2008 Ford Escape Limited V-6 4WD

2008 Ford Escape Limited V-6 4WD - The small sport-ute segment is rapidly evolving, though, and for 2008, Ford is giving the Escape a face lift. It is still the same old Escape underneath, but with a new look—or a new face on the old look. The Escape’s new face will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a Ford SUV in the past decade.

For the Escape, that means cleaner sides and a new nose. A higher, more smoothly chamfered beltline over a barren rocker—less plastic cladding—adds visual height to the side view. A scaled-down, squared-off version of the trapezoidal grille and a power-bulge hood from the Explorer and Expedition mean that each of Ford’s SUVs is as unique as any wiener in a pack of Ball Park franks.

The Limited—only available with the V-6 and all-wheel drive—Escape we tested comes fitted with leather seats. The Limited Luxury package adds seat heaters and dual-zone climate control for $795. We found all seats—with the usual exception of the rear-middle one—to be comfortable, although none offers any substantial lateral support. Full-size adults in the second row might find that seat too upright for long stints.

One particularly hard point in the Escape is the center-stack and console surround. Vehicles with the tricolor tan interior get a classy sort of matte platinum trim here, but cars with the black interior, like our tester, have a high-gloss black plastic that looks cheaper than Kmart vending-machine jewelry and is so soft that our fingernails left scratches in it. Then again, we haven’t had a manicure in weeks.

And the driver will need to watch the road, because the Escape communicates about as well as a week-old corpse, and there’s nobody from CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, CSI: Deadwood, or even CSI: Juneau around. There’s a disconnect in the steering similar to watching a movie in which the sound is a 10th of a second off. You stare and stare until you begin to wonder if it’s all in your head and everything is actually fine, but you’re not totally satisfied with that assessment, and then the movie goes to commercial. When it comes back, you know you were right, because now the problem is gone.

As noted, we had praised the previous Escape for its class-leading performance. Partly as a function of the class advancing, and partly as a function of the Escape regressing, the 2008 Ford Escape is no longer a class leader in any performance category. In fact, we measured distinct decreases in every one of our performance tests, despite this Escape weighing only 139 more pounds than the last Escape we tested.

Exhibit A—The Skidpad: For comparison’s sake, the weakest skidpad performance we measured in 2006 was for the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon, which moped around the skidpad at the same 0.61 g that we managed in the commercial-truck-based GMC Topkick pickup. The Escape we tested in 2001 pulled a comparably epic 0.75 g.

Exhibit B—Acceleration: Zero-to-60 mph in 8.5 seconds, the quarter-mile in 17.3 at 82 mph, 0-to-100 in 24.2 seconds. These numbers, ladies and gentlemen, are figures we recorded six years ago while testing the then-new 2001 Escape. Now here we are with the updated version, and with the Escape Limited churning full mustard, all we could extract was 0-to-60 in 9.5 seconds and the quarter-mile in 17.3 seconds at 82 mph.

The Escape now takes 10 more seconds to get to 100 mph than it did in 2001 and an additional 33 feet to stop from 70 mph (169 versus 202). It’s worth noting that number would have put the Escape second to last in the 2001 comparo. In a panic stop, that’s easily the difference between a whew and a hefty body-shop bill.

The Escape gets winded quickly when asked to run, and its new styling will have a hard time hiding among its softer-edged competitors. Ford’s chorus seems to be, “You can’t run, you can’t hide, but can you love my Escape?”