2019 Ford Edge ST Review _ Thanks, But No Thanks

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin America gone are the Fiesta and Focus ST what we get to replace it the edge St an SUV that ford claims is a sports car let's take a look now whether you're a Ford fanatic or not I've had my dirty little hands on most of them the Ford Escape the Mustang the edge they all look good their exterior styling isn't off the deep end they maintain good proportions without going you know - Bulbasaur - skinny and in the case of the edge most all of the body panels are painted their body colored there's no huge black plastic chunks all over the place and when you look at the headlights the taillights it's just very cohesive and I think that's one of the strongest parts of the Ford Edge despite its age but you can only look at the outside for so long before you start to notice the esti treatments on the interior and the best part of this interior space is the esti seats part of it is because you have this micro suede or Alcantara Center portion so it's cool and it's absorption love level for people that have well let's say dairy sensitivities is excellent I have never had a point driving this car where I felt like the seats weren't almost perfectly set up for street driving I was in here for hours on end the bolsters are good the adjustability is good so this is one of the reasons again why you would buy an ST the next part is some of the little attention to detail in here is pretty good for the well really mostly good and I just got into the estate or I'm sorry the edge titanium and most of what was good about that carries are in here they're very similar now let's get into the parts that are a little bit more difficult for me to swallow now I'm gonna roll up this window because it's a little bit windy I'm my buddy Reynaldo we were on our way to hieroglyphics class and he said well it's not a bad interior space tell me how much it is and when I told him this thing was fifty thousand dollars he nearly spit up his soy latte all over these esti seats and I gotta agree with them that is a steep asking price namely when you look at the competition my big issue is the interior space and I say this about every single Ford vehicle I'm in they need to take a look at their interior does team and material choices and just look at the competition what they're doing from Mazda to Toyota to Hyundai and Kia even Chrysler is doing a better job than them and there's no way that you could justify the price point unless they were doing something magical with the rest of the car which we'll go into in a bit but here's what's bad I had the edge titanium and I noticed that the driver side vent was loose the plastic and I was going to give it a pass until I got into the st and it has the same problem the rubber or - material does not meet the vent and the whole vent is loose most of the other fitment of the panel pieces are not that great and then the entire center stack when you take a look at this this is the epitome of generic it looks like it literally cost them 50 cents to make this and you know everything is easy to use at least there's physical controls but then they leave out stuff like the steering wheel heater button where is it it took me literally like three minutes to find it and it's it's basically in two spots and the touchscreen why would they leave it out of the physical controls and my guess is cost laziness whatever and then you have the gauge cluster which is you know it just looks dated and it looks like it was kind of integrated back in the days of the Microsoft Ford SYNC their old infotainment because they still have some of the color palette and the way that it looks and even their infotainment screen there's a settings menu where everything looks clean and then they have the Ford app icon the Ford Pass Connect icon which is blue and everything else is gray and it's like little details like this you can tell the tension of detail is just not in this interior space now I don't want to end on a sour note because there are some good things about this vehicle and I can understand why some people would buy the lower trim levels the doors for example they have a really great opening really wide opening front and rear makes it easy to get inside and out the next part is the storage capacity when you open up the rear hatch or the lift gate it does you immediately notice how tall and how wide the load area is and you can put down the seats manual and the rear seats recline a little bit or there's an electronic release that kind of pushed the seats for now when you open it up it really that it's its highlight again cargo capacity comfort and adjustability the steering wheel is electronically telescopic both seats are can electronically adjust and the overall comfort and just calmness that you get on this interior space but everything aside from that from attention to detail most of the materials the accents the sound system the infotainment is slow it's just pretty much below average in every other regard it's indicative of the age of this platform and design but let's take a look at this in the shop and see the underpinnings now's your chance to have a look at the Ford Edge ST on the Ben pack lift and due to some creative marketing Ford has made something old new again and when I say old this is based on the CD for platformer architecture which was being designed pre 2014 and is shared with cars like the Ford Mondeo and the Ford Fusion which were pretty solid now because it's older he can't really nitpick this so when I say make new old again what have they done well they rebranded the edge sport to the S team made it look a little bit different because people know what the ST is in the enthusiast community and you know it might trick some people a lot of this really is carry over from the sport the caliper shot or the calipers and the rotor size are the same it has operated a solid operated front sway bar