---
title: '2022 Ford Escape Hybrid PHEV: Regular Car Reviews'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=flE8cSneRrg'
video_id: 'flE8cSneRrg'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 1050
---

# 2022 Ford Escape Hybrid PHEV: Regular Car Reviews

> Source: [2022 Ford Escape Hybrid PHEV: Regular Car Reviews](https://youtube.com/watch?v=flE8cSneRrg)

## Summary



## Transcript

The 2022 Ford Escape plug-in hybrid EV
is the official car of nice guys. You
know exactly who I'm talking about.
Those sniveling little larval stage red
pillers whose niceness is entirely
transactional and built around trying to
dip their fork in the casserole. They
seem caring and compassionate, but
underneath it all is a gremlin trying to
figure out how to be validated for as
little effort as possible. And in that
way this car will sell you on the notion
that it's sensible, it's safe, it's
worthy. But then you give him a chance
and what you get is an experience so
painfully mid it's like they motorized
the sensation of eating chain restaurant
chicken wings. I mean it's okay, I
guess. But this isn't the mom and pop
deli around the corner making lemon
pepper wet. Yet in classic nice guy
fashion, this doesn't just stop at being
blandly undesirable. It's simultaneously
needy while oozing entitlement that
because it's perfectly acceptable it
therefore deserves to be desired. And
look, being the safe option has never
made anybody's pants shift around, but a
nice guy will be out here in these hot
streets talking about I can treat you
better and then your reward for giving
him a chance is being late to every
function involving your family. Ford
Escape Hybrid. I used to work at Best
Buy and also I still work at Best Buy.
Now let's watch a bunch of grindset
videos with Thomas Shelby in the
thumbnail.
>> [groaning]
>> The mediocrity almost feels intentional.
Like Ford executives sat up there in
their Michigan mind palace conjuring up
how best to create something that evokes
nothing. It's like they started from the
premise of a car for somebody
experiencing their first day on Earth
every single day and then started
building from there. The Ford Escape
Plug-in Hybrid EV is a futuristic car
that promises a future of limited
participation.
The world is overstimulating. People are
peopling too hard. The sixth family
member this month has a birthday coming
up and work is asking you to do stuff
again. Well, here you go. Here's your
sensory deprivation pod, colorless and
mute.
We're Ford.
We'll break down so you don't have to.
It would almost be kind of genius if
Ford really did decide to market to the
overstimulated by saying, "Here you go.
It's your favorite.
Less."
Except, well, I think there's a lot more
going on underneath the surface here.
>> And they say nice
>> Nice.
>> guy
>> Guy.
>> Go and drive [singing] a plug-in hybrid,
nice guy. Ford not lobbies that way.
>> 2022 Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid EV, the
official car of gas station chicken
Caesar wraps. I mean, how good could it
possibly be? But also, how wrong could
somebody possibly get this?
The Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid feels
engineered to be offensive to absolutely
no one. Like a corporate apology that's
been fussed over and run past legal
again and again to make sure they got
the wording right. It's a triumph of
artless efficiency. This is a car for
the kind of person who generates AI
artwork and then watermarks it. It's
very much a product, a digestible,
inoffensive product. A movie by a
filmmaker who's lost his fastball,
sitting there in his Patagonia sweater
on a director's chair with a hemorrhoid
donut. We'll fix it in post, always
waiting in the wings at the back of his
throat. Yeah, yeah, let's phone this in,
why not? We're already good for a 55% on
Rotten Tomatoes, brother. That's our
floor. That's the Ford Escape Plug-In
Hybrid EV. Because even at peak
operation, it's so blandly inoffensive,
you'd think it was trying to get
monetized on TikTok.
This is a car for people whose hot take
is social media bad. Like, okay, yeah,
but also you're still on it. And you
know, this car is frustrating because I
feel like there's the bones of something
better underneath all this senioritis
engineering. The road feel is whatever.
The handling is whatever. None of it is
bad, it's just there. This entire car is
just there.
Let's get down to brass tacks. The
drivetrain consists of a 2.5 L Atkinson
cycle four-cylinder, an electric motor,
and a 14.4 kWh battery whose combined
system output is around 221 horsepower
and 155 pound-feet of torque. It's
matched to a power-split eCVT,
