Easter egg hunt in the 2025 Ford Explorer honors Detroit, Chicago
Owners of the 2025 Ford Explorer will find shout-outs to the people who created the vehicle — not to mention a blockbuster movie — in their new SUVs if they look closely.
“The idea was to pay homage to the places where the Explorer is developed and built,” interior designer Paul Mutter told me. The result: a series of design flourishes inside and outside the new Explorer, which goes on sale this summer.
Concealed images a product’s fans will appreciate are called Easter eggs. Recognizable to by devotees, unnoticed by newcomers, the practice of placing them in products began in video games that contained hidden references to previous versions of the game.
2025 Explorer Ford design Easter eggs
Detroit skyline
Chicago skyline
Silhouettes of all six generations of Explorers
Easter eggs from Loch Ness to Dearborn
In recent years, Ford has hidden more eggs than the Easter Bunny in products and ads. Advertising images for the 2019 Ranger midsize pickup in rugged outdoor settings concealed legendary beasts that resembled — but, let's be clear, for copyright purposes, were not! — King Kong, along with public-domain creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and a jackalope.
Other flourishes include an American flag and map of Detroit in the 2021 F-150, an Expedition driving from the city to mountains, and more.
For the latest eggs, Mutter wanted images that were more specific to the Explorer and its history.
Two city skylines — Detroit and Chicago — represent where the SUV is being developed and built, respectively. Both images show the skylines from the perspective of the people who did the work: Dearborn, home of Ford Engineering and Design, and Chicago’s South Side, the assembly plant’s site.
More: Hidden mythical beasts liven up pictures of 2019 Ford Ranger pickup
More: 2025 Ford Explorer details revealed: New interior, 14 features at no extra cost
Detroit and Chicago, like you've never seen them
The images aren’t the familiar waterfront views. Mutter studied dozens of Google Earth images to show signature buildings like Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and Renaissance Center in Chicago and Detroit, respectively.
Mutter took some artistic liberties and added some of the cities’ landmarks, even though they’re not visible from Ford’s Dearborn development center or South Side assembly plant.
The Detroit image includes the Michigan Central train station, the centerpiece of Ford’s Corktown tech development, and a bustling entertainment and residential district.
Despite being from the south — inland — side, the view of Chicago includes the mirrored Cloud Gate — popularly known as “the bean” in Chicago’s lakefront Millennium Park.
Without giving the locations away — that comes later in this column — Mutter said he wanted the city views to be among “the first things you see when you enter the vehicle.”
Dinosaurs and the Explorer's evolution
It’s a bit harder to find the third Easter egg. It features a mountain range behind the silhouettes of all six generations of Explorer, including one modeled on the “Ford Explorer Tour Vehicle” a T. Rex smashed in the original 1993 “Jurassic Park” film. (Named EXP 04, its demolished remains got a callback in 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”)
The Easter egg process is refreshingly lacking in bureaucracy for a multimillion-dollar program at a company that can require a committee meeting to order hors d’oeuvres. Mutter and his boss discussed ways to honor the Explorer’s heritage, penned “a few doodles” picked their sizes and ran the result by Ford Design management.
“It’s an informal process,” says Mutter, who’s been at Ford about nine years. “We try to keep it hush-hush, but we’re always going to look for more opportunities to do it.”
Other 2025 Explorers other design touches:
A tiny Explorer silhouette on the windshield base.
A “Zen garden” of parallel lines on rubber mats for bins in the center stack and console. The lines abruptly change directions, resemble a Zen garden’s raked sand and stone. They also hold items in place, a particularly useful characteristic in the shelf for mobile phone storage and wireless charging.
Spoiler alert
This paragraph reveals the Easter eggs’ locations. Stop here if you want to find them yourself.
Detroit skyline: on the driver’s-side instrument panel end cap, visible from outside the vehicle when the door is open.
Chicago skyline: on the passenger-side instrument panel end cap, visible from outside the vehicle when the door is open.
Mountains and six generations of Explorer: on the passenger side of the center console. It conceals the line between two trim pieces and salutes the vehicle’s heritage.
Contact Mark Phelan: 313-222-6731 or mmphelan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mark_phelan. Read more on autos and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Design Easter eggs in a 2025 Ford honors Detroit, Chicago
