Ford Bronco vs. Bronco Sport | 10 Differences Between 2021 Bronco & Bronco Sport | Price, MPG & More

See that blue SUV over there? That is a Ford Bronco. See that one over there? That's not a Ford Bronco. It's a Ford Bronco Sport. You might be asking, what the hell is the difference? Well, I'm glad you asked because that's exactly what we're here to find out today. Both of these vehicles were introduced by Ford around the same time, but the big Bronco got delayed and delayed and delayed again and it just took so long to get to market that the Bronco Sport beat it there. So everybody thinks that's the Bronco and it gets all the credit. They even have the same damn name on the front grille. Today we're going to discover which one's better. We're going to take a look at the differences and we're going to see which one lives up to the Bronco name. And should we change the name for the Bronco Sport? How about like the BS or the baby Bronco? Maybe the B-Sport? No, those are all too Spice Girls. Escape Extreme or the Escape Rugged Edition. Anyway, before we get started though, I want to make something clear. I'm aware these two don't compete directly against each other. They're not rivals. They're entirely different sizes and they have different purposes, but I'm still interested in finding out if we can take the Bronco name and separate it from the Bronco Sport and we can see what tasks these are each better at. There might be some unexpected answers. Before we do all that though, click like and subscribe below. There's more information in the links and for a cash offer on your car today, go to edmunds.com slash sell my car. What do these two cost? Well, it kind of depends on how you equip them. The base two-door Bronco with not a lot of equipment is around $30,000, but the four-door version is closer to $35,000. As equipped, this one, the first edition, is over $62,000. It's a pretty big price tag. Now, the Bronco Sport, as you might expect, is a little bit more reasonably priced. The base model comes in under $30,000 and this one, the Badlands, with all the extras, isn't even $40,000. It's around $38,000. The difference in price between these two is over $24,000 as they sit. That's a big enough difference to buy a whole Honda Civic and like $800 worth of gas. Winner in price here, Bronco Sport. At Edmunds, we classify vehicles via their dimensions, so how long they are nose to tail, how wide they are, and that's what we've done with the Bronco and the Bronco Sport. The Bronco Sport is a compact SUV. It competes with stuff like the Honda CR-V, the Subaru Crosstrek, or even the Toyota RAV4, while the Bronco, being much longer, competes with stuff like the 4Runner, the Honda Passport, or the four-door Jeep Wrangler. Now, their dimensions are about 172 inches and 189 inches in length, respectively, which is a big difference. Not only is the Bronco longer than the Bronco Sport, it's significantly wider. It's even wider than the Wrangler, so when you're out on trails, you're going to have a tough time keeping it away from bushes if the going gets tight. And if you have a small garage or if you park in the city, a lot of parallel parking, you're going to want to get out your tape measure and see if either one of these vehicles will fit properly in the space that you've got for it. Winner, the Bronco Sport, because it fits in smaller spaces. So, which engine should you go with? Well, it depends on which one of the SUVs you want. The Bronco Sport has a choice between a 1.5 liter and a 2 liter engine. Both are turbocharged, a three-cylinder and a four-cylinder, and the 1.5 is kind of middling. It gets around 180 horsepower, but the 2 liter engine is 250 horsepower. That is a lot more, and it really changes the way the Bronco Sport drives. That's the engine we recommend. Now, when it comes to the Bronco, there are also two engines. Not a long list of choices, but similar in their power delivery. 300 horsepower on the base 2.3 liter engine and 330 horsepower on the upgraded 2.7 liter engine. Big difference, though, is torque. There's almost 100 pound-feet more torque in the 2.7 liter engine, which is one of the best reasons to go with the upgraded engine in the regular Bronco, because it drives way better. Both of the Bronco's engine choices are more powerful than anything you can get in the Bronco Sport. We'd kind of expect that, given their respective classes, but the Bronco Sport is still peppy and fun to drive. It's just that the Bronco feels really powerful, especially with that optional engine, and as a result, it's faster. Zero to 60 and quarter mile times are much better than you'd expect in the Bronco Sport, which is kind of indicative of these two different classes, but it's the Bronco that wins the horsepower wars. How do these two do when it comes to fuel economy? Well, with great power comes great responsibility, and responsibility means higher gas prices. Essentially, the Bronco is rated anywhere between 17 mpg combined and 21 mpg combined by the EPA, depending on the engine and which tires and how many doors you get. The Bronco Sport has two ratings, 26 mpg combined and 23 mpg combined. That is a lot better, and even if you take the best possible rating for the Bronco, 21 mpg, and multiply it out over 10,000 miles of driving, with a current average gas price of around $3.30, you're going to be paying nearly $1,600 a year in gas alone. Now, the Bronco Sport, let's say you go with the least efficient version of that, you're still going to be paying way less in gas, hundreds of dollars less in gas over 10,000 miles than you would in the standard Bronco. Now, of course, you'd come to expect that from a more powerful vehicle, but it means the Bronco Sport is easier to live with, at least when it comes to your pocketbook on a daily basis. Now, clearly the bigger of these two vehicles is going to have more cargo space, but there's still