DETROIT — One of many worst-kept secrets and techniques within the auto business is out: Ford Motor Co. on Thursday mentioned it plans to disclose a compact pickup known as the Maverick subsequent week.

The automaker has tapped actress Gabrielle Union to assist reveal the 2022 Maverick on June 8 through social media and the streaming service Hulu. Ford launched teaser photographs that present the Maverick title, in addition to a shot of Union within the driver’s seat of a Maverick XLT. A teaser video describing it as “the truck you did not see coming” — though Automotive Information reported Ford’s plan to build it greater than a yr in the past — exhibits the car’s tailgate stamped with the Maverick wordmark.

Suppliers have been instructed to organize for annual volumes of 110,000, in keeping with an individual with data of the plans. Manufacturing is predicted to start in late July, and the truck is predicted to go on sale later this yr.

Ford has instructed sellers that the truck will begin at lower than $20,000, successfully serving as an entry-level alternative for the corporate’s discontinued sedans.

A picture of a prototype on the meeting line at Ford’s Hermosillo, Mexico, plant, leaked this yr, and the corporate unintentionally reported constructing 21 fashions of a “C pickup” there on a manufacturing chart despatched to traders and the media in February.

The truck has been engineered on the identical unibody front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive C2 platform that underpins the Lincoln Corsair and Ford Escape and Bronco Sport crossovers. Automotive Information reported in March that the automaker had reached out to suppliers about building a small van on the plant the place it builds the Bronco Sport and, quickly, the Maverick.

The compact pickup continues a latest streak of Ford reviving traditional names, such because the F-150 Lightning and Bronco. The automaker beforehand used the Maverick moniker on a small automotive offered within the Nineteen Seventies. It most lately was used on a European model of the Escape crossover from 2001 to 2005, earlier than it was changed there by the Kuga.