jrm223

Here's a picture I found of a 2014 online with the three-seater, but it's RHD instead of LHD. You'd need to find & import a 2-passenger seat from a LHD in Europe. Here's a link for more pictures, but the price shown is just the RHD seat covers only, lol. See here for more pics, lift-up seats, storage, etc.

Windguy got the pics up already, so I won't put more here. But, if you go to my profile and then Albums, there's pics from when I took out my floor the first time & some of the pics have a measuring tape showing depths and such. I will say that if you don't care about having the plastic steps by the sliding doors, you can just squeak a 60" wide chest toolbox on top of those brackets in Windguy's first pic (the silver brackets at bottom of pic, the plastic steps normally mount to them). Right now I have a 48" chest in that spot and it's too narrow, but I have a 60" that I'm still cleaning grease and crud out of because the guy I bought both boxes from is a diesel mechanic. When the 60" is ready, the 48" may go by the back barn doors, instead. I'll have to get a pic of the setup soon, supposed to be decent temps here in a couple days so I can get the extra junk out of the van.

On the 2nd gen, AC is standard, but power locks/windows are "Optional", but pretty much every dealer around specs their lot orders with power L/W since everyone expects them these days. Like Fifty150 said, you'll want the LWB for the extra length to work with, but the lower roof is not-so-great on G2, so there's tradeoffs. You'll have the footwell behind the front seats to work with, though - you might be short enough to stand fairly comfortably there even with the lower roof. I'm 6ft tall, so I still have to hunch over when standing in that well. If you get a cargo van, take out the false floor to be able to use the deeper well; reports are that some/most 2014's are welded in, but all 2015+ are just bolted in. The length of floor in LWB behind the front seats is right around 7ft or so, near floor level.

That looks to only affect the passenger wagons in Europe, not the cargo vans. Ford is doing essentially the same thing here in the states, stopping car production by 2022 except for Mustang & the new Focus Active (I think that was the name of it, some crossover thing that just recently came out & looks similar to Subaru Outback). All we'll have here is 'Stang, trucks, SUV's and CUV/crossovers because passenger car sales are abysmal.

This is the first I've heard of terrible wear on the Conti tires. I swapped mine out at 73K miles and they were still somewhere around 1/16+" above the wear bars at that point. I'll have to look again when I get home from work tonight. Since they still have a glimmer of life, those tires are still sitting in my garage at home, because the tire shop gave them back to me for "just in case" spares when I had the General Grabbers put on.

OEM tires are Continentals, at least on my 2015. My van wheelspins easily ever since new, completely empty (no heavy load), flat dry pavement or wet and still even with the 215/65R16 General Grabber AT2's that I had put on about 10-15K miles ago. These just have a lot of torque off a stop, so you need to keep real light on the skinny pedal, haha.

I was trying to figure out how to get that off, but didn't want to break it. I reckon that will probably require the panel trim tools to safely remove it, yea? For right now, the wire comes out just ahead of that triangle, goes around the outside and then back into the door opening - ghetto as all get out, but I didn't want to chance breaking that piece of triangle plastic. But at least my van and the wire are both black (who knows why Curt would send black for the positive power, although it uses a white ground - which is house wiring color scheme, white neutral).

There's nothing back there except fuel inertia cut-off and taillight wiring, as shown here. Fifty150, the taillight converter has a ground ring terminal attached for a screw-to-body ground, so I temporarily put that on one of the hinge support bolts - in the pic above, they're on the right side D-pillar, but of course I used a driver-side bolt where the converter is. I ran a temporary power wire off the underhood fuse box on Saturday because I was expecting to be bringing a trailer home yesterday, but the tires on it ended up being real bad so first I need to get some tires this week, lol. The lights do work fine, though, I towed the trailer 3-4 miles to another buddies house. I did buy another ball hitch and set it up in the raised position and I can use that other drop ball on my F350 when I get it on the road.

Well, I see you did finally get the hitch off. But, I'll still post this pic from the other thread that someone mentioned (where a guy added the Ford hitch to his non-equipped TC wagon), just in case anybody else needs to remove the factory hitch for any reason in the future. Underneath the van, directly ahead of the rear bolts, will be one of these on each side. This is the same hole that the Curt and other aftermarket hitches use to fish-wire bolts for the forward mount points (the empty hole in pic). For those who mentioned running the Ford & aftermarket hitch to strengthen a hitch platform, the Ford one would need to be removed so the aftermarket can be installed, then put the Ford one back into place.

For what it's worth, I can provide these pictures of my 2015 TC LWB cargo model. As you can clearly see, there's no fuse panel and no extra harnesses that would plug into a trailer module. I'm not really sure what the module is on the passenger side by the sliding door, probably an inertia fuel cut-off in case of serious accident? I never have paid much attention to it.

I finally got my van 'hitched' yesterday, woo hoo! Took me 20 minutes to install by myself. Still need to run power wire for the Curt 56218 trailer light adapter, though. My van doesn't have the rear power fuse panel, so I have extra work required to get power to the module. And talk about low, I'll need to flip that ball to get a decent height. I'm used to knee-busters on my past trucks, but this one is an ankle-buster! Never mind the dirtiness, I live in rural ranch country in a town with gravel roads. I can clean it in my yard, leave it out to dry and it'll be dirty again an hour later without any driving... So I just hose/rinse it off every so often.

I don't know what Ford models y'all have across the pond, but here in the US the steering wheel is compatible between Focus, Edge, Escape, TC, and probably some other models.

From Blackstone themselves - "We always recommend using an oil grade recommended for your engine by the manufacturer and a brand that fits your budget. But beyond that, we find that brand makes very little difference. If there were an oil that consistently out-performed the rest of them, we’d have no reason to keep that information secret, but we just haven’t found that oil yet. ... One of the best-kept secrets of the oil industry is that these store brands are actually the same, quality oils that are produced by the major oil companies." https://www.blackstone-labs.com/which-oil-to-use/ On a somewhat related note, I rolled 92K yesterday, so I'm getting close to knocking down that 100K in my van, lol. Only big issue I've had is the ambient air temperature sensor, I had to get that replaced in 2016, somewhere around the 30K mile mark or so.

There's somebody in the forum here that has the Fiberine top, I can't remember their name now. As I recall, it was around 12" or so, instead of the 22" model. Come to think of it, when I last looked at the Fiberine website, I think they only showed 22" available for the TC1, not the TC2 (2014+).

Digital gauges are generally always suspect, they should only be used as a rough guide. The only way to know your true mileage is dividing miles traveled by the gallons put into the tank to fill back up. I have larger-than-stock all-terrain tires and I'm averaging 23-24 MPG hand-calculated (including correcting the indicated miles on the tripmeter to adjust for the tