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Long story short, my wife's Windstar failed state inspection last Friday due to rotted front subframe. It's at the dealer now waiting on a ruling from Ford, and based on what the service manager told me, it's likely to be bought back.
I've had no major problems with it in the 4 years or so we've owned it, except for having the transmission rebuilt last June. It had over a 100K miles on it then, so while I really didn't want to have to spend that money, 100K on a FWD trans seems reasonable to me. Things don't last forever.
The problem is we really can't afford another payment right now, and I don't expect to get more than maybe $4000 from Ford if we're lucky. Not what I consider acceptable by any means, but that's another arguement.....
My alternatives at this point are another Minivan, and in that market Dodge/Chrysler are the only ones that I can even remotely stand. The problem there is that I've only owned Fords my entire driving life, and even as pissed as I am at Ford right now, I can't quite bring myself to put a Mopar in my driveway. My daughter's Honda is bad enough.
When we were looking for the Windstar, the wife liked the Freestyle, but they were too much money at the time. We bought the Windstar used.
Checking out the Freestyle, I found lot's of horror stories about the CVT transmission, so the Freestyle is out of consideration.
I haven't found much bad news in the "X" so far.
A dealer near me has an 09 with about 63K miles that is at least near our budget.....
I'll have to move quickly.
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9 MPG is worth the look from the guy at the parts counter when he asks "engine size" and you say 7.5!
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