Although the last post is eight years old, I still found it informative today. My special thanks to BIll Winney for his stoic defense of his opinions in spite of some testy replies. After looking through some recent threads on the internet, it seems the FEH crankshaft, rods and bearings are very durable but there still is a very small probability of failure. Not enough to lose a wink of sleep over. The thread ended on a friendly note so "all's well that ends well".

 

I had almost forgotten about this old thread! I thought I would go ahead and post an update on the old FEH! After 255K mi I passed my Beloved Escape on to my son last Spring. He is in college and needed a reliable vehicle with 4 wheel drive. He is still driving it and it has well over 260K on it now. This is the best vehicle we have ever owned by a long shot. I recently had a Ford Salesman tell me that the FEH has the lowest "part failure rate" of any vehicle ever made. No idea how that is measured or if it's even true, but based on the number of them still on the road with gobs of miles on them, this factoid passes the sniff test.

"Curby" still uses less than a quart every oil change. We now change the oil every 8,000 miles because if you change it before that, it's just a waste because it's not dirty enough. The most major repair I've done on this car was a PCV valve, which incidentally was a total pain in the butt! A valve cover gasket, A/C pump and some front end maintenance sums up the rest. I think this baby will easily crest 300K and keep going. I only wish I was as impressed with my non-hybrid 2015 escape. It's a nice car but the FEH has it beat in many areas, not the least of which is the mileage! Best mileage I get with the 2.0 Ecoboost is 28. That was the worst mileage I got with the '05 FEH. By the way - I still use conventional oil so I'm pretty sure it's OK. :-)

PS - For the record, this vehicle also still has the original battery! All the naysayers have been proven wrong over the past 20 years but people are still freaked out about batteries dying in hybrids.