-The midsize sedan segment is one of the most popular in the U.S. Cars like the Toyota Camry, Nissan Altima, and Honda Accord have all gotten recent updates.
Now, Ford comes to the fray with the 2013 Fusion.
Let's see how it stacks up against the competition.
This Titanium badge means that this Fusion is a top trim level.
This car has a spoiler across the back.
We also have this nice
exhaust port flushed with the rear fascia.
This car also has a sort of fastback roof line.
That's also pretty popular these days.
You see that in a lot of cars.
And now, we get to [unk] this car.
It really looks pretty.
That's in the front end.
You have this nicely contoured hood.
We've got these slit headlights.
And we've got this grille.
This grille is Ford's most recent design element.
You see this on the Fiesta and the Focus as well.
But let's get under the hood and see what's really important here.
What's that?
The sound of direct injectors.
That clatter is unmistakable.
This car also has a turbocharger.
This is one of Ford's EcoBoost engines.
It's a 2-Liter four-cylinder that gets up to 240-horsepower and 270 pound-feet of torque.
Those are great numbers for a midsize sedan.
That's what you used to get with the V6s.
Ford is doing it with the four-cylinder.
That also means 21 miles per gallon city, 32 miles per gallon highway.
Not fantastic numbers, but certainly better than the V6 and with all that power as well.
In the cabin here, we have these two screens on either side of the speedometer.
Left screen showing fuel economy information and basically driving information.
The right hand side, we've got infotainment functions that I can cycle through with these buttons and see my phone, navigation, entertainment, and climate control settings.
We also get that same information on the center LCD.
Now, this is the touch part of it.
One thing I've noticed on this vehicle is
the navigation seems a little more reactive.
It's-- It actually follows the location of the car better.
I've had problems with that on the Focus and the C-MAX where the GPS antenna doesn't seem to be very strong and so it takes a little while to get the location of the car down.
Here, I've had no problem with the system finding the location of the car.
We also have in the system is this "i" button here, which has Sirius travel link, so we get weather, sports info, ski conditions.
We get nearby traffic, movie
listings even, and fuel prices.
And fuel prices is actually one of my favorites 'cause you can look down on those lists and they'll show you all the nearby gas stations with the price per gallon.
Just hit that setting.
It will automatically throw it into the navigation system, so you can drive right to that gas station where you'll get cheapest gas.
One problem that remains with this touchscreen is that it reacts really slowly, much slower than you expect from a phone or other electronic device.
And that's a problem for Ford.
Fortunately, there's a way around that in these cars.
You can
use voice command for just about everything in this car.
So I can tap the voice command button.
Play artist Fleet Foxes.
-Say a line number or say none of those.
-One.
-Playing artist Fleet Foxes.
-And also, with the Sony system in this high-trim titanium car, we get 10 speakers around the cabin.
Really good sound.
Really tight and well-balanced.
With the Sony system, you get a big volume knob in the middle and all these little touch buttons around here that control climate control,
the sources, and tuning and all the sort of stuff.
On the console here, we have the shifter for a six-speed automatic, the only choice transmission with this car.
It's got the normal P-R-N-D settings plus there's a support setting and I've got manual shift paddles here on the steering wheel.
But what this car really has overall the other midsize sedans out there are a lot of driver assistance features.
What I'm interested in is we've got blind spot monitoring.
We've got adaptive cruise control.
We've got a lane keeping assistant.
And we also have
automatic parallel parking.
And you don't find those types of features on other midsize sedans in this range.
Now, trying out the driver assistance features.
Right now, I'm in pretty slow traffic and I've got the adaptive cruise control set for 50 miles per hour, but I'm only going about 20 because the car in front of me is going about 20 and in all this traffic too.
My blind spot monitors are showing when I've got cars to my left side right now 'cause I'm in the right lane.
It will show a little
icon blinking in the left hand mirror when there's a car in my blind spot back here.
Once I get above about seems like 35 or 40 miles an hour, the lane keeping assist can start to work.
That's when I see the little line turned green to show that the car is recognizing the lanes.
So that means if I drift to the side a little bit, this car just actually steered me back into my lane because I let it drift off to the right.
As far as the driving experience goes,
in a midsize sedan, I feel like the car should drive really easily.
It should be the kind of car you can kind of jump in and just drive to the grocery store, and to a large extent, I think this Ford Fusion accomplishes that task, but I do find there's some turbo lag with this engine.
When I kicked down the accelerator, there's a little moment where it kind of thinks about it then it gets going and you kind of hear that slight hesitation before it really kicks in.
It's not a lot, but it's something.
Suspension is tuned a little rigid.
This is definitely not a soft ride from this car.
It's a relatively smooth ride, but when you go for bumpy bits of the road, you really feel it.
Overall, I think the ride works pretty well.
I like it.
There are some things that interfere slightly with that midsize sedan experience such as the turbo lag, but overall, it works nicely and the driver assistance features certainly add a lot to it.
Let's price out our 2013 Ford Fusion.
The titanium level, this car costs $30,200 and includes quite a few options, like the MyFord Touch system and the Sony audio system as well.
We also have $2,000 for the all-wheel drive system, $1,000 for a driver assist package that gets you blind spot monitoring and those goodies, $995 for adaptive cruise control, $795 for the automatic parking system,
$795 for the navigation system.
That comes to a total of $35,785 which puts this fully loaded Ford Fusion pretty solidly in the premium car territory, but it's got a lot of tech that sets it apart from the midsize competition.
