Ford is planning to unceremoniously dump the Explorer Sport Trac model once hte current production run ends. As production of the current body-on-frame Explorer winds down in the coming months, the Sport Trac pickup and the rebadged Mercury Mountaineer will be canceled. Sometime in 2010 a new unibody Explorer crossover based on the Flex/Taurus platform will debut, but there will not be a pickup version.

With total Explorer sales down to just 78,439 in 2008, including the Sport Trac, and those numbers down by half again this year, the number of Sport Tracs sold simply doesn’t justify developing a new one. At its peak when Ford was moving some 400,000 Explorers annually, about 60,000 were Sport Tracs. This year the number is likely to be 10,000 or less.