some cool stuff worth exploring on the Bronco Sport. See what leg up it has in terms of cargo. First thing is I think this is a pretty cool feature. You can load in stuff from the top without everything falling out of the back. Then you can close this, open the lift gate, and you've got access to about 32 cubic feet of storage back here, which is not small. That's plenty enough space for all your camping gear for the weekend, and it's only a few cubes behind the four-door Bronco, and it's about 10 cubes larger than the trunk in the two-door Bronco. That's a significant amount of space. Now, I brought some stuff that I would typically bring on a camping trip, stuff like a chair, sleeping pad, pillow, of course, stop the sleeping pad from falling out, sleeping bag, backpack with some clothes in it, and a cooler. Plenty of room for a second person's worth of stuff in here, but what I want to know is if I can fold down the seats and lie out flat in it, is it big enough to sleep in for a night worth of camping? So from back here, I will fold the seats. You've got to fold the headrests first. Fold this seat down. I'll go to the other side, then fold this section down, and what's nice here is in the back of the Bronco Sport, there's no ledge. It's not exactly flat-flat, but it's one surface. It's continuous. So let's lay out the sleeping pad and see if it fits. All right, so it doesn't quite fit all the way. I suppose I could fold up the front seat a little bit or sleep diagonally. Let's put out the sleeping bag, see if I've got enough room to lay down and close this cargo thing on top of myself. Now, I could sleep diagonally. Let's give that a shot because this is not working, and for reference, I'm about 5'8", 5'9", on a good day. It doesn't exactly stretch out. It'd be cramped, but I could make it work. So the Bronco, it's longer and it's taller, so you're going to have more cargo space. You also get to lift, not lift, I guess open this side lifting gate, but that's the only way you can access the glass. Now, if you want to have the glass open, you can reclose this, but the spare tire, as you can see, gets in the way of opening and closing it while the tailgate is closed. So push that open, and you've got more cargo space clearly than the Bronco Sport. It's got more headroom and a little bit more legroom, and you can fold the seats down as well, but one of the things here that's interesting is this floor isn't flat, so that might be an issue when I try and lay down. But first, for perspective, I'll show you the same camping gear. There is a ton of extra space here, a lot more than there was in the Bronco Sport. Obviously, you're going to be able to stack stuff higher because of how high the roofline is in this one. Now, let's get in the back, fold down the rear seats. Similar procedure here, headrest first, and then that first side. And again, this is going to be a big issue. There's like a three-inch drop-off. Headrest. Now, it should be noted those are both really easy to do, but the next thing is climbing in here to try and set up my sleeping quarters. So let's roll out the sleeping bag, and really lengthwise, it's not much longer in here. I'm going to have to go diagonal again. Now, I don't think I could sleep like this with the big drop-off. See if I can actually stretch out. Well, it's better. There's more space. I don't have to bend my knees as much, but my entire back is up on the back of the back seat while my legs are kind of hanging off here. You need a platform to flatten it out and sleep in here if you're going to go camping for the weekend. I can definitely see there being a cool aftermarket solution for this kind of stuff. There's also more headroom, so you can sit up nicely in here, and there's cool small item storage solutions. There's a little shelf here for, say, a flashlight or a book, and there's cool small item storage in the front as well as on the back seats, which is copied in the Bronco Sport. And the Bronco Sport has lots of little cubbies too. When it comes to overall cargo space, the Bronco clearly wins. It's just got more. If you're going to do some towing, it's the Bronco, not the Bronco Sport that you want. It tows as much as 3,500 pounds when properly equipped, which is equivalent to something like a small boat and the trailer you're going to have to carry it on, compared to the Bronco Sport, which can only tow 2,200 pounds when it's equipped with all its towing gear. That's more like a jet ski or a small utility trailer. And honestly, 3,500 pounds isn't that much. It's not as much as a full-size pickup truck or even some other midsize SUVs that can tow 5,000 pounds or more. So I wouldn't make the Bronco my first choice if towing is a priority, but between these two, the Bronco is definitely much better than the Bronco Sport. What do you get in terms of tech for the Bronco Sport? Well, even the base model is relatively well-equipped with stuff like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. So that means you can plug in your smartphone and use its functions on the screen. There's driver aids, stuff like adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, lane keep assist, and forward collision mitigation. And then there's plenty of stuff for comfort, too. Heated seats and a heated steering wheel. There's even a 180-degree forward-facing camera. Sure, the screen isn't as large or as high-resolution as it is in the Bronco. And you don't get the bird's-eye-view 360-degree camera. But if you want a vehicle with a lot of tech, the Bronco Sport won't disappoint. The differences between these two are small. And sure, the Bronco feels a little bit more luxurious. But honestly, on tech, it's a tie. As you may remember from our instructional video, you can take the doors and the top off of a Bronco. And you can do it pretty easily. The Bronco Sport only gets a sunroof. So if you want to take the