Ford Flex rolls into Buffalo showrooms
Crossover a benefit to region’s economy
Ralph Dalessandro noticed a couple things about the Ford Flex right away — better gas mileage than his pickup truck, and he didn’t bump his head getting into it.
“I’m getting one next year, when the lease on the truck is over,” the six-foot- four Lackawanna man said.
His wife liked it, too.
“We’re looking for something that has decent size but excellent mileage,” Mary Jane Dalessandro said. “We don’t want to feel like we can’t go on a trip because of gas mileage.”
The Ford Flex officially rolled into Buffalo-area auto showrooms on Wednesday, with a coming-out party at Towne Automotive Group in Orchard Park.
The Flex carries up to seven people, a refrigerated cooler for drinks — and a piece of Buffalo’s economy. Like its fellow crossover vehicles the Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX, it’s an important product for Ford’s Buffalo Stamping Plant in Hamburg. The approximately 1,000-job plant makes the body panels for the Flex, as well as the Edge and MKX.
The stamping plant has much of its future riding on crossovers, but the vehicles are on a bumpy patch right now. Sales of crossovers, including the Edge and MKX, dropped in the second quarter, prompting Ford to scale back production of the Flex. The company canceled a planned third shift of production at the Oakville, Ont., assembly plant on Wednesday, citing weak demand for similar vehicles.
“It’s a stronger category than Explorer, Tahoe and Suburban and the others,” said Ford spokesman George Pipas, naming SUVs whose sales have fallen steeply. “But we still have to be careful about not over-building these nice products.”
Ford's earnings released today highlighted the need to be prudent. The company lost $8.67 billion in the second quarter and announced it will retool the Michigan Truck plant in suburban Detroit, shifting its products from large SUVs to make global vehicles off the European Focus platform by 2010.
Crossovers are a compromise between a car and a big SUV or pickup, making them popular replacement vehicles for SUVs. But that role has actually hurt crossovers, as values of bigger vehicles plunge. Now that many SUVs are worth less than the remainder of the loans on them, their owners are staying away from car lots, Pipas said.
Sales of Edge were down 5 percent during April through June, while MKX fell 17 percent.
Billed as a “people mover,” the Flex fills the role of a minivan while looking like anything but.
“It’s the kind of vehicle, people either love it or hate it — it’s definitely a lot different,” said Frank Downing Jr., president of Towne Automotive Group. He’s heard it described as a cross between a Mini Cooper and a Land Rover, because of its box-shaped body and its white or silver roof that contrasts with the body color.
“It’s for people who don’t want a minivan, or the gas mileage of a big SUV,” he said.
Weighing in at over two tons, the Flex is not petite. It’s rated at 17 mpg city/24 highway, while the all-wheel-drive version gets 16/22. Its EPA combined mileage of 19 mpg compares with 21 mpg for the 2009 Escape, which is billed as a compact SUV.
Nor is the Flex cheap. Its sticker price starts at $28,295 and rises to about $35,000 with extras like a voice-activated navigation system, satellite radio and a rear-view camera for backing up its nearly 17-foot length.
With its future pegged to relatively fuel-efficient crossovers, Ford’s local plant should see stable employment, said Charles Gangarossa, president of United Auto Workers Local 897 in Hamburg. “We’re not targeted for buyouts,” he said. The union represents 867 hourly workers at Ford, including 33 part-time workers.
Also feted at Towne was the 2009 Lincoln MKX, the latest model of the crossover that’s an upscale cousin of the Ford Edge. The new MKX went on sale in recent weeks.
