These days, three-row crossovers are all the rage for families looking to haul themselves around. They’re so prevalent, it’s hard to believe this entire segment just didn’t exist 25 years ago, and that Detroit didn’t fully latch onto it until the late 2000s. Perhaps as a result, there was some early installment weirdness as this segment found its footing, and one of the weirder offerings was the Ford Freestyle.
The Ford what? The Ford Freestyle. Don’t be ashamed if you don’t remember it. Not only was the name a bit too close to that of the maligned Freestar minivan, an evolution of the Windstar that felt thoroughly outdated next to the Japanese competition of the time, but this thing only ran from model years 2005 to 2007 — barely a blip on the radar as far as longevity goes.
Still, the concept of the Freestyle was sound — a full-sized-sedan-based three-row crossover that fulfills the consumer’s desire to lord over sedan drivers by way of an elevated hip point without offering the topsy-turvy handling of body-on-frame SUV construction, particularly in the hands of under-experienced drivers who think higher equals safer. Sure, an old GMC Yukon can turn Bambi into a pink mist, but it’s not the first choice for evasive handling maneuvers. In short, Ford set out to create a minivan for those too insecure to be seen in minivans. Sound familiar?
To start, Ford took Volvo’s P2 platform and molded it to fit a cheaper price point, with substantial changes, to the point where the Haldex all-wheel-drive system was pretty much the only shared part. We’re talking more steel suspension parts replacing aluminum, a longer wheelbase, and enough cost-cutting to take a premium platform from 1998 and use the concept of it underneath mainstream American family cars. For the 2005 model year, the D3 platform, as it was dubbed, was ready to rock, and in addition to underpinning the entirely forgettable Ford Five Hundred and Mercury Montego, it also came underneath the Freestyle.
Slide behind the wheel of the Freestyle and prepare to be whelmed, with a grab handle being the rare bright spot on a staid dashboard of various grained plastics, corporate stereo and climate controls, and middle-of-the-road styling. However, you didn’t buy a Freestyle for the experience up front, you bought one for the space in the back. Every trim level got a tumble-back flat-folding third row elevated far enough off the floor that passengers wouldn’t be knees-to-ears, while the middle row offered the choice of a bench or captain’s chairs. We’re talking genuine seating for six or seven and plenty of cargo space with everything folded away — up to ten feet in length thanks to a fold-flat front passenger seat. The Freestyle was a mainstream three-row crossover with three usable rows, so it should’ve been a hit, right?
So what’s under the hood? Well, every Freestyle came equipped with a three-liter quad-cam V6 cranking out 203 horsepower and 207 lb.ft. of torque. That’s a bit disappointing when you consider that the 2005 Chrysler Pacifica offered a 3.5-liter V6 with 250 horsepower and 250 lb.-ft. of torque, the Honda Pilot’s J35 3.5-liter V6 cranked out 255 horsepower and 250 lb.-ft. of torque, and even the Toyota Highlander’s 3.3-liter V6 made 230 horsepower and 242 lb.-ft. of torque. However, the Freestyle’s transmission was unlike those used in competitors, because it was a continuously variable transmission.
Developed in conjunction with ZF, the Freestyle’s CVT offered a ratio spread of 2.47:1 to 0.41:1, and was Ford’s trick of making a 4,190-pound crossover with a three-liter V6 seem less underpowered compared to competitors’ larger units. Did it work? As Car And Driver found out, sort-of.
This is the first use of a CVT in something as large as the Freestyle, but its operation will be familiar if you’ve ever sampled one of these novel transmissions in a smaller car. Driven gently, the engine revs stay unobtrusively and quietly at low rpm, much as they do in a conventional automatic. But if you floor it, the engine will rev to 5800 rpm and stay there until you back off, whereas a conventional transmission would change to the next gear. Keep the pedal mashed, and the Freestyle continues to accelerate uninterrupted with the engine crying out at 5800 rpm as the CVT goes through its spread of ratios seamlessly to keep the engine at its power peak. This takes a bit of getting used to, but if you never floor the Freestyle for the extended periods that we do, you’ll never notice its unusual behavior.
The end result? Zero-to-60 mph in a magazine-tested 8.2 seconds, and, uh, a habit of blowing up. Perusing NHTSA complaints, there’s no shortage of Freestyle drivers reporting transmission failure, such as this complaint with an incident date of June 30, 2006. Considering the complainant stated they “have been advised the vehicle needs a transmission and catalytic converter” with a reported 62,000 miles on the clock, that’s not great.
Alright, so fears over the transmission, combined with the slightly underpowered nature of the Freestyle and the fact that it could only tow 2,000 pounds didn’t work in its favor, but who says do-overs aren’t possible? In 2007, then-Ford CEO Alan Mullaly decreed that the Ford Five Hundred would become the Taurus because it was a bad idea to throw away that brand equity in the first place, and the Freestyle would get a restyling and a name change to follow suit. More than that, it got a 3.5-liter V6 engine and a conventional six-speed automatic transmission to become the Taurus X. Alright, so the name change was confusing, but for the 2008 model year, the sins of the original Freestyle were atoned for.
We’re talking 263 horsepower, 248 lb.-ft. of torque, a normal gearbox, and all the practicality and car-like handling the Freestyle was known for. The Taurus X should’ve done well, but it didn’t quite live up to its potential because it emerged into a huge shadow. See, on June 3, 2008, the Ford Flex went into production, and it promised the same thing the Taurus X did, only better. Riding on a beefed-up version of the same platform, called D4, it could out-tow the Taurus X, felt nicer than a Taurus X, had a heavier-duty transmission than the Taurus X, and was far more stylish than the Taurus X. The rest, as they say, was history.
The Ford Freestyle was an early proof-of-concept of what everyone would end up wanting, but it was too early and it had a few flaws. It’s safe to say that this thing was a miss, but failures are opportunities for learning. The Ford Freestyle walked so the Ford Flex could run, and chances are that one of the most distinctive American family vehicles of the 21st century wouldn’t have been as good as it was without lessons from the Freestyle.
(Photo credits: Ford)
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I used to do car detailing as a side job for years, and have spent some time up close and personal with a Taurus X and a couple Flexes. The Flex absolutely blows it out of the water, in terms of build quality, and the quality of the interior. The Freestyle has that typical, cheap, plasticky early 2000s interior that turned me off from American cars for years. The Flex is much closer to what you’d expect from Ford today in that department. Didn’t drive the Taurus X far, but the Flex was surprisingly nice to drive.
It’s funny you should say this because I remember the Flex as being very underwhelming inside; especially the door handles & surrounding trim which reminded me of the water dispenser flap on my parents’ Kelvinator
So I guess the Taurus X was abysmal inside
Yeah, the Flex wasn’t anything special inside, but miles ahead of the Taurus X.
I learned something today.
I always sort of liked the Freestyle/Taurus X and was always a little perplexed as to how they sold so few of them. But I had no idea that they put a fucking CVT in this thing back before the recession. Woof. I wouldn’t touch a 3-row crossover with a CVT in general, but one built in 2006 or so? Lol.
I do remember being in a couple of these and remarking that the interior was pretty damn miserable even for the era. Though that generation of Explorer had a genuinely shit interior as well, as did most Ford interiors of the time.
I saw “CVT” and I new exactly what would happen next.
My wife had a Freestyle for a brief time shortly after we started dating, it was so forgettable I had forgotten she owned one until seeing this article.
Coincidentally at that same time, I had three kids in car seats and was driving a Freestar minivan.
Why did it fail? Because it’s a Ford 😛
And they created something that looked like a larger, raised ’93 Escort wagon. Swing and a miss.
I was a little surprised the Flex didn’t get a second generation.
While the Flex Ecoboost is beloved on places like this, they didn’t seem to sell that great in the real world. People apparently want family cars that look like they are ready to take on Moab.
It sold poorly, just barely enough to save it from cancelation for several years, but nowhere near enough to justify investing in a second generation
The styling is extremely polarizing, and sales figures suggest the majority came down on the “nope” side of things.
People either liked or FUCKING HATED boxy cars. The Flex was up there with the xB, Element, and Cube. You want to maximize the space and utility from the footprint? Get the fuck out of here with that shit. Give me a sloping roofline and no trunk on my SUV, thank you very much.
Also, I think at the time it took more effort to pretend that CUVs were real SUVs. The Flex may have come off too much like a station wagon. Today they aren’t even trying to hide that they are just selling wagons and hatchbacks with a little plastic fender cladding because no one seems to care anymore.
Yeah I have an Element so that lines up, haha.
We tried to get my brother into a platform mate Mercury Monterey, which also featured this abomination of a CVT. After two replacements from the local salvage yard didn’t net an operating vehicle, we gave up. The whole platform was excrement.
Guessing you meant Montego? Monterey was the Freestar minivan equivalent. They probably should have made a Mercury Freestyle like they did the Meta One concept although I guess they were trying to protect Mountaineer sales. (although TIL there was a tester at the time of the 2008 facelift)
You are of course correct. I was going off memories I’ve been trying to suppress since I wasted a day doing a tuneup on that hunk of crap between CVTs 2 and 3 failing. Changing plugs was such a pain in the arse.
There are a couple of thing I always thought were awkward about the Freestyle. The first is that it looked like a lowered Explorer. Even though it wasn’t built on the same platform, they went out of there way to mimic styling of the Explorer.
