An Escape Plan for Malaysia

Malaysians have been reading a lot about the Ford Escape since late last year when the company announced it would assemble the small SUV in Malaysia. Positive test-drive reports by motoring journalists in April increased interest and in a new approach to marketing, Ford Malaysia specially imported a batch of Escapes from Japan so that customers could try them out at dealerships. It was a break from tradition where people place orders and never really try before deciding to buy since no units are available until local assembly commences. It was so unusual that many people thought the Escape had been launched and were puzzled why they would only be able to get their units in August.

From the end of April until the official launch tonight, Ford Malaysia collected a couple of hundred orders, indicating that the strategy was effective and also that the Escape was appealing. That’s good news for the company since it has decided to stop offering the Telstar, its representative in the 2.0-litre sedan segment. For non-national makes, this segment (which accounted for 5.4% of all cars sold in 2000) has become smaller as prices have risen since the economic crisis of 1997/1998; non-national makes had a 54% share of the segment in 1997 and it fell to 25% last year. As such Ford Malaysia feels it is no longer worth competing in the segment for small volumes and has decided to offer an SUV instead.

The switch to an SUV makes sense since such vehicles are increasingly popular and the duty structure is also not as high as for passenger cars. This is why the Escape can be priced at RM140,000 (without insurance), an acceptable price level for many.

DESIGN
At a glance, the Escape looks fairly generic for an SUV and resembles a cross between a Honda CR-V and Land Rover Freelander. Perhaps it’s hard to be really different when designing a SUV but if you look a bit longer, you will notice that there are some styling elements which are cleverly incorporated to give a more rugged image to the Escape. The way the middle section of the front bumper extends upwards on either side of the grille gives the impression of a strong front end while the same treatment is evident at the rear end.

The North American influence seems strong in the rear end as the external spare wheel is absent. This is common in many North American SUVs and it tends to stray from the image of the typical 4WD SUV where the spare wheel is prominently hung on the back. However, there are good reasons why the spare wheel should not be there, as an independent organisation in the USA discovered recently after crash-testing SUVs. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the externally-mounted spare wheel, “which is predominantly for styling reasons, guarantees excessive damage and high repair costs from a whole range of rear-end collisions”. Apart from saving you money, having the spare wheel inside also keeps it cleaner and you have less worries of it being stolen.

While the rivals would include the Toyota RAV4 as well, it is the CR-V which the Escape is directly challenging since the RAV4 and Freelander are both full-time 4WD vehicles and besides, they aren’t assembled locally and have a different price structure. So we’ll restrict comparisons to the CR-V and in size, the Escape is shorter by 55 mm but wider by 75 mm. It is also taller than the Honda by 65 mm, giving it interior headroom that is even greater than its much bigger brother, the Explorer. However, while both SUVs have the same wheelbase of 2620 mm, which is quite generous. More on The Development Story

Structurally, the Escape follows the trend of today’s small SUVs in that it has is monocoque or ‘unibody’, as Ford terms it. Although many people may think it was the RAV4 which started this trend, Jeep actually started using it for its Cherokee as far back as the mid-1980s.

With monocoque construction, the bodyshell and floorpan are welded as a single unit, like a passenger car’s. This differs from the separate bodyshell and chassis frame design used for the larger SUVs. There are pros and cons for the two construction methods, the separate type being claimed by hardcore off-roaders to be tougher for rough conditions. But for the sort of driving envisaged by 99.9% of Escape owners, such robust engineering is unnecessary and the owners would prefer comfort and handling sharpness.

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