Ford Flex a High-Tech Bonanza, With Some Bugs
Most of the people who flocked to look at the Flex couldn’t even see inside, and that’s where a lot of the SUV’s fun can be found. It comes with both Sync, Microsoft’s voice-recognition music and phone system, and Sirius’ system for navigation and more. You can actually input your destination using voice commands while driving (you can’t type it in while driving, so this is your only choice when you’re on the road), find local gas stations and see the prices they’re charging (using the GPS in the car to fix your location), local movie times, sports scores, regional weather radar and more.
Now, this is a new system, and likely suffers a bit from that newness. The voice recognition, while neat, doesn’t always hear me correctly. Sometimes it’s just a little off; sometimes it’s laughably wrong. I discovered on my way home from work just how hard it is to enunciate the name of the town where I live, “Aurora.” I expect that they’ll work these problems out over time.
The kids loved Sync’s ability to enter in playlists, songs, albums or more, and my 15-year-old son even managed to time it so he could interject “Linkin Park” when I was trying to say “Foo Fighters” while waiting for the appropriate prompts. Instead of getting mad, I had to give him credit for his quick thinking. Speaking of those prompts, there’s a two-step tone system to let you know when to say your command. There’s a trilling higher-pitched series of notes, followed by a lower “donk-donk” (think “Law & Order”) when the “Listening” icon pops up. It takes some practice and patience to learn how to say the right thing at the right time.
The nav system suffers a little from the same problems that other nav systems do; it doesn’t know the little shortcuts that your friends and relatives know, and several times we had to overrule its path selections. My favorite nav moment, though, was when we took Interstate 355 South near Joliet, Ill. It only opened in November of last year, so it didn’t show up on the nay system. We looked like we were flying over the landscape, and the system seemed to be stymied until we merged onto I-80 15 minutes later.
Surprisingly, the feature that got the most comments from in-laws and cousins was the powered fold-up second-row seat. Now, the technology isn’t new here; you can find them in the Taurus X, too, but the reaction I found was visceral. After being prompted to push the button, both testers jumped back when the seat back snapped forward and the bottom of the seat flew up to rest against the front row. There were plenty of “oohs” and even a “Wow!” My wife’s cousin said if she’d seen it when she bought her new minivan recently, it might have changed her mind: “That folding seat is great. I need to be able to get my kids back into the third row easily, and that’s the reason I didn’t buy an SUV.”
While the folding seat drew a lot of spectators, my wife and kids were pretty vocal about how much they disliked the headrests. My daughter REALLY didn’t like them, especially when she was sitting in the third row. Indeed, none of the kids who sat in the third row liked that experience very much, but I suspect that’s because of all of the luggage we had stored next to them. In daily driving, I suspect none would have much to complain about, and the stadium-style seating gave them a better view of the road than they get in our minivan.
Of course, you take a vacation to chill out, and the Flex’s built-in refrigerator worked surprisingly well. We’ve seen “chill zones” before, but this put them to shame. We filled it with a bunch of water bottles, and within 45 minutes, my daughter reports, they were refreshingly cold. I haven’t tried the freezer setting yet; we’ll see how that holds up.
Lastly, I’m always worried about how comfortable I’m going to be while driving for more than 12 hours. The Flex’s seats were comfortable (although my wife thought the leather looked a little cheap), and there was plenty of legroom and, especially, headroom. In fact, for a SUV with so low a profile, I was stunned by how spacious the cockpit area seemed. Another one of my wife’s cousins pointed out, “I’m surprised by how spacious it is inside, since it looks so small outside.”
Overall, my wife was very happy with the Flex. “It’s very comfortable, very roomy,” she said. “The kids didn’t looked smushed, and I loved the retro look of it, especially the two-toned paint job.” Most importantly, she said, was that the Flex doesn’t follow the trend of teardrop-shaped side windows that are so popular in many crossovers these days. “I love the fact that it doesn’t have the squashed windows of a crossover.”
Her final verdict? “I like it.”
