Top Gear’s guilty pleasures: the Ford Flex

There are a great many things a person might not want to be called. In fact, the list is long (and indeed caustic) enough to rather prohibit its inclusion on a family website. And also on most other websites, as well as any periodical you care to mention and perhaps even some toilet stalls. But at the nexus of titles that are a) absolutely hated by those they’re applied to, and b) actually fit to publish, there’s one standout: hypocrite. 

Given that it’s not high school in the 1990s anymore, it’s no longer a problem to care, or like what you truly like. But it’s still a problem as insurmountable as the Gangkhar Puensum to be a fake, a phoney, to say one thing while believing another or indeed nothing at all. To butcher an old aphorism, it’s not a problem for everyone, all of the time, but it’s definitely a problem all of the time. 

Which brings us, at a pace even glaciers would call ‘a touch on the slow side’, to the topic of SUVs. You may have noticed that, at Top Gear, we’re not exactly known for extolling their virtues or excusing their vices. And yet in spite of ourselves, we keep finding 4x4s we like – as little as we might want to. The Jimny, G-Class and Range Rover spring to mind. 

But then they are (or at least could still be) actual 4x4s, and therefore used to serve a particular and specific purpose for those who want to work or wander in the wilderness. Conversely, the road-going SUV is almost always scorned and spurned around these parts, generally to a chorus of ‘Not while estates still exist, bucko'.  

So what about the Flex? It’s a fairly low-slung family hauler, which is hardly a problem. But then it’s also an SUV, which should, by rights, be capable of heading off over the horizon, regardless of the terrain. Which it absolutely isn’t. 

It also weighs an easy two tonnes, which flies (and indeed spits) in the face of our ‘light is right’ mantra. And you’d better believe that mass comes with a similarly massive size. Having a Flex anywhere but North America will be a litany of little annoyances: parking spaces will feel like they’re the size of postage stamps, Margaret Thatcher was more inclined to turn, and it’ll likely earn the nickname ‘Ever Given’ for how difficult it is to thread through narrow gaps. 

However, much like listening to a Sir Mix-A-Lot song, you know we’re moments away from the big ‘but’ – after all, this is an article on guilty pleasures, not ‘Top Gear gives a crap car a kicking for the jollies’. So it won’t surprise you to learn that at least one Top Gear writer thinks the Flex is fantastic. 

We could point to its stats (pick up the right one and there’s 365bhp from an all-aluminium, twin-turbo, 24v DOHC V6), its performance (nought to 60 in 6.2 seconds, aided by an AWD system that can shunt 100 per cent of the power to either axle) or its supreme, American-spec ride comfort, but they’re little more than justification. As is the astonishing amount of space on offer. So much, in fact, that it deserves its own paragraph. 

With all seven adult-sized seats in place, there’s 570 litres of luggage space – 70 more than a 3 Series estate. Press a button and the two rear seats do a little choreographed dance and fold themselves away, leaving 1,220 litres and five seats. Stow the second row and there’s a titanic 2,350 litres on offer. Misquote Stepbrothers as you see fit, et cetera. 

So yes, we could justify our guilty pleasure until the cows have come home, been sold off at auction and turned into leather for a future Ford’s seats, but the fact is that we just like the Flex. Its (ironically) squared-off, slab-sided design – by ex-Volvo designer Peter Horbury – works overtime, taking the SUV shape, draping it over what’s essentially a minivan and somehow coming away with what feels like a wagon of old. And while it doesn’t ape any classic car in particular, the 2005 concept car was called the Fairlane: a throwback to the full-size flagship of Ford’s range in the Fifties and Sixties – before Michigan was even in the business of building 4x4s, let alone SUVs. 

And we like that too, to be honest. Because if there’s one thing we don’t want to be called, it’s an SUV driver.