and a hollow operated rear sway bar on the esti compared to the regular models and then the ST model gives you the optional performance brake package for around $2,200 and what that gets you is the same rotor and caliper but they paint the caliper red and it gives you more aggressive brake pads with a higher temperature threshold and some vent work for them and larger 21 inch wheels and tires which this doesn't have so basically this is kind of the carryover from the old sport now you have aluminum lower control arms here and aluminum knuckle a lot of the same Aero panels and underbody that you would get with the previous edges or the edge sport the biggest change here is you get the new twin turbo v6 that makes more horsepower but you need to use premium fuel to get more horsepower and it gets the new 8-speed automatic and the 8-speed really isn't all that new because what they did creatively probably to save cost is they took all the gear sets out of the old six-speed Automatic and put the same gears in it and then they just created one new gear or two new gears second gear is new and eighth gear is new which explains some of these strangeness in how it shifts gears because second and third are so close and third and fourth are so far apart that you notice it when you drive and I'm gonna talk about that more but let's get to the rear end and talk about the all-wheel drive system and more now as you nose around here the first thing you're gonna see is these massive lower aluminum control arms that are connected to an aluminum knuckle Ford is good about doing that everything else is kind of stamped steel your lower control arms your subframe it's just typical stuff I think one of the things here that I I feel like they could have done is done something with this I mean they have these kind of triangular exhaust tips but they're just this kind of cheesy muffler it could use more exhaust throat out of this car now the big thing to talk about is the all-wheel drive system I will say this I think this is a lost opportunity if they're going to make this an ST model they have the ability and they've manufactured some torque vectoring differentials I think if you really wanted to get nuts with this that's what they should have included here but what they've included instead is your traditional on-demand all-wheel drive system that is capable of decoupling itself so it can go in true front-wheel drive mode and then reactivate based on software to engage the electromagnetic clutch and transfer power here now the only thing that Ford is claiming is that they're using an AI all-wheel drive system the new catch phrase in tech and companies talking about AI everything's AI artificial intelligence all it is it's it's an algorithm they're using all the body control modules the sensors the wheel speed sensors yaw rate acceleration temperature windshield wipers pretty much something that every modern company is now using and the software is able to predict when it needs to kick the all-wheel-drive system into action transfer the power to the back even when you're just cruising on the road just little steering wheel angles when you accelerate it will it may not choose to send power to the back at all or sometimes it may and it's all software driven you don't really have control over when it does it but Ford says they've spent a lot of time and tuning it and when you drive it sometimes you notice that but let's get this thing on the road you know we can talk about the tech stuff all date let's see how it drives we are finally behind the wheel of the edge st and this vehicle is supposed to WoW me with its with its athleticism and I've driven this plenty of miles now to have a good feeling on what its capabilities are so let's start with the ride quality and this is a highlight of the edge and typically in ST products or some of the ford performance vehicles ride quality is not something that you rave about with a combination of the seats and the way they have this suspension adjusted you can drive this every day over every pavement type and have zero issues with it its dampened is as good as pretty much all of the competitors even though the better competitors it's one of my favorite parts of it the side effect is it's not the most quiet interior space but you know given its age they didn't put a high emphasis on reducing NVH from wind noise and all that but it's not totally ridiculous and I think you're going to you're gonna notice that right away as my point now speaking of which ride quality is one thing but does it sacrifice handling one thing it really doesn't do is it doesn't sacrifice the handling much for an SUV of this size it is pretty impressive how well it it is a nimble but you know you do have 20-inch wheels and tires here so you get the immediacy from the tire design there's not a lot of rollover but the first thing I noticed was this feels very much like a front-wheel drive vehicle it tends to understeer way too much the all-wheel-drive system doesn't kick back into the rear enough to kind of help you rotate through turns and sometimes I'll get in a tight scenario and it just feels like a total front-wheel drive fast and I think that's one of the biggest disappointments because Ford talks about how they have artificial intelligence behind the all-wheel-drive system but then when you start to drive this thing like a maniac it really doesn't do that but let's you know pound this thing around a little bit more now it does have bigger brakes than the regular edge and you notice it but it's not like it's not gonna blow you away it gives you enough confidence but let's be real nobody's gonna drive this thing like a maniac even though they're trying to market it as a sports car I find that it drives pretty much like every other SUV in this class and you know it's just got a much better motor let's talk about that I'm gonna come to a stop here put this in sport mode with the dialer shifter and I'm just