2005 Ford Freestyle
Steven Boender
Issue date: 11/15/04 Section: Automotive
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Until fairly recently, people with children faced an unappealing decision: sell out and buy a minivan or blow a huge chunk of change on a gaudy, gaz-fiend SUV. Without much choice in the station wagon market, you needed either a minivan or an SUV to fit the family. However, several automakers have risen to the occasion and produced car-based SUVs that carry all the best traits of that genre (size, winter traction, and non-minivan-ness) with the ride quality, lower price, and fuel consumption of a regular old car.
The latest entry in this "not a car, not quite a truck, and sure as hell not a minivan" category is the unfortunately-named Ford Freestyle. Ford has high hopes for the Freestyle, projecting up to 120,000 units sold in the first year. Our first look at the Freestyle showed that Ford execs weren't high on fumes from the Dow Chemical plant when they made that projection. In short, the all-wheel-drive Freestyle is Detroit's best effort at competing in that category thus far (Buick Rendezvous, eat your angioplasty out).
For the base platform, Ford searched its global design bin and pulled a winner with the Volvo P2 platform (featured in the S60 and XC-90, among others). Not content with off-the-shelf design, Ford engineers took the platform and tweaked it to their exact needs. The only actual parts shared with the Volvos are the components of the all-wheel-drive system, which is optional across the Freestyle line.
For inertial motivation, Ford threw in a 3.0 liter Duratec V-6 putting out about 200 horsepower and 200 pound-feet of torque. Those underwhelming numbers are bolstered by the Freestyle's most noticeable technical marvel, the continuously-variable transmission (or "CVT" if you're into the whole brevity thing). A CVT is essentially a transmission without any gears, or with an infinite number of gears, depending on how your point of view. The ultimate effect is that the transmission doesn't ever shift, which is slightly unnerving at first drive, but you won't mind so much when you give the accelerator a generous push in highway merging situations and you find that you don't have to wait for the transmission to kick down into a lower gear, which can be interminable with some automatics. The CVT has a bit of a lag, but it's much quicker and smoother in most cases, and according to Ford, leads to better fuel economy (19/24 for models with AWD).
The latest entry in this "not a car, not quite a truck, and sure as hell not a minivan" category is the unfortunately-named Ford Freestyle. Ford has high hopes for the Freestyle, projecting up to 120,000 units sold in the first year. Our first look at the Freestyle showed that Ford execs weren't high on fumes from the Dow Chemical plant when they made that projection. In short, the all-wheel-drive Freestyle is Detroit's best effort at competing in that category thus far (Buick Rendezvous, eat your angioplasty out).
For the base platform, Ford searched its global design bin and pulled a winner with the Volvo P2 platform (featured in the S60 and XC-90, among others). Not content with off-the-shelf design, Ford engineers took the platform and tweaked it to their exact needs. The only actual parts shared with the Volvos are the components of the all-wheel-drive system, which is optional across the Freestyle line.
For inertial motivation, Ford threw in a 3.0 liter Duratec V-6 putting out about 200 horsepower and 200 pound-feet of torque. Those underwhelming numbers are bolstered by the Freestyle's most noticeable technical marvel, the continuously-variable transmission (or "CVT" if you're into the whole brevity thing). A CVT is essentially a transmission without any gears, or with an infinite number of gears, depending on how your point of view. The ultimate effect is that the transmission doesn't ever shift, which is slightly unnerving at first drive, but you won't mind so much when you give the accelerator a generous push in highway merging situations and you find that you don't have to wait for the transmission to kick down into a lower gear, which can be interminable with some automatics. The CVT has a bit of a lag, but it's much quicker and smoother in most cases, and according to Ford, leads to better fuel economy (19/24 for models with AWD).