doors and the top off, you're going to need to do it with like a Sawzall. Clear winner here is the Bronco. What are the driving differences between the Bronco Sport and the Bronco? Well, the Bronco Sport is peppy. It's city-friendly. You can fit it in tight parking spaces. And honestly, I like the handling quite a bit. You can go around corners really well in this without a lot of body roll. But there is some numbness from the steering. It's a little bit too tight, at least the tuning in the steering is for my liking. And compared to some of its rivals, stuff like the CR-V or the Subaru Crosstrek, maybe even the Toyota RAV4, the Bronco Sport is not quiet or comfortable. It's got some road noise, some wind noise, especially over the windshield. And it has a little bit of a bumpy ride, especially on these off-road trims. You can tell that it's tuned for off-road ability. It's not the most comfortable version. But that is in stark contrast to the big Bronco. It is really loud inside there. The wind noise going over the top of the big Bronco is there all the time. I mean, 70 miles an hour on the highway, stereo at full volume, and that's the optional stereo with more speakers and more louds, you can still hear the wind just rushing over the top. It's not refined in there. The ride quality in the standard Bronco is pretty damn good, especially with the long travel and the suspension. It soaks up a lot of bumps. And steering in the Bronco is much better than stuff like the Wrangler. It's seriously night and day difference. If you like the act of driving, steering and handling in the Bronco way better than competitors like the Wrangler or even the 4Runner. But between these two, which one would I want to drive on a daily basis? It is no contest. The Bronco Sport is much more livable. The fact that the Bronco Sport is so much quieter on city streets, on the highway, wherever you drive it, it's what gives it the advantage and makes it the vehicle I would want to drive five or six days a week. Now when it comes to the sixth or the seventh day of the week, that's where I'd go with the Bronco. Now that sixth or seventh day clearly is off-roading, and it wins the off-roading category handily. It has 11.5 inches of ground clearance, at least in this Sasquatch trim with the 34 and a half inch tires, the fives as Ford calls them, which is a big difference when you compare it to the 8.8 inches of ground clearance that the Bronco Sport has. Tires are different too. There's available mud terrains for the Bronco, and these are real knobby all-terrain. Sure the Bronco Sport has available all-terrains, but those are more optimized for street driving. Then there's the hardware underneath. The Bronco Sport is related to the Escape and the Maverick. While those are fun, they're not as robust underneath. They don't have real four-wheel drive. They've got all-wheel drive systems. They don't have physically locking differentials. They don't have disconnecting stabilizer bars or stuff like the trail turn assist, which is pretty cool where Ford breaks the inside wheel to get you a tighter turn radius on the trail, and honestly this is the one that's going to make it to the top of the mountain. The Bronco Sport will make it up most of the trail, but you're probably going to be camping at the bottom most of the time. The comfort off-road, the Bronco wins there too. It's got a lot more tire sidewall, and it just can go a lot faster off-road. You don't feel like you're going to break it. You can really bomb down trails, and you can actually crawl up steep rock faces because you have much better approach and departure angles. Now all of this is a known quantity. We're not saying that we're breaking new ground here telling you that a Bronco is better off-road than a Bronco Sport, but it's important to figure out what your balance is. How much off-road driving are you actually going to do? I've been to the Rubicon Trail. Definitely a bucket list item. One of the hardest trails in America, but it's not the kind of weekend driving I like to do. I like to do trails. I like to get to pretty spots that you can't go in a lowered sports car, and I can do that in the Bronco Sport, but if you spend a lot of time out wheeling on the weekends, and you want something that can go pretty much anywhere, the Bronco's the winner. It is worth noting though that top that was loud on-road is still loud off-road. You'll get wind noise, but I'm getting a lot of creaks and rattles in this thing. Kind of sucks for a brand new $60,000 vehicle. I don't know. Maybe the soft top would fix that issue or taking the top off altogether. So we tallied up all the points, and in the end, we remembered we kind of forgot to track points, and who cares? We weren't out here to find a winner between these two anyways. They're in completely different categories, but we did find out a lot of stuff about both of them and where they excel and where they have their drawbacks. The Bronco Sport, it would be a better daily driver. It's quieter. It fits in the city better. It's got better fuel economy, and it's $24,000 less. So in their top trim levels, you're going to save a ton of money if you go with the Bronco Sport, and that's not even considering the serious markup that we're seeing from dealers on some standard Broncos these days. Now all that aside, I honestly would rather live with the Bronco Sport on the daily basis. It kind of hurts deep down in my gut too because the Bronco has a real cool factor to it, but it is so loud on the highway, super inefficient in terms of fuel economy, and it's just not as easy to drive. I mean, sure, it's fun going up steep rock faces and stuff, but I'd rather just enjoy myself on a trail. Which one would you choose? Let us know in the comments below or don't, you know, you don't have to. It's a free world. Click like or subscribe while you're down there. Thanks for watching.