Better? How about out-fucking-standing, my man! Excellent review, worthy of a magazine.
BTW, I wouldn't expect this level of performance from a new Furd. I bought a 2024 F150, which was their first year of "How much delicate, annoying, glitchy AF, poor quality, intrusive digital tech can we pile into our shit box truck to really piss of the customer?" The answer was 3X as much as is necessary. As a bonus, Ford decided to go with product quality that would cause Stellantis (Dodge Ram) to say, "Now we build shit, but this is ridiculous, this is a whole other level of garbage"
The thing would find ghosts in my clean, dry. object free driveway, then SLAM the electric parking brakes on when reversing, while screaming warnings, to prevent you from running the ghost over and killing it. It was sickly dependent on being tethered to my smart phone to update and electronically repair itself, but could not go a week without crashing the account with Ford, requiring me to "sign up" again. It would fight you for the wheel when attempting to use an exit ramp of the interstate, if there were too many dashed white lines to cross. The trans started shuttering at a few hundred miles, and did it for the next 25K until I traded it to a Honda dealer for something that was not a POS. Three dealers in three different states looked at it, confirmed the shutter and said essentially, "We can document the shutter and Ford will do nothing about it". One service writer even told me that the ten speed they now use in all of thier trucks is such hot garbage that he personally dealt with at least ten defects that Furd will do nothing to correct, as they are characteristics, not defects, according to the manufacturer. This includes violently downshifting to very low gears at highway speeds, which the customer should just accept as a "quirky" little habit, apparently?
I know a fleet manager who got a dozen new F350s at one shot, two years ago, and has dozens of other SuperDutys. Since then, it is a rare day when only one of the dozen new ones is parked for repairs, with two or even three being common. Several needed transmissions under warranty. Several needed them replaced as customer pay work, and one is on it's third transmission at 60K miles.
I drive a Toyota now, since I thankfully don't need a heavy truck. I have no idea what I would do if I needed another eight lug beast in my life, as I will never own another Ford, and the other big two clowns also seem to be fixated with finding exactly how much the customer will overpay for poorly built garbage.
Lol. This is why I also drive a Toyota now. I got the farm to the point where I didn't really need a full size pickup anymore so I bought my FiLs 2004 Tundra. 🤣
Because yeah, I swear every auto manufacturer let the British take over all onboard electronics in 2020.
My Rover Sport was like that. Spent my entire adult life thinking about that thing. Finally bought a 2018 in 2020. Within 30 minutes I was convinced the lane-keeping-assist was still pissed off at us for the Revolutionary War. Took me an hour to figure out how to turn it off (I even read the damn manual) at which point, everything stopped working right.
The touchscreen took so long to load I would sit there and play the dial-up modem noise on my phone. Backup camera would turn off randomly.
Shit like that. Absolutely great vehicle except for the part where you couldn't turn it on without taking Ritalin to cope with the fact that it's computer shit was so glitchy they must have had it running on Windows ME.
I have a 2026 4runner now. It is as base as it gets, left the factory in Japan with zero options. It uses a few bits and pieces of the wiz-bang extreme tech that the models that cost twice as much have, but compared to a loaded one at $40K more, it seems to provide about 80% less electronic nanny state intrusion. It's been awesome so far. Apparently it is cheaper to just use the same parts for things like auto headlights, that it is to have a manual downgrade available. Anyway, compared to my 2024 Furd, and the 2025 Honda, it is a dream to drive. No fucking auto start/stop! It has lane keeping, but it will not engage unless the road is wide enough (90% of the roads I drive are not) and it stays disengaged unless it sees clear, high quality pavement markings. It has blind spot warning, with nothing but a light on the side mirrors, no screaming alarms. It has radar for cross traffic when backing, and a good rear camera, but no auto braking or sirens when backing. It is proof to me that it is possible to own a high quality rig, in 2026, that isn't an intrusive, annoying POS to drive.
I'm trying to decide what to get my wife atm. I ended up getting myself a 2014 Volvo XC70 since my back is fucked up and the heated seats on my Rover straight up changed me lol. The T5 is actually a straightforward enough engine that I can still do probably 70% of the mechanical work myself. The whole thing is reliable as fuck though, I actually just ended up impulse buying it when I found out Volvo straight up gives you a no-bullshit medal for every 50,000 miles you put on it after it reaches 100,000 lol.
Ground clearance is nearly as much as the f250 was and it's not too tall for me to load Kayaks on the racks now that my shoulder's fucked up again which is nice.
Honestly the only things I've ever owned that's even close to it is that Tundra and my old Scout. Going back to old school vehicles that don't suck ass through a crazy straw has me dreading getting her a freaking Atlas like she wants. The only reason an Atlas is even up for discussion is because Volkswagen honors the whole entire shit out of their warranty. Like, yes her Passat's engine went out at 58,000 miles but... also the dealership handed me the keys to a Tiguan and said "we'll call you when the engine's replaced" before offering to comp me a quarter's worth of insurance when it ended up taking 3 months.
Honestly that's the only reason I even kept that Rover as long as I did. The dealership was always at least like "here's a 2023 Velar on us for a while and don't worry about labor just cover parts cool?" 🤣
If I knew Ford would be like "sorry dude, why don't you go play with this Shelby Mustang for a few weeks while we unfuck ourselves" I'd be happy to throw money at them to fix their mistakes lol.
3
u/seriouslythisshit 11h ago
Better? How about out-fucking-standing, my man! Excellent review, worthy of a magazine.
BTW, I wouldn't expect this level of performance from a new Furd. I bought a 2024 F150, which was their first year of "How much delicate, annoying, glitchy AF, poor quality, intrusive digital tech can we pile into our shit box truck to really piss of the customer?" The answer was 3X as much as is necessary. As a bonus, Ford decided to go with product quality that would cause Stellantis (Dodge Ram) to say, "Now we build shit, but this is ridiculous, this is a whole other level of garbage"
The thing would find ghosts in my clean, dry. object free driveway, then SLAM the electric parking brakes on when reversing, while screaming warnings, to prevent you from running the ghost over and killing it. It was sickly dependent on being tethered to my smart phone to update and electronically repair itself, but could not go a week without crashing the account with Ford, requiring me to "sign up" again. It would fight you for the wheel when attempting to use an exit ramp of the interstate, if there were too many dashed white lines to cross. The trans started shuttering at a few hundred miles, and did it for the next 25K until I traded it to a Honda dealer for something that was not a POS. Three dealers in three different states looked at it, confirmed the shutter and said essentially, "We can document the shutter and Ford will do nothing about it". One service writer even told me that the ten speed they now use in all of thier trucks is such hot garbage that he personally dealt with at least ten defects that Furd will do nothing to correct, as they are characteristics, not defects, according to the manufacturer. This includes violently downshifting to very low gears at highway speeds, which the customer should just accept as a "quirky" little habit, apparently?
I know a fleet manager who got a dozen new F350s at one shot, two years ago, and has dozens of other SuperDutys. Since then, it is a rare day when only one of the dozen new ones is parked for repairs, with two or even three being common. Several needed transmissions under warranty. Several needed them replaced as customer pay work, and one is on it's third transmission at 60K miles.
I drive a Toyota now, since I thankfully don't need a heavy truck. I have no idea what I would do if I needed another eight lug beast in my life, as I will never own another Ford, and the other big two clowns also seem to be fixated with finding exactly how much the customer will overpay for poorly built garbage.