Yet another rental, I drove this though southern Alabama to Pensacola, FL. It’s a perfectly fine lump of transportation, but you will be bored to death by its mediocrity. There is however, one major little thing that will piss me off to no end with that car.

I’d like to preface this with a statement that I don’t have anything against Ford, and my thoughts do not reflect that of the team I work for. And I have in fact driven Fords that I like. This car is not one of them.

Ok, so let’s make this a quickie? A splash and dash, if you will. It’s a forgettable car, the interior doesn’t give me anything of note (except for that one stupid thing), the engine is forgettable, the styling is a mix of obese Wish.com Vantage and Ford forgetting to update the car, presumably because their engineers and stylists were smoking crack and making a winning race car with the Ford gt, figuring out how the hell to appease people by replacing the godly GT350 with the Mach 1, and trying to justify the Mach E’s existence. They where busy little bees!

It had some crappy electronic throttle, an engine so forgettable I’m using the same bit twice, and if it didn’t have the badge, I wouldn’t have known it was AWD. The 6.8 0-60 is fine for what the car is, and if you have one, you can still piss off your friend in an frs until he accepts his fate at the fifth stage of grief. The ride was fine, and I’ve heard these aren’t the worst handling, however I lacked the roads and time to discover this fact. It was an car, and you’ll probably find more enjoyment in a Mazda 6, Accord, or Passat.

So what’s the issue that pissed me off? Ok so ya know how automakers like to play around with features that you’d think have been trialed and errored over the past 100 years, and more or less standardized across the board? The gear selection, right, how do you screw that up? In this car, it’s a knob, but to be fair that’s not too out of place now a days. High end cars do it, so why not. There’s no gear stick to move, and twisting it to go between P, R, N, & D isn’t baffling. However there are no paddles in the car. No no, instead, the geniuses at Ford decided that to shift the car, you move the fucking knob side to side. The hell where they smoking for this? Was it really cheaper to make it move like that vs just adding two paddles to the wheel? At that point why even bother giving the driver a manual mode? I’d like to think the meeting between the transmission, software, and ergonomics teams ended with this: “To hell with it, you stupid consumer, the computer knows best. You wanna shift gears and go against IBM Watson’s wishes? You fool! You idiot! Punished you shall be for your hubris! Take this knob and shove it up your ass!”

In the late 20-teens, are automakers really grasping for early 20’s/pre-infotainment levels of “let’s just rearrange the buttons and add random bullshit to the car”? And the fusion isn’t even the only Ford guilty of this! I had a fiesta rental (it’s anemic but more characterful if you’re interested), and it did have an actual gear selector lever, but I can’t fathom why they put a toggle switch on the knob vs just letting it move up and down like every other automatic!? To me, this kinda stupid rearranging adds nothing to a car other than making you look dumbfounded at the design choices made. And obviously Ford isn’t the only one doing this. Mercedes is guilty of stupid shifter solutions as well.

Do they not have any human factors people making sure that stupid things like this don’t happen or is if purely for their sick enjoyment of our confusion? They’ll sit there, laughing with the software guys about how they’ll annoy the next fusion driver as some sort of sick punishment.

Whatever, this car car doesn’t deserve more attention, I’m glad these are gone so I don’t have to see them any more.