At its core, car camping or overlanding is about finding comfortable ways to sleep in your car, truck, or SUV. To that end, lots of companies make all kinds of products to help ensure a good night’s sleep in your rig, from inflatable custom-shaped mattresses from companies like Luno to full-on pop-top conversions from companies like Alu-Cab.
It’s not often, though, that a vehicle manufacturer tries to dip its toes into these waters, but based on a recent patent filing by Ford, that could happen with the Bronco.
In short: Ford filed a patent application for new ways to sleep in or on the Bronco. One is a folding platform for sleeping in the car, and the other is a rooftop tent with access from the inside of the vehicle.
The Designs
In the patent filing (US 2026/0233661 A1), Ford outlines a couple of solutions for turning your Bronco into a big, comfy bed. The first involves a custom-cut platform that hinges and folds in several places to fill the area behind the front row of seats. This gets rid of all the humps and bumps that simply folding the second row of seats leaves, and gives you somewhere solid to set up your inflatable camp mattress. It’s not groundbreaking or anything, but because it’s custom for the Bronco, Ford wants to lock the idea down.
Ditto with the sort of half-rooftop tent, half pop-top conversion that is also part of the filing. It looks like it utilizes the Bronco’s interchangeable roof design to add on a tent with a pass-through to the vehicle’s interior. This one is super-cool for a few reasons.
First, with a traditional pop-top conversion like the one Alu-Cab makes for the INEOS Grenadier, for example, installing it requires physically cutting away a large portion of the vehicle’s roof. This permanent modification is, understandably, not for the faint of heart.
Ford’s solution gets rid of the big, scary angle grinders, reciprocating saws, and air nibblers, and instead bolts to the Bronco’s body and built-in roof support structure. The Bronco is already configured with interchangeable roofs — hard top, sliding soft top, folding soft top, etc. — so this is just a variation on that theme, albeit with a bit more utility.
A Great Big Grain of Salt
This all sounds very cool, and if I were a Bronco owner, I’d be excited. But, though I hate to rain on your parade, patent filings are often a means to prevent another company from using an idea, rather than the filer actually making the product. So, if Ford gets this patent, any company wanting to make a similar roof solution or sleeping platform will have to either pay Ford or find a way to make it substantively different from the patented idea.
While this practice isn’t new or limited to car companies, car companies do it pretty often. Still, the chance that Ford makes this stuff and offers it to customers is not zero, so we can all cross our fingers and hope, because it would make the already cool Bronco much more appealing as an overlander than it already is.
