered the adventure to its owners. And, as a seasonal ranger on Pike's Peak as a post-retirement gig, Peterson looks for new experiences.
"I have a Bullitt Mustang and take it on the track. But this was a little different extreme," Peterson said. "I bought the Bronco to allow for a little more adventure in my life. And this was an experience of a lifetime. I was blown away. I could not believe how versatile the Bronco was – we went 50 miles per hour on dirt, then did steep climbs, steep descents."
Participants start with a bit of classroom training and then take to the trail.
"An instructor rode with me, which I loved," Peterson said. "I was the first to go on stuff. And I would ask, 'Are you serious? I'm not sure I can do that' and the instructor would say, 'Oh, yes. You can do that.' We went down some steep embankments and then up. I was like, 'How in the world is this even possible?' We did rock crawling, and I was like, holy cow. I felt like a little kid. ... It's such a freeing experience."
Pushing the limits
Eric Schwertzel, a videographer from Las Vegas, drove the course in Nevada last summer.
"I wanted to push the limits of Bronco," he said. "I'm not a person that rock crawls. But you literally go up, I don't know the degree or angle, on a lot of loose rocks. I've done dirt trails. But not loose rocks. My level of confidence was, like, oh (expletive). Will I get stuck?"
What blew his mind, Schwertzel said, is when wheels go up in the air.
"It was like the movies," he said. "I thought, I'm like Tom Cruise. You think you're all cool and then you see that soccer mom over there, and she's doing it, too. I realized these cars can do what you see in commercials. I've driven Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls. I belong to a car club in New York. This is out of the ordinary."
The experience is out of the ordinary, said Levine of Ford. Porsche offers its own adventures in Los Angeles and Atlanta to its owners.
Ford CEO Jim Farley has told investors and dealers since he started running the company in 2020 that his vision would be selling experiences as well as iconic products.
Ford also offers other free experiential driving for vehicle owners, including:
ST SUV Experience for Edge and Explorer owners in Park City, Utah, and Asheville, North Carolina.
F-150 Raptor Assault Experience at the Ford Performance Racing School in Tooele Valley, Utah.
Dark Horse Track Attack for Mustang Dark Horse owners at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.
How it started
This Bronco Off-Roadeo program first opened at one location in Texas in June 2021.
Since then, more than 24,000 owners have attended a Bronco Off-Roadeo. Nearly 20,000 guests have attended with these owners, so total attendance has totaled nearly 45,000 people, Levine said.
"More than 90% of people who attended Bronco Off-Roadeo have said the experience exceeded their expectations and 94% would recommend it to others – which is one of the reasons why we are now opening up Bronco Off-Roadeo to the public," Levine said.
A key data point spotlights the impact of the experience: Guests who have joined Bronco owners for the experience have purchased Ford vehicles afterward, many of them Broncos, Levine said.
"That's amazing to me," he said.
Specifically, 4,542 unique households attended Bronco Off-Roadeo as guests between September 2022 through June 2023, Levine said. After the event, Ford surveys indicated:
380 Ford vehicles, mostly Bronco, were purchased by the guest households for a total of 8.3%. It was a mix of existing Ford owners and buyers new to Ford, called conquests in the industry. Getting people to switch brands is considered very costly and difficult, as consumers tend to be brand loyal. Some Bronco owners purchased a second Ford vehicle or another Bronco.
Of the new purchases, only 12% of the buyers had purchased a Ford previously.
The 2024 Bronco ranges in price from $39,130 for Big Bend to $89,835 for Raptor, plus delivery fees and taxes, according to Ford. The 2024 Bronco Sport costs $31,230 to $38,390, plus fees, according to Ford.
While Texas is the most attended site, Moab is a mecca for destination adventure, said Greg Nikolas, a Dearborn-based program director who oversees all of the Bronco Off-Roadeo sites for Ford.
The Bronco owners' experience is a fully immersive day. The nonowner experience is a half day. Trail guides go with groups to be sure drivers know how to utilize all the capabilities. The project employs more than 50 trail guides as well as site producers who manage the four locations.
Visitors have come from South Korea, China, the Middle East, Cuba, the Netherlands and throughout Europe, either as Bronco owners or guests, Nikolas said. Couples frequently come together, Nikolas said.
"People learn how a front tire grabs a rock, and the front bumper does not," he said. "We also tie this to everyday driving."
Ford declined to reveal the cost of the Bronco adventures, saying it's proprietary information.
The company does not use the sites for official vehicle testing or engineering but new experiences with the vehicles are relayed to engineers, Levine said. Ford has rights to these properties but does not own them, he said. The Texas and New Hampshire trails are exclusively on private land while the Utah and Nevada trails include private and public land.
'Incredibly cool'
What Ford is doing with Bronco is textbook marketing that most companies wish they could execute but they lack the money, interest or creativity, said Bob Kolt, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University.
"In the classic model of diffusion, you create awareness, provide information and one of the key things is trial before you get to use and adoption," Kolt said. "It’s really classic sales."
This is classic scientific persuasion, Kolt said. "I just wonder if Ford is pricing it too low. I wonder if $795 is too cheap. This isn't a test drive. It's a vacation experience."
For more information, go to BroncoOffRoadeo.com.
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter @phoebesaid.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford Bronco Off-Roadeo driving experience: 4 locations now open to all