which basically is a planetary gear set
that precludes the need for all the
extra CVT hardware, like belts and
hydraulics. Yet, the drive itself is
dispassionately efficient, like having
your lunch money taken by a bully on
SSRIs.
The handling is very light, which is
fine for just tooling around the lot
where we were filming. But once we were
out on the highway, I kept waiting for
this to commit. It's not exactly fast,
although it's not sluggish either.
Acceleration has the urgency of a
swinger changing his mind after his wife
already left.
You're fast, but you're not going to get
there in time, my friend. What I would
say is that this feels kind of floaty,
like it's tuned for comfort more than
for handling or road feel, which is fine
because in fairness, it's not positioned
as a performance car. It's positioned as
a practical hybrid SUV intended to
represent a cross-section between rugged
usability and daily driver appeal.
Internal combustion married to the
long-term fuel savings of an EV, a sort
of best of both worlds. I'm not sure the
point is to be interesting or even
engaging. It's to be agreeable,
unchallenging, and incapable of letting
you down because it's not promising
anything more than a low-frills option
for husbands whose dream vacation is an
unbothered trip to his own bathroom.
For all the flak I gave to the 2004 Ford
Escape I reviewed, that had an endearing
kind of character to it. An SUV that
thought it was a sedan, a Ford Cruiser
with off-road ambitions and a Mazda
soul. But this is a homogenized product,
just uninspired engineering upholstered
in hard Lego store plastics. Yeah, you
buy it to save money, but people cut
their own hair to save money, and that's
not a great idea either.
Now, this was priced at around $36,000
new and could climb above $42,000
depending on trim. But even on the
expensive end, the idea is that you're
still ultimately coming out ahead on
fuel savings.
I'm looking all of this up in in
official brochure, but it claims that
the plug-in hybrid models have an
EPA-estimated combined range of 481
miles for model year 2022. But, this
changes when you break down the economy
for both systems.
EV efficiency is around 105 MPGe,
so miles per gallon equivalent, while
fuel economy tops out at 40 miles per
gallon on gasoline. Electric-only range
is 37 miles, which is better than the 32
miles achieved by such options as the
plug-in hybrid 2022 Hyundai Tucson and
2022 Kia Sorento. Yet, despite having a
60-mile round trip commute to work, my
fantastic volunteer Ryan has only had to
fill up gas twice so far in 2026.
Great right?
Well, not exactly. You see, for as good
as that mileage is,
it should be better. But, his overall
efficiency is far more limited than it
ought to be because of a system error
that prevents him charging past 80%.
And this ties into how many problems
this car has had.
Ryan has owned this fewer than 4 years,
and there have been numerous recalls in
that time over such things as the fuel
injector catching fire, the display
screen inverting and getting stuck that
way, or the battery shorting out to such
an extent that Ryan told me that Ford
recommended not charging it at all for a
year, which is kind of wild to me. But,
then when you look at it, even the stuff
that didn't warrant a recall are
frustrating enough that it made me
wonder why anybody would bother with
this car. Like the charging door getting
stuck, sometimes it won't open,
sometimes it won't close, and as Ryan
discovered, if you can't close it, you
can't drive it because the car wouldn't
let him go anywhere while the charge
door was open. So, he had to take the
heat gun to this thing countless times.
And while these are just one person's
experiences and not universal to every
Escape plug-in hybrid, I do think they
illustrate a car that probably needed
more time in development. I mean, at its
best, at its absolute best, it does
enough to feel modern and practical and
even pleasant because it doesn't leave
enough of an impression to make you
notice that it's underwhelming you. But
at its worst, this is a needy machine,
constantly asking for accommodation
rather than simply making your life
easier.
Okay, so you save on fuel, but how many
more recalls can I anticipate? What are
our odds of catching fire today? You
going to link the app this time or are
you going to lag again? These issues
have the potential to stack one on top
of the other until they're piled higher
than one of those trendy hipster bar
hamburgers that's meant to be
photographed instead of eaten because
even without the recalls, you're still
being treated to a painfully mid-tier
experience.
You'd think a plug-in hybrid SUV would
