Interior

The first thing I noticed about the Escape when I got in was its clean, organized center stack and console. Yes, there are a lot of buttons, but their layout is organized and uncluttered, which really works for me. And the center console and cupholders were easy to use. A little shelf inside the console housed smaller gadgets or writing utensils. Underneath the shelf, Ford provided slots for those of us in the Dark Ages who still tote around CDs.

But otherwise, the interior storage situation left a lot to be desired. I didn’t really think there needed to be more; it just needed to be better organized. The map pockets in the doors were impractical; I couldn’t fit my hand in there to dig stuff out very easily. They would hold maps, magazines and coloring books fine, but don’t you dare drop a pencil down there! It should also be said that many other cars I’ve tested have storage in the doors that can fit a water bottle. When there’s no armrest with cupholders for the rear seat, a water bottle stashed in the rear-door pocket would be much easier for kids to reach than the Escape’s backseat cupholders that are housed in the backside of the front center console.

The Escape has a good-sized cargo space for your huge strollers, and you can fold the seats down by using a latch on the top of the backseat. The hassle is that—and Ford isn’t the only perpetrator of this kind of cargo issue — in order to completely fold the seats down, you must remove the head restraints on the backseat. I hate that. Whenever I fold the seats down, I wind up trying to skip taking the head restraints out of the backseat. I’m left trying to manage a cargo-space slope that I think will be fine for carrying my flat of flowers from the nursery or whatever. But ultimately it just peeves me because it’s enough of a slope that everything slides down and gets mushed.

I do want to take a moment here and highlight something new in the Escape. The seats are made from 100 percent post-industrial waste, and they’re comfortable, too. According to Cars.com, “While post-industrial doesn’t have quite as big an impact as post-consumer waste, Ford says the new source will conserve, annually, 600,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of 1.8 million pounds of carbon dioxide and more than 7 million kilowatt hours of electricity.” Nice! Maybe if more seats were made of this fabric, my mountain getaway (and yours, too, wherever it is) will stay pristine.

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