Freestyling

After the brutal demise of the Subaru in September, we’ve been using a borrowed behemoth of a pickup truck. Not only was it not fun to drive, it was brutal on the backs of me and my father. Due to our need for a good winter vehicle with serious cargo space (that also gets reasonable mileage), the search for a replacement in the price range we targeted was looking pretty bleak. Another Subaru was completely out of the question with used prices sky high for Outbacks and Forresters.

Grabbing the bull by the horns, I made sure we went out for an exploratory search of what, if anything, existed in our price range at local dealers. I had little hope of finding anything decent and planned to sacrifice longevity or capability. Our first stop ended up being our last thanks to a newly arrived used 2005 Ford Freestyle SEL at the dealership.

It was an afterthought of the salesman’s since it had only arrived a few days before, but it was as close as we could get to our needs with the only deficiency being that it was the front wheel drive version. A test drive revealed nice handling characteristics on the hills with decent power while feeling much more like a luxury sedan in ride.

My father left a cash hold on the car and so began a more than a week of scraping together the money for the car.

Numerous scratches, but no dings testify to this having been used along with the 138,000 miles on it. That’s still a 100,000 less than the Outback had on it when it was totaled.

In regards to space, the crossover has that in spades with folding seats in the cargo area. The Freestyle can seat six comfortably in three rows, which impressed me. I don’t know if we’ll ever use that, but the option is there.

The radio deck was replaced by the previous owner with a low end Boss that accepts USB drives, SD cards, and 3.5mm jack inputs, so that will be interesting to play with. After using a cheap FM transmitter for years, this is actually an improvement as far as ease of use goes. Sound quality of the speakers has yet to be tested and the stock Subaru set was pretty good, so we’ll see.

The last Ford we had was a nasty little Escort Station Wagon which I didn’t like and it didn’t like me. How can a car dislike someone? Well, the automatic seatbelt wouldn’t work for me half the time, but never gave anyone else a problem. Yeah, we had it in for each other. I think the Freestyle will be different because it reminds me of  driving the Chrysler LHS we had before the Subaru. That was a great car, just not built to last.

It’s nice to have wheels again.