In late August some local blog­gers & media folks were invited to come test drive the 2013 Ford Escape on Ford’s cross-​​Canada pro­mo­tional tour, “Escape for the Day with Ford”.

Note: Ford didn’t pay me to attend the event. They did pro­vide a light lunch, fruit, pop and an inter­est­ing mashed potato mar­tini bar sup­per. So take that for what you will while you read my account of the day. Mashed. Potato. Mar­tini. Bar.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to take a 2013 Ford Escape for a quick tour of the city on our way to Praire­land Park for a vehi­cle road test. Using the pre-​​programmed GPS was unique as up to this point I’ve only ever used my iPhone for any sort of dri­ving direc­tions. The built-​​in GPS is cer­tainly eas­ier to use over all — though Apple’s new Maps sys­tem in iOS 6 could change that once it gets up to speed.

With a course setup designed to show off the brak­ing and maneu­ver­abil­ity of the new Escape — par­tic­u­larly when it comes to avoid­ing hit­ting pylons and interns hold­ing up flags that are meant to sim­u­late lit­tle pup­pies and small chil­dren run­ning out onto the road.

I’ve never dri­ven a car the way we were pushed to on that course. Accel­er­at­ing as fast as you can and then slam­ming on the brakes as hard as you can. Turn­ing at the last pos­si­ble sec­ond before hit­ting a pylon isn’t some­thing I’m going to allow myself to do with our mini­van. ¹ I’ll leave that for my son when he turns 16 in 11 years.

Easy Gate Access

One par­tic­u­larly neat fea­ture of the Escape is the foot acti­vated gate/​rear hatch. Basi­cally you do a kick­ing motion (motion being the key word — you don’t need to actu­ally kick your vehi­cle) and it trig­gers the hatch to open. They had us do a race between the var­i­ous groups to see who could get a vin­tage box into the back of their Escape the quick­est using the foot acti­vated gate.

One impor­tant secu­rity detail that Ford thought of with the foot acti­vated gate is that you need to have the key within a few feet of the rear of the vehi­cle in order to active it. So that it’s not like any­body can just come up behind your car and open the gate. Or if you’re involved in a race and you for­get to get the key from the pre­vi­ous team, you prob­a­bly won’t be able to com­plete the race. ²

As Tenille over at FeistyFru​ga​land​Fab​u​lous​.com said, it’s great how Ford is tak­ing the time to show off their vehi­cles and bring out local blog­gers, tweet­ers and other social media folk to chat about their prod­ucts. No other vehi­cle man­u­fac­turer is doing that to the best of my knowledge.