Steve Fumarolo

ETIS won't show a build date until the build is completed. Have you tried grabbing your sticker? The build date appears there about a week before the build.

I have. My first car had leather and I absolutely hated it. That being said, I know there are some people who have had the opposite experience. I know it's a wide split in people who like or dislike them, but that's only why I'd love for Ford to offer more choice. I don't think I'm the only one that's not a fan of leather.

As my wife and I were researching what car we were going to get, we narrowed down to the Focus or Escape. It was very frustrating that heated cloth was an option on the Focus, but on the Escape, the only way to get heated seats was with leather. I know leather seats are a love/hate thing, and I happen to be on the hate side. I would have loved to get my wife heated seats for our cold Chicago winters, but ultimately, the discomfort of leather for our hot and humid summers won out. I know there's a lot of other people disliking leather like I do, and it just seems silly to me that the option to heat cloth seats is available on some cars, but not others, especially on models that are very similar in pricing.

Very helpful! I'll do more digging around this, but the descriptions are spot on to what I'm hearing in my Focus. This definitely gives me a good place to start!

I'm in suburban Chicago, and I really have seen a lot of both flavors of the PI. I guess I haven't seen any numbers before, but now that I see what others have posted here, I feel like I have seen more of the PIUs than PISes. That just means seeing a lot more utilities than sedans, in general, since Ford has owned a good share of the market in our area anyway.

I can see both sides of the argument. I am a programmer, and although the "technical" part of this would be easy, there's a lot of other thought that would have to go into it. I can see why Ford wouldn't want you to have to the second info about shipping, etc. so that people are camped out at shipping yards. But that problem has already been solved with airplane tracking... just add a delay. Allow us to track it through the factory, then delay shipping info by 24 hours or something. That'd be good enough for most of us! My sister ordered a Fusion last fall that was built at the Hermosillo plant. That was my first experience with trying to decode window stickers. In retrospect, the codes on the sticker show it was scheduled to build about a week after she ordered. The sticker doesn't show a build date like it does for some of the other models, so I don't know how long it took from there, but then the car wasn't delivered for another 3 months. The dealer was at a loss, and they said they didn't have any more info. Now my wife and I ordered an Escape on 3/1 with the dealer, which they put into DORA on 3/3. Dealer claims they won't have info until a VIN is assigned, which from what I'm reading on the forums isn't necessarily true. By the way, even going on 4 weeks later, we're still waiting on a VIN. Even if the tracking offered is vague, I'd just like to know the status. I don't need nitty-gritty details, but I'd like to not feel like my 6-8 week estimate I was originally given is starting to feel very unlikely.

On my 2009 SES (with moonroof), I have a buildup of some kind of fluid on the passenger side, somewhere right in front of the passenger compartment. Whenever I accelerate, I can hear it moving around. Of course, the one time I asked my dealer about it, the car decided not to have the issue. Anyone had any issues with rogue water building up somewhere that you could hear it floating around?

Just stumbled upon these forums, and seems like a great place to share info! Bought my 2009 Ford Focus SES 4D the week after I graduated from college, and now my wife and I are waiting for our 2014 Ford Escape to arrive from the factory. Bought my Focus pretty much because Sync was new at the time, and no other manufacturer had anything like it at the time. I'll keep coming back to Ford, especially if the product lineup continues advancing like it has the last few years!