Ford Flex , tell me more

So the wife has outgrown the Golf for Craft Fairs so we've been doing a little shopping around.

SUVs are the easy button but she hasn't got into any she's really liked. She doesn't want a minivan because she doesn't like the styling and really they are a bit low ground clearance for year around here.

Do we started looking at the Flex and it seems to be the right mixture of everything for her. It's big enough inside to do everything she wants, nice enough inside that she gets so she gets the luxury features that she likes. With AWD and decent ground clearance it'll do great year around here. And it looks cool and isn't normal.

I know Javelin has one and the video he posted was very helpful but does anyone else have any experience?

It's the same vehicle as a Taurus or contemporary Explorer.

I picked up a used '18 this year with only 10k on it after watching the market for almost a year. Love it. I got the 303A package which gets you the TT v6 AWD w/ the towing package. 365hp gets you nice acceleration but the fuel mileage suffers. The gas tank could be a few gallons larger imho.
 

The back area is nice with the 3rd row seat and pretty decent hauling capacity. Great legroom in the 2nd row, tons of headroom, and easy ingress/egress in front and back. Apple CarPlay works well and the stereo works well. 

Not all are AWD and not all at turbo'ed.  In general, I like them.  

Big things that come to mind are the internal water pump on the 3.5 and steering rack leaks. I've driven them and helped work on them a few times, just doing basic stuff. I agree they are nice to drive and are a pretty great all-around vehicle, although I'm not sure they are really any more capable in snow/off road than an awd minivan.

Which is basically what they are, a minivan with out sliding doors and a square station wagonish shaped body.

I'm curious how the turbo V6 engines are holding up as these get older.

Wearymicrobe raved about his. 

My mom has owned the earlier version, the Freestyle.  She put nearly 300k on the first one before she retired it, and went out and bought another one with very low miles.  She loves them.

In reply to BlueInGreen - Jon :

Since the first Felx TT came out in 2010, the basic family is now 14 years old.  Pretty old, all things considered.

In reply to BlueInGreen - Jon :

Not to diss on them but they're no minivan. A minivan is a wide open box with movable/stowable seats inside it. A car or SUV (which this is) has molded in seats and footwells and all that. They're not nearly as convenient for hauling things as a van, mini or otherwise.

Friend has one since his wife doesn't want to be seen in a minivan and they like it a lot. Doesn't sound like a concern for you but they use all three rows for seating and there's little storage beyond that.

Dunno where you're located but the doors curve under the car and the bottoms are a common place for rust. 

In reply to P3PPY :

It's academic since many minivans and SUVs and crossovers and such are made on the same floorplan nowadays.

The Flex is fairly huge but it will never have the interior room of something that has a beam axle, the rear suspension takes up a lot of room.

My wife and I put 40k miles on an AWD Ecoboost flex.  I am tall and it has the best first row and second row legroom and headroom of any car or truck we tested with 3 rows of seats.

We used ours to tow 4500lbw and it worked great up and down the east coast.  It was a great road trip car and Ford's active Cruise control was pretty good even 10 years ago.  We had a light trailer and limited speeds to 65mph.

It was ok for school runs but the long 2nd row doors were difficult to open in tight parking lots.  Ours had 2nd row captains chairs so we didn't quite end up with a flat floor with the seats folded down.  A traditional minivan fits both of those uses much better.

A naturally aspirated fwd flex has some known maintenance issues like the water pump taking out the engine by pumping water into the cylinders.  We sold ours to carvana after the turbo oil lines started leaking, we got it repaired, and it came back with a cam phaser rattle.  The ptu/center diff is another known weak point.  With some combination of the ptu, trans, water pump, and cam phaser rattle fallout, we were staring at $10k in repairs at some random point in the future.

We ended up with a Mazda 5 and a crew cab truck for towing duties.  We have no regrets with the Flex though.

Spouse has  a '12 nonturbo, 2wd that we got in '13.   She likes it a lot. I like it.  Internal waterpump is an issue as noted above.  Ours went at approx. 60K and IIRC, it cost around $1200 to replace at dealer.

For what it's worth, the ones I see on the road these days all appear to have been well maintained.

