FORD will give its new compact sport utility model a different name when the car reaches the British market towards the end of this year. The UK nameplate chosen for Escape, the model which shares a new platform developed with Mazda for its new Tribute SUV, will be Explorer.

'I guess there might be some confusion because the new car will go on sale alongside the bigger Explorer model. But we want to keep the name the same because it's a family thing - we're working on adding numbers or some other way to distinguish between the two,' Ford truck vice-president Gurminder Bedi told Fleet NewsNet at the North American Auto Show in Detroit.