Secondly it has the proportions of a hearse. Starts off as a sedan, and then the cabin gets big, and the cargo area grows bigger. I don’t know anyone that wanted to buy a hearse to take the kids to soccer practice.
The 3 row SUV/CUV options on the market at the same time were better looking and offered a lot more refined options between the Toyota Highlander, Honda Pilot, and Mazda CX-9.
My brother and his wife bought one when they had their first child. It was a neat idea, and I, as a Volvo fan, was super excited to check out the P2-based platform.
Idea was okay.
Styling was less okay.
Interior was aggressively terrible. The cheapest shit you could ever imagine. Like Studebaker Scotsman bad. (also, how insane is it that Studebaker was able to acceptably name its skinflint car after what is essentially an epithet and a stereotype? Albeit the same stereotype that gave Scotch tape its name…)
The engine was underpowered and also disgusting to listen to.
And that CVT.
It must be a P2 platform curse. It kills transmissions. Even the mighty GM Hydramatic that some of the early S80 T6 and XC90 cars shared with Cadillacs was failure prone here. As was teh AW55-50, which was used in a TON of stuff and is a TOYOTA transmission.
Also price.
This was a badly executed car and deserved to die. It SHOULD have been what they released as the Taurus X in the first place, but I bet that thing lost a bunch more money for the company too, dropping at the height of the Great Recession. Owies.
“ Interior was aggressively terrible. The cheapest shit you could ever imagine. Like Studebaker Scotsman bad. (also, how insane is it that Studebaker was able to acceptably name its skinflint car after what is essentially an epithet and a stereotype? Albeit the same stereotype that gave Scotch tape its name…)”
Thank you for sending me down the Studebaker Scotsman rabbit hole. My ridiculously frugal post-WWII grandpa would have loved it. I’d like to think they ran ads with an offensively stereotypical Scotsman saying things like “Ach, but I’ll nae be payin’ extra for armrests!” followed by the condescending voiceover saying “Don’t worry, Mr. MacHaggis, you can’t even get armrests in the Scotsman!”
They probably didn’t bother advertising it. When some tightwad came in asking for the most barebones car possible, they could just point to the car that came with nothing.
You’re welcome! The ads you can find are inadvertently hilarious. I also think it was probably MORE expensive for Studebaker to make so few of such a stripped down model. Production variations cost money. That’s why you’ll often find your lower-spec car has the wiring in place for you to plug in other high-zoot features, for example. The more similar they all are, the cheaper it is to stamp ’em out.
I have absolutely zero recollection of these – not the name (either of them!), not the shape – even after seeing the pictures. Wild.
There was just something wrong with the styling. I could never quite put my finger on it. Everything on paper says it should work, yet somehow it just doesn’t. Most of the problems seem to stem from the C Pillar back. It’s close, but still a miss.
You can have poor reliability with great styling, you can have great styling with poor reliability, but you can’t have both be bad and still succeed.
I agree with you that something just seems off. The roof does this strange little hump over the C-pillar that makes the back look tacked on, maybe that’s it. The cladding is over the top, but I do like the monochromatic purple one shown in these pictures.
We could not be in more agreement. I had those exact same thoughts.
The Chevy Trailblazer EXT from the same era has a similar roof hump aft of the C pillar. It’s to accommodate headroom for the third row but ultimately makes it look ungainly. Evidently GM did a bit better in other areas of the vehicle than Ford did with theirs as I still see Trailblazers and their badge siblings all the time.
It’s got a car front end welded to a minivan rear but it doesn’t have minivan doors. The hood’s too long and angles down too sharply which makes the tall roof look all the more ungainly. The best way to tell is that the tops of the taillights are actually above where the hood shutline is over the grille.
While here in upsidedownyland we got the similar looking, but most excellent Territory – with a legendary 4.0 I6 Barra! Had a Turbo version, and man that thing could hustle!
That CVT was an absolute disaster, especially if you hauled or towed anything. I knew a guy who had one and went through two CVTs before the warranty period ran out. He was an avid biker and Ford tried to deny the warranty claim the second time because he had a bike rack on his Freestyle. For reasons beyond my comprehension he actually kept the thing after the warranty ran out, but the problems didn’t stop. The Taurus X was improved, but the damage was done.
Photos of the seating included in this article: 0
I have always felt like there was some kind of cheapness to the styling of Ford vehicles. I can’t really put my finger on it but I just can’t really find any Ford cars throughout history that I find attractive. Sure they make some cars that aren’t ugly and maybe the new mustang and bronco(along with a few Lincoln vehicles) seem to avoid the cheapness that I’m describing. By and large though I would never buy a Ford largely because of the styling and something about it. Maybe it’s panel gaps? Maybe it’s the plastic they use for cladding, but something is off.
