- Jul 20, 2001
- 73,718
- 35,577
- 136
I got to drive an Escape hybrid for the first time today. It was a combination of city, highway, and dirt road driving. Overall it seems to be a pretty nice car. It has great pickup and responsive steering for an SUV. IMHO, automakers aught to put electric helper motors in sports cars for improved jack rabbit starts.
It is a bit noisy with a very noticeable whine if the windows are down.
The automatic 4WD system worked well for the most part however wasn't doing so good in deep sand. Since I didn't have any recover gear with me I decided to bail out before finding out exactly how much it didn't like deep sand. The electric motor shines on steep inclines where one can come to a dead stop in mid-slope and start up again with no revving and no sliding backwards. The truck didn't handle steep descents very well though with quite a bit of sliding. I didn't try it in low gear but my assumption is that it would have done better.
Fit and finish was much better than I had come to expect from Ford, on par with Toyota or Honda.
The lack of temperature gauge was annoying as was the lack of instantaneous mpg readout. There was a bizarre graphic in the info screen that looked like a bar graph with a down arrow on the left, a stairstep bar graph in the middle, and an up arrow on the right labeled mpg that might have been some type of gauge but it never changed and its meaning defeated me.
The auto climate control works but it isn't my thing. I prefer hotter/colder dials to temperature setting dials.
The radio/CD player is poorly laid out. It is time for car companies to give up on the six CD player. They are too awkward for use in a car.
26.5 mpg for the 200 mile trip. Car had 12k on it.
It is a bit noisy with a very noticeable whine if the windows are down.
The automatic 4WD system worked well for the most part however wasn't doing so good in deep sand. Since I didn't have any recover gear with me I decided to bail out before finding out exactly how much it didn't like deep sand. The electric motor shines on steep inclines where one can come to a dead stop in mid-slope and start up again with no revving and no sliding backwards. The truck didn't handle steep descents very well though with quite a bit of sliding. I didn't try it in low gear but my assumption is that it would have done better.
Fit and finish was much better than I had come to expect from Ford, on par with Toyota or Honda.
The lack of temperature gauge was annoying as was the lack of instantaneous mpg readout. There was a bizarre graphic in the info screen that looked like a bar graph with a down arrow on the left, a stairstep bar graph in the middle, and an up arrow on the right labeled mpg that might have been some type of gauge but it never changed and its meaning defeated me.
The auto climate control works but it isn't my thing. I prefer hotter/colder dials to temperature setting dials.
The radio/CD player is poorly laid out. It is time for car companies to give up on the six CD player. They are too awkward for use in a car.
26.5 mpg for the 200 mile trip. Car had 12k on it.
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