gonna take off from a stop and see how it accelerates so one of the first things you're gonna notice when you start to drive this thing hard is the fake engine noise it sounds like a scent synthesizer and Ford does this on their twin-turbo v6 is on many models I don't know why it sounds horrible and it comes on in sport mode and non sport mode when you get past this certain throttle position you can't disable it but much like the straight pipes do you can kind of hit the s when you're accelerating you can hear it turning on and off it's so stupid it's so cheesy I hate that manufacturers do this and then don't give the customer an ability the ability to disable it but the biggest thing about the esti is the transmission and I talked about this in the shop and I think the only way I can show you how I only way I could show you the ultimate laziness and design is to give you a quick demo of what it's like to switch between second and third gear back and forth and how close those ratios are and then what happens when you go from third to fourth so let's take a look at that so basically what they did is they took the second gear third gear fourth and I and so on from the six-speed and just put it in here they added a new second gear so essentially you have two second gears in the ford st so when you're driving even normal you'll feel this rubber banding effect from its switching from second to third it feels almost like a CVT because the ratios are so similar it's like okay I'm just gonna switch from second to second and it's really annoying and you'll notice a lot of times that the electronic programming of the transmission we'll just skip second gear altogether and go from first to third or start and second switch to fourth and the other annoying part is from third to fourth it's such a steep change and it's one of the worst parts about this vehicle is the transmission performance even the manual control is not the quickest to respond despite it rev-matching it's not it's not particularly smooth to upshift all the time and it's certainly not the smoothest to downshift and you know for a vehicle like this if you're gonna try to sell a sporty image you better have the transmission performance sorted out and they just don't now the last thing to talk about is I spent a week with the edge titanium which is very similar to price and you know it doesn't have the higher performance motor but to me these vehicles feel so similar in terms of performance on every angle that I feel like what you're buying here is a lot of the branding more so than anything it is a good riding vehicle it does feel confidence inspiring the electronics work pretty well but this is for the price tag it's a very difficult pill to swallow but let's get into the final thoughts and I'll talk about some of the other nuances final thoughts on the Ford Edge ST Ford performance was involved in doing this project I thought well maybe it's going to be something like the Jeep track Hawk or a more nimble version and then I started seeing commercials where guys like Ben Collins and ken Block were shilling for this even donut media got a payday to do a commercial and this is where it hit me I'm like oh man here we go and now after driving it I can tell you one thing for sure this is a marketing exercise they took the esti badge and they slapped it on an SUV to see if it would sell and it's not that Ford performance can't do things and in fact they've been able to turn things that are mundane into amazing products like the Focus ST and the Fiesta ST in America they have a rabid following with enthusiasts for a couple reasons one they were in one they were affordable the HST is not two they were more hardcore they rode firm they handled well they were edgy almost rear-wheel drive feeling when you started to push them hard they were a lot of fun to drive the adjust T is not a lot of fun to drive they've taken a higher horsepower motor which requires 93 octane or premium fuel to get that horsepower level they took a mundane transmission and kind of reutilized other parts and it's just a big vehicle it's not fun to drive I'm sorry in fact I just got out of the edge titanium a couple weeks ago which was a really solid vehicle and I can't tell much of a difference between the two namely for 95% of people that are gonna be buying this there's not that much difference and I think you know if you're gonna take a sub-brand know who you're marketing it to don't insult the enthusiasts by pretending and that's what they're doing I'm and that's just a straight answer to this nobody is gonna get behind an edge st and be like oh my god I'm gonna trade in my sports car for this in fact there's so many other vehicles in that forty five to fifty thousand dollar price range in terms of SUVs this really does nothing particularly special in any regard yes it is comfortable it rides really well and has a ton of cargo capacity but that can be said for so many vehicles in fact the negatives about the adjust e far outweigh the positives and in that regard you know maybe getting a lower trim level that's more affordable I can see it but as it stands I can't recommend this now if you absolutely have to have the edge st or any ford product head over to Ames Ford and Lincoln they're one of the few dealerships I've ever seen that offers a lifetime drivetrain warranty on any new vehicle you buy from them it's built into the cost and it's underwritten by CNA insurance so you could go anywhere in the u.s. and always have it covered and that's one of the nice things if you're looking for a Ford or a lincoln product that again if you have to have it well that's a good place to look even if you're out of state so I hope this via her I hope this video was worth your time take care and I'll talk to you later I'm on my laptop right now this is the gentleman you're leaving before very well I hate the savage geese I'm going to show you how to get rid of them just like this you\n"