First Drive Review
For any number of reasons, the Edge is a hugely important vehicle for Ford. It's the company's first entry in the burgeoning crossover utility vehicle (CUV) market, an area that has assumed more importance lately because of volatile gas prices. Ford needs a sales home run, because—with the exception of the revamped Mustang—its recent offerings have hardly been selling like crazy. The Fusion may be doing relatively well, but the Fusion, Five Hundred, and Freestyle together muster fewer sales than the Taurus managed on its own in the past. We also get the sense that Ford management feels that the Edge is the vehicle to prove that they can compete with the foreign automakers who have been stealing market share from the domestic producers.
Finally, a new V-6.
The big news is that the Edge is one of the first recipients—along with the Lincoln MKZ—of the new corporate 3.5-liter V-6 engine. Although this shares its basic, dual-overhead-camshaft V-6 layout with the anemic 3.0-liter fitted to the Fusion, Freestyle, and Five Hundred, this is effectively a new engine, with the potential for capacity increases in the future. Displacing 3496cc, the V-6 makes 265 horsepower and 250 pound-feet of torque. It is mated to a new six-speed automatic transmission that's a joint design between General Motors and Ford. Strangely, this transmission doesn't feature manumatic shifting. Edges can be ordered in two- and all-wheel-drive form.
Underpinnings of a car, not a truck.
The Edge features unibody construction rather than a traditional SUV's body-on-frame arrangement, which should endow it with a more rigid structure and theoretically give it better handling and ride. Essentially, the Edge is based on Mazda 6 architecture. Up front, it uses a MacPherson strut suspension, with lower control arms each side and an anti-roll bar. At the back, there is a multi-link arrangement with coil springs and an anti-roll bar. The Edge has power-assisted rack-and-pinion steering and all-around anti-lock disc brakes. All models come with seventeen-inch aluminum wheels, but SEL and SEL Plus variants are available with two types of eighteen-inch wheels, one of them in a garish chrome finish.
