Hello,
New member to this forum. I found the site while doing some homework on the Ford Edge. Looking for a new car for my wife who has owned only Fords for her entire life.
First Ford was the Escort, with non-powered steering, manual windows and no rear-window defrost. Sucked driving that car on a cold morning, always having to lift the tailgate and wipe the rear window from the inside so you could see out the back :0
Second car was a Ford Tempo that really was a piece of junk, always had problems. Was surprised she wanted another Ford after that one.
Third and current car is a Ford Explorer XLT that is now 14 years old and about 180K miles on it. Despite having around 10 recalls, it has been surprisingly reliable, although now it is on its last legs. Isn't causing any problems per se, but you can just tell that it is getting tired, so we are in the market for a new rig.
My personal preference is that she get a Japanese SUV like a Highlander or a Pilot. Having owned foreign cars my whole life, I have been pretty happy with them and their reliability (Honda, Acura and Toyota). My wife has looked at them but is also looking at Fords. We were at the dealership last weekend and she immediately nixed the new Explorer. She disliked it so much just sitting in it that she wouldn't even test drive it.
She did drive the new Escape and the Edge. The Escape was pretty tiny inside and while she was OK with it she really liked the Edge. After doing a lot of online research on the car (and how I found this forum), I have a couple of concerns about the Edge. The main one is that the overall reliability ratings appear to be going downhill since 2009. Is this something that the frequent posters on this forum would agree on? I was wondering if a large portion of those lower reliability ratings is due to the massive influx of new electronics going into the car.
I travel quite a bit and rent a lot of different cars and my experiences with the Ford Escape with MyFordTouch is pretty abysmal. IMHO, it is a really nifty system that has way too many bugs in it. In the half dozen or so times I have rented a Ford with the MyFordTouch system it was a 50/50 chance that my iphone would not properly connect to the system after the initial pairing. I would literally be driving in the car, everything working fine, stop somewhere, get back in the car and I would get an error message and the iphone would not connect to the system. Then I would stop again, and when I got back in the car, the iphone would connect. Very irritating to say the least.
So here are my questions:
1. Is the non-electronics reliability a problem with the Ford Edge? Is it going downhill?
2. Is the MyFordTouch a problematic system? Seems very buggy to me.
3. How many people who buy the Edge are getting the extended ESP plan because of concerns about reliability, electronics or otherwise? (I am considering getting the 7 year/100K mile top-of-the-line plan just because of #1 and #2 above if we go with the Ford due to how long my wife keeps her cars)
I won't be driving the car, it will be my wife's car so I just want her to be happy with whatever she gets, and as I've stated, I would rather her get either a Subaru Outback, Acura RDX, Honda Pilot or Toyota Highlander which are all in the same ballpark and she has driven and liked all of them.
So a final question is who ended up buying an Edge over the other cars I mentioned? The price differential is not an issue for us, we can afford any of these cars. So I would really be interested to know the opinions of folks who selected the Edge over other choices when price was not an issue.
Thanks, and sorry for the long first post.
David