Ford Freestar

Ford’s substantial Freestar is sold as a minivan; we in Europe tend to think of them as muti-purpose vehicle. However you care to describe it, Freestar is a big player in the field in both senses; it is a big seller for Ford and it is a big piece of metal too. It is up against the Chrysler Voyager (Town & Country in the USA) so needs to be something special to compete. Ford’s response has been to load it with equipment, and to tune the chassis to behave as much like a car as possible. There is a choice of big V6 engines – a 3.9 and a 4.2 – which don’t seem to offer much different from each other in terms of performance; the small advantage of the 4.2 is dulled a little by the soft automatic transmission. Only when the car is loaded with eight people does the bigger engine start to make sense.