My dad says he lost any interest in American car styling starting in the ’80s and there’s been nothing outright attractive to him since from the Big Three. I think a lot of it comes down to committee design where every inch of the car is so thoroughly worked to avoid any sort of contention or character. Opening the door on a new Explorer or Escape feels a lot like walking into a Walmart. Lots of cheap plastic and blue screens everywhere, but at least everything is basically where you think it’d be. You’ll get what you need, but it won’t be fun or enjoyable.
So they ditched the CVT everyone was afraid of but replaced the 3.0 with the dreaded timing chain-driven internal water pump 3.5?
What a shame. The Volvo-based Fords had the potential for greatness, but the styling was intensely bland and the drivetrains typically had one or two deal-breaking flaws.
I imagine the heartwarming family commercial that ends by giving you whiplash and mixed feelings didn’t help:
https://youtu.be/CLVa3cZyGIo?si=E9MKEX5h5KuFagwi
That was an odd ad campaign for sure. I did like the one with the father teaching his son to respect the power of a Mustang by doing burnouts in a parking lot late at night. Making the ad about the car was probably better than making it about the people.
The Mustang one wasn’t bad yeah. It fit the car it was portraying. Unless Ford was trying to make the Freestyle the official car of divorced families then they should have gone a different route, even if the intent was well-placed.
Looked too much like a station wagon and not enough like an Exploder.
That awful CVT did NOT help it’s cause though. And they were rather expensive for what they were.
Younger brother worked at Ford’s warranty engine/trans supplier. DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE. The CVT is the weak link, and quite a weak link it is. Buy a later model Flex instead.
They still make these, they just changed the name to Explorer. Branding was the problem more than anything else.
The Flex uses the same floorpan.
Explorer is not related in any way. That is a fresh disaster.
The 2011 Explorer used the same floorpan as the Flex.
Oh, yeah, THAT Explorer. Yes, indeed. I was thinking of the current Explorer they’re making alongside the Lincoln Aviator in Chicago (and the Interceptor). All of which introduced a fresh set of problems to the world.
I think the meh reception was mostly a product of the time period – back then, “crossover” still meant “SUV” which still meant burly, offroad-looking things in the minds of most drivers. More car-like SUV styling like the Freestyle had hadn’t hit its highpoint of public acceptance yet.
Also, my personal theory is that in the mid-2000s, Ford was at the “good neighbor” end of the “good neighbor — edgy cool” spectrum on which its design language tends to ping pong back and forth.
To be fair, almost every manufacturer at the time was throwing all manner of 3-row spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. Nobody really knew what the public would latch onto. I’m not really sure the Freestyle is something I’d call a failure. It was just one of the lesser choices of the day.
There is a single Freestyle and Five Hundred in town that I always chuckle at when I see. The existence of the Taurus X is news to me though!
I had no idea the Freestyle had a CVT myself.
And my way, I see way more Freestyles compared to Taurus Xes. Like 3 to 1, easy.
Yea I had no idea that Ford offered a CVT that early. Quick Google showed it was also in the Five Hundred which is news to me. My dad had a Fusion with the 3.0L motor and he easily put 250,000+ miles on it and the 6 speed with no issues.
Same on the Freestyle:Taurus X. I guess some of it is simply sales volumes, even with just one more model year the sales were about that ratio. The Taurus X was probably more doomed from the start by the Edge coming out just before and getting all the marketing oomph.
And Edge was just a more eye-catching design compared to the very conservative lines of the Taurus X. I wasn’t exactly a fan of it, but a lot of people were.
The Taurus X – along with the 500 being rebadged the Taurus – was Ford’s attempt to resurrect the Taurus model after letting what at one time was one of their most valuable assets from a brand equity perspective, die in the name of having all their car models (with the exception of the Mustang) have a name that started with “F”.
I’d buy a Faurus and Fustang, wouldn’t you?
Well that was the other part of the inherent stupidity of the plan,; they couldn’t apply it to their most iconic model. So we ended up with the Fusion, Focus, Fiesta, and 500 (Five Hundred). None of them are sold today, but we’ve still got that Mustang.
My parents had an 08 Taurus X. That was one great car. They put 150k on it before selling it to a family member, who had it for a few years and then they bought it back. They sold it with close to 200k on it and it was still running strong. Great car that while not super exciting, drove nicely, was reliable, and could comfortably haul 6 adults. It’s a shame they didn’t sell better.
One of the first CVT cars that I hooned when working for Hertz. Loved the Tach being pegged. It felt quick.
Now THAT’S what rental cars are there for!