2018 Ecoboost here with AWD in the highest trim. I miss the Flex every day. Would tow motorcycle trailer with ease, would fit my 6 foot 8 brother in law in the back and front with no headroom issues. Was extremely quick and even faster tuned. 

Bad was the gas mileage. It was horrible with the EcoBoost and the AWD, then there was the wind noise. I completely sound deadended the entire car. like 100sqf of matting and then backing fiber. Car was dead quiet then except for the windsheild wind noise which eventually drove me crazy. But big stereo fixed that eventually. Also making stereo upgrades is not the cheapest thing on these cars if you want to keep the fancy screen which I did. 

The water pump thing is weird.  I have rarely seen them fail, but I also had one vehicle where I had to replace one under warranty after 5,000 miles.  I have never seen one leak into the oil, they leak out at the weep hole over the air conditioning compressor.

Fortunately this is one of the easiest chassis to do the work in, it can be done in under four hours without removing the secondary timing chains after some practice and a good set of tools to make the job go faster.  The engine stays in the chassis.

The PTU fails because nobody ever changes the fluid or even checks it, which is admittedly a pain especially with turbos.  Most PTUs don't have drain plugs, so changing the fluid requires a fluid evacuator.  It IS replaceable without having to drop the subframe, at least in a nonturbo vehicle, but it's a little tricky and a lift still makes it a lot easier.

Definitely get one with electric power steering instead of hydraulic, if only to make life easier with no lines to leak or pump to whine.  And no frigging stretch belt on the power steering pump that there isn't enough room in the chassis for an installation tool so you find yourself putting four zip ties on the pulley and hope they don't break while trying to roll the belt in place.

The turbo feed lines are labor intensive because the procedure calls for turbo removal for access to the Torx headed banjo bolt that is partially obscured by the exhaust manifold.  With dexterity (or sinistrality if left handed) and a set of barrel-ended Torx bits, the turbo can be left in place.

If you live in salt country, the rear upper control arm bushing mount fails.  The aluminum crumbles.  This is one place where Ford took Volvo's P2 chassis and simplified it for rapid (meaning cheap) assembly at the expense of longevity.  It's widely available in the aftermarket and it's the main reason why you see Flexes with two degrees of negative camber in the rear.

If you buy one and cut off the roof just behind the rear doors, you'll have a Maverick for a lot less money.

The water pump is strange, some don't seem to have any problems at all, others lots of trouble from what I'm reading. I'm not entirely sure why though.

We don't have kids, just 2 huge ass dogs so the third row seating doesn't really matter to us at all.

It towing 4500lbs well is a good thing too, a small trailer is in our future 

earlybroncoguy1 said:

If you buy one and cut off the roof just behind the rear doors, you'll have a Maverick for a lot less money.

Funnily enough, the Maverick is also something we both like 

Way back machine, talking Flex reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR2qDU7dnQM&list=FLH7urshfbQwCIkAsZRCLx4A&index=5&ab_channel=Infiltr8te

And that actual car was one of our TT test cars.  When we pulled the camo off after discovering what it was, it pulled a lot of the gold leaf off.

The problem isn't the water pump going bad.  They all go bad eventually.  The problem is the rare (but not rare enough) case where the water pump hydrolocks your engine on the way out.

In reply to ojannen :

Do you mean contaminates the oil with coolant?  I know that can technically happen and has happened but it's extremely rare.

Hydrolocking the engine would be impossible because there is no way for the coolant to get into the intake manifold via the water pump.  Or any other means, really.

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

It has been a few years since I paid specific attention to this.  I used the wrong terminology to describe the problem.  I was trying to suggest the water pump failure without a telltale puddle under the car -> something -> new engine that happens to the 3.5s sometimes.

It is all over the flex forums but I have no idea how often it happens in the real world. I know how to check coolant levels and catch the problem early but my wife generally waits for me to do it.

I looked at them and passed. The water pump issue was a common enough problem I bought a Volvo instead. 

The Flex was also sold as the Lincoln MKT, and from what I can tell, a lot of these retired from rental fleets and limo companies with lower prices and better maintenance than the Flex. 

Data point.  Water pump on wife's Flex failed at around 60K.  There was no water in the oil.

I remember Javelin having some issues with his, can't remember the details. Maybe he will chime in. Think it was turbo issue.