Yeah, my garage is a filthy mess, mostly because of my tractor, and yes, the attachments take up so much space!  I'm considering building racks for them and get a set of pallet forks to lift them up to store them on the racks to save space.

Maybe your girlfriend is "boring?"  😄    It's OK to be boring.  My girlfriend in high school dumped me because I was boring.  3 years later I called her up and asked her out again.  She said yes, and now we've been married almost 28 years.  I guess boring wasn't so bad after all!  Now our kids tell us that we're both boring!  😄    Side note, we had 3 Escapes (plus the one we bought for my 17 year old daughter to drive) and my mother-in-law is on her third.  Boring seems to be a theme around these parts!

Hopefully wit some type of midgate available for longer stuff.  4 feet is too small for hauling pipes or wood.

Seems Shelby would rather sell their own versions than sell Ford the licensing.  Can't blame them.

People like familiarity.  I'm sure she loved it but all 5 of those were heavily discounted to compete with GM and the Asians.  8% margin on a $30k car is only $2400 net profit.  Add a $3k rebate and you're losing money.  Contrast that with Bronco Sport and Maverick that was selling at or over MSRP without rebates and therefore supported a big price increase.     Rav4 platform was built to be low cost from the get go and has been amortized over decades so they can make money even at lower prices.  That's where Ford is trying to go with new products and new platforms based on ce1 learnings.    

When I tried to find the new Rav4 daughter wanted they would hit the dealer inventory when the order hit the factory and within 2-3 days they were sold.  Got lucky and found one that just hit the website and got a deposit down.   It's a crying shame Ford didn't build a new C2 hybrid Edge for North America.

I think the bed (going by the above photo) is going to be roughly the same size as the Maverick, but the passenger cab/greenhouse is going to be larger.    Also the patent drawings are going to be a very general approximation of it too-we just don't know how the surface detailing is going to look on it. 

I think the issue is just company inertia for almost the past 50 years-   Smaller cars in the 1980s where only being built to keep plants busy and for CAFE offsets of larger more profitable products. There was really no thought given to how to make smaller products cheaper to build so they would generate a profit. You can see that with the 2013-2020 Escape-the EU Kuga was too high end for the NA market and there was growth of features to the point that the mid level product line was better equipped outside of leather/wheel size vs the top trim model from 4 years prior.    The real question is how much of the assembly/engineering of the CE1 platform from the assembly standpoint can actually be applied to ICE products. EVs are inherently less complex to assemble because they have less parts. I'm not sure how the new assembly process can help cut back on how much it costs to pay UAW workers to assemble products in the USA at least.    The only way that I can see less expensive products become more profitable for Ford is that they are EVs and the costs of batteries are so cheap and having a smaller battery pack won't hurt expected range or performance

I think the Rivian thing was more about being beholden to an external source vs having a partnership with them. I'm assuming the VW group went with Rivian because they had no other choice due to external factors pressing on them.    It is the same situation as Ford has with VW-they went with the VW platform because they thought it would be the cheapest/best route to getting more EVs to market. I'm also considering that Ford has also decided to cut back on Ford EU doing engineering for new projects also and those engineering assets will be more NA based.   Finally, maybe Ford figured it out that doing its own skunkworks CE1 project (after doing just about everything else) was the best path forward for them for the future. 

She doesn't "love" cars, but I don't know of anything stronger than a 5 time repeat buyer.