#EcoBoost

I live in the country, well outside city limits in the septic tank/well/propane tank kind of area. Like many that live out where the blacktop ends, we have some farm animals, over a mile of fencing and a pasture in need of TLC. Since I’m a DINK and have a day job that has nothing to do with my animal husbandry, I’m apparently the perfect demographic for a luxury pickup. True to form, the last 5 times I shopped, I wanted a pickup truck. Badly. Every time it came time to put money down however, I ended up with a sedan, station wagon or SUV. Still, I’m not ashamed to admit my loins burn for a “cowboy Cadillac”, and now that my GMC Envoy has 140,000 miles on the clock it’s time for a 6,000lb tow-capable replacement. Since the HD pickup trucks are honestly overkill for the majority of us, I hit Ford up for an F-150 Platinum to see if I should take the plunge.

Editor’s note: Ladies and gentlemen, for one night only, it’s the return of Curbside Classics to TTAC. You can catch Paul Niedermeyer’s work (along with contributions from an ever expanding crew of TTAC commenters and more) on a regular basis at the new Curbside Classics site. But this piece? It just had to be on TTAC.

There’s a big difference between creating and re-creating. The proto-hot rodders of yore scoured the junk yards for new solutions, not to replicate. The competition was as much in creativity as it was pure speed. Much of that has given way to endless replication, whether it’s a perfect restoration or a 1000 hp resto-mod. But creative juices are irrepressible, and they were certainly at work here. Want a daily driver Edsel, but not its 1950′s fuel-gulping ways? The solution was just a $200 junkyard engine away. But it had to be imagined first. Now that’s creativity, and a harbinger of the future. Which is exactly what the old car hobby needs: a new model, like this “Eco-Boost” Edsel.

While my invitation to the media burnout fest musta been lost in the mail, I attended a regional ride/drive event to cover the four new engines in the 2011 Ford F-150 as compared to some of its domestic competition. The afternoon included a fairly-lame autocross, a (short) drag strip and real world tests, unladen and towing. The product specialist made a point to ask everyone to tell their friends about this event. Luckily for Ford, I got a lot of people to tell.

Okay, everybody, take out your old Waitresses or Bouncing Souls songbooks, and sing along with me:

I know what girls like
I know what chicks want
I know what girls like
Girls like
…the Ford Edge.

Ford’s rolled 400,000 Edges out the door since the model was introduced five years ago. For reasons I cannot understand, it completely obliterated the Flex and the Freestyle/Taurus X at dealerships, outselling them combined by a factor of two or three in most months. Half of the Edges sold are registered to women, which likely means that far more than half of them were selected by, and are driven by, women. According to Ford, among buyers in this segment, “styling” ranks as the #5 reason to buy a vehicle, but Edge buyers rank “styling” as the number one reason they chose one.

So here’s the new one. Ford has made a solid effort to address the Edge’s shortcomings. It has more power, less weight (in some models), better brakes, and a much higher-quality interior. The dynamic package is significantly improved, and I had the chance to test that in a literally life-threatening situation, as we’ll see below. None of this will matter too much to the Coach-bag set, however. They’ll be blown-away by the new “myFord Touch” system… and if you care at all about the state of in-car electronics, you will be, too.

Last week, the big news coming out of Ford was that the new Lincoln MKZ would be available with a hybrid drivetrain as a no-cost option. With Mercury on its way out, and Lincoln struggling to carve out a niche in the luxury space, that move made a certain amount of sense at the time. What we didn’t know until today is that the “free” hybrid option on the MKZ was only Ford’s opening salvo on the status quo of automotive drivetrain option pricing. Today, with the 2011 Explorer dominating the news cycle, Ford has announced its latest head-scratcher: making the four-cylinder “Ecoboost” engine option more expensive than the more powerful standard V6. Yes, really.

Reviving a legendary nameplate inevitably invites comparisons. As is often the case, those for the new 2010 Ford Taurus SHO have not been favorable. Judging from reviews, forum postings, and (I’ll predict) the comments below, the 2010 lacks whatever made the original legendary. Well, I drove the original SHO back in 1989. And now I’ve driven the 2010 for a week. For better or worse, the similarities outweigh the differences. So, what’s missing in the SHO’s revival?

Ford’s relationship with hybrid technology has been an on-again-off-again affair, since Bill Ford first pledged to build 250k hybrids by 2010. And it’s probably a good thing the Blue Oval backed away from that promise, as the firm sold only 33,502 hybrids last year. Meanwhile, Ford still has yet to claim profitability on any of its hybrids (last disclaiming such an achievement (sort of) in 2008). Perhaps because Ford has paid dearly to tag along in the import-dominated hybrid segments, it’s getting a bit jaded about the power of high-cost, high-tech green halo cars to deliver real results. Or, perhaps Ford’s VP of powertrain engineering Barb Samardzich is simply channeling old Henry Ford, when she says:

We are focused on sustainable technology solutions that can be used not for hundreds or thousands of cars, but for millions of cars, because that’s how Ford will truly make a difference

We’ve heard this before, but today’s news puts the four-cylinder future into perfect context in just five words: Four. Cylinder. Explorer. This. Year.

If Lincoln were a person, it would have been committed to a psych ward years ago. Battered by corporate politics, economic cycles, and a desire to both retain traditional customers and conquest new ones, the brand has lacked a coherent identity for over a quarter-century. There have been times when each of its models was the product of a different strategy and expressed (or failed to express) a different design language. In the early 2000s Lincoln seemed to finally be getting its shit together, with a brilliant Continental Concept and a common design language applied to all of its 2003 models. Then the wheels came off the wagon—again—and a bankruptcy-skirting Ford had no choice but to cancel the ambitious cars in the PAG pipeline and redo Lincoln on the cheap. Did they spend their pennies well? What is a Lincoln in 2010? There’s no better place to find out than the driver’s seat of the current flagship, the MKS EcoBoost.

A few years ago Ford decided that its survival depended on making bold moves. They decided to stop simply doing what they’d always done. Well, at least some of the time. One bold move: replace their minivan with the world’s largest Scion xB. Another: instead of offering a V8, twin-turbocharge and direct inject a V6. Then combine the two to offer a 355-horsepower family hauler that really hauls. Intriguing. But does the Ford Flex EcoBoost make sense?