McLarenblog

Within a span of one week the Escape was in for repair three times.  Without making any comments to my daughter about how I felt about the Escape, I asked her how she felt about the car.  She said she had lost confidence in it.  She reminded me that she had planned trips to other cities and the mountains but she was now fearful that the car would break down.  I then told her that I felt the same way.  We were going to get rid of the Escape.   We would never buy another Ford.  This was getting to be similar to my Volkswagen bus experience.  I would never buy a Volkswagen ever again because my bus had a Porsche pancake engine with sodium valves which separated about every fifty thousand miles, requiring an engine rebuild.  When I determine that a product engineering team and/or assembly workers can make such bone headed mistakes I immediately dismiss them from future consideration.  I would be stupid to be twice burned.

January 2014 during a routine maintenance McCoy Mills found an oil leak that was covered on an extended warrantee that I purchased.  It would take two days to repair.  I asked how much it would cost if I did not have the warrantee and was told well over a thousand dollars.  The car took close to four days because approval had to be made by Ford and that approval did not arrive right away.  When I picked up the car and drove it, it seemed like it had a new engine.  It was noticeably more quiet and smooth.  It seemed like we had a new engine.

The next night I had to pick my daughter up from work.  She said she might get out at 10:15pm.  I waited and waited.  It was quite cold outside so I turned on the engine and ran the heater.  About 15 minutes later I started to hear what sounded like a child mimicking a siren sound.  It would start up and then stop.  This kept on going for over five minutes and then got a bit louder.  The parking lot in front of the store had only a few cars, probably owned by the employees that would soon leave work.  I opened my driver window and determined that the siren sound was coming from our car.  I then looked at the dash and noticed that the engine maintenance light was lit.  I turned the car off and waited another 15 minutes for my daughter to leave work.  We got the car home safely but there was this siren sound again during the drive and the engine maintenance light was still on.

Next day, I drove the Escape back to the dealership.  They would inspect the car for free.  Within two hours it was ready.  They found a vacuum leak.

The very next day I used the Escape to go to the gym and work out.  I then went to Albertson’s to get my daughter and me a Starbucks drink.  On the way home, about a mile distance, while making a left turn, I heard something in the engine compartment break and I lost power steering.   I had the car towed to McCoy Mills.  They called me about 4 pm to tell me that the power steering pump had busted and it was covered; no cost to me.

The car worked quite well for a number of years.  But, some small issues did crop up quite soon that were very telling to me that allegedly that Ford engineering was flawed..  I tried to adjust one of the passenger air vents.  There was a small knob that you could sort of rotate up or down to direct the vents.  As soon as I pressed against the knob to roll, it fell apart.  The side vents have a lever that can move vents back and forth.  The lever is utterly useless.  They were so poorly designed that you have to use a stick device to move them.

The air conditioning would not cool the cab and I had to have that serviced.

The cruise control died.

When you wash the car and spray water into the wheels an incredible amount of black rust like material pours out of the wheels soiling the driveway.  Our Toyotas never have this problem.

Our family needed another car.  My wife drove a Toyota Camry too and from work.  My son and I shared a Toyota 4 Runner until he started work and went to a local college. It then became his car as work expanded and college got more intense.   My daughter needed some wheels during her senior year in high school, 2010.  She and I would share that car.  I asked her to do the research with my supervision.  Toyota vehicles were top on my list but for some reason, I asked my daughter to check to see which dealerships in the area had good ratings.  That began the process of running this project off the rails.  My daughter found a dealership in Fullerton, McCoy Mills, which had a darn near perfect score and glowing customer reports.  We failed to do a good automobile model search which I am at fault for not requiring.  We decided to just go to McCoy Mills Ford dealership and look to see what they had and then travel over to a nearby Toyota dealership.  Upon arriving at McCoy Mills we found their sales people were quite friendly with no sales pressure applied to us.  The sales person just presented the used cars as if he was our friend devoid of any hype.  He just asked us what we wanted and answered our questions honestly.  My daughter looked at each car that interested her by its outside look and then sat in each vehicle that interested her and found that she loved the Ford Escape dash board the best.  I don’t know what happened to what little intellect that I have because I should have insisted that we go home to research the Escape after visiting a Toyota dealership.  I utterly blew it.  We purchased the 2006 Ford Escape because my daughter liked the dash and it had a multiple CD disk changer as part of the AM/FM radio.