have been a layup for Ford, especially
with fuel costing what it does and
people looking for a car that's
versatile enough to be a good daily
while offering more utility than just
some standard sedan or even just some
standard SUV. I'm not surprised that
production costs were high, but I am
surprised that it still feels this cheap
and that it feels this disinterested in
showing any signs of life beyond bare
minimum functionality. This is a car
that projects an attitude of cooperation
and partnership, but ends up controlling
you through its neediness. And that
brings me back to the nice guy-ification
of the internal combustion Escape. A car
that, while not some paragon of
engineering excellence, still felt
substantial by comparison to this. The
Escape plug-in hybrid bites off more
than it can chew, like they wanted to
make a RAV4 hybrid and just gave up
halfway because it would require too
much work. Maybe in that sense, it isn't
the Escape plug-in hybrid that's the
nice guy, it's Ford themselves. Because
nice guys always try and outkick their
coverage, then rage quit when they come
up short. And Ford is doing the same
thing here as 2026 is reportedly going
to be the last model year for the
Escape. And by accepting and moving on,
Ford is already taking rejection better
than any nice guy you're likely to ever
meet. But that doesn't really absolve
Ford from making this seem like a much
more low-stress, capable car than it
actually is. And I get that advertising
isn't always about marketing to a
consumer's taste, but trying to convince
them to buy something they might not
have considered before. Because you
don't need to improve yourself or work
on your desirability if you can simply
convince someone to accept less. But
wearing somebody down is not the same
thing as winning them over. Okay, so you
got them to accept a car that's good
enough because it's available and it
makes sense. Being chosen doesn't
suddenly make the thing that's chosen
great. And the Escape feels like a car
that never achieves whatever potential
it might have had because trying was
beneath its dignity. Yet in that sense,
it can never lose [clears throat]
precisely because it wasn't really
trying. It's just doing enough to get
by.
The Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid EV is a
car that doesn't know how to win
because its idea of victory
is simply not being defeated.
All right, this is kind of a tough one
because conceptually, I just really did
not enjoy this car. I feel like it
presents a pragmatic option, yet it
risks causing as many headaches as it
solves. Like I said, at best, it's
blandly inoffensive, and at worst, I
could imagine a hard plaque of
resentment building against this because
it feels like it should be better than
it is, but it's not. It doesn't feel as
powerful as you're told it is, and it's
one battle after another with all the
recalls. Like they just fed a hungover
groom six cups of coffee, and then
shoved him into the chapel without
noticing the wet patch blossoming around
his crotch.
It's really not the worst hybrid in the
world. I would argue that it's not even
bad, really. It's just disappointing.
It's like I said, it's mid. It's not
going to make your life miserable every
time you have to drive it, and you will
save money driving this. But it also
doesn't feel like any great care went
into making this. All right, look. I'm
just going to wing it. I need to decide,
and I haven't. So, I'm just going to
roll the dice. Um
Uh bottom five.
You know what? No, it's not. This falls
in the crack of the race to the bottom.
It's neither top five nor bottom five.
It's just it exists. Because it's not
bad enough for me to truly rail against
it, but it's also not good enough that I
would ever really recommend this to
anybody. So, there you have it. The top
five and the bottom five remain the
same. I'd like to thank Ryan for
volunteering in the first place and
providing such a satisfying shooting
day, even though I didn't really like
your car. I'm sorry. If you'd like to
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Now, if you think you have a car that
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have a car that you think Brian would
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hey, thank you so much for watching.
Your viewership is enough, and I
appreciate it. Have an amazing
rest of your week.
>> And they say nice
guy
>> guy
>> go and drive a [music and singing]
plug-in hybrid. Nice guy
for my hobbies that [singing] way.
>> If you're a nice
>> Nice.
>> guy
>> Guy.
>> Drive the Ford Escape in silence. White
lies aren't simply mistakes.