Flex time!

Thanks to Ford Canada and Social Media Group, I was asked if I wanted to take a Ford Flex for a spin. It’s Ford’s answer to the minivan since they stopped manufacturing the Freestar a couple years ago and it’s made at their Oakville plant.

I’m no soccer mom but I wanted to test it out around the ’hood with my family in tow. I’m a minivan driver so I think I have a pretty good point of reference. The kids loved it because of the features we don’t have in our van. Mr. B. enjoyed his test drive too. I even liked the two-tone Light Ice Blue Metallic with White Suede roof colour and as Mr. B. will tell you, I usually have an aversion to blue cars. Don’t know why, I just do.

I also thought it would be a lot of fun to fill it up with some podcampers and take it to PodCamp Montreal. Joining me for the ride were Connie Crosby, Lily Mills, Jay Moonah, Daniele Rossi and Brent Morris.

The Flex is spacious and with six leather captain seats, built in DVD player, SIRIUS satellite radio and four sunroofs, it’s a more luxurious vehicle I’m used to driving.

We had a very comfortable ride but found parking and turning such a long and wide cross-over vehicle more challenging. As you can see below, at 201.8" in length, it’s somewhat long for a standard parking spot. Cool thing is, when you’re backing up and getting too close to an object behind you, an audio signal lets you know.

Seats in the middle and back rows can easily be turned down for extra storage. When all seats are in the upright position, storage isn’t as generous as I would have thought for the wide Flex design. We managed to fit all our our overnight luggage in the back.

The electrical outlet was a bonus for us geeks ’cause we could use our laptops without wearing out the batteries.
One of the cool features we wanted to check out was the “fridge”. We had planned to bring a special lunch with us instead of stopping at a fast-food place on the highway. Needless to say, although having a small fridge compartment is a great bonus for keeping snacks and drinks cold for the kids, it was smaller than we expected and not large enough to hold our lunches.

According to Ford Canada the Flex starts at $34,999 and the model I previewed retails at $44,229.

Read more about Flex features.

Photo credit: photos of me and the electrical outlet are courtesy of Connie Crosby. UPDATE: Connie also took the photo of the Flex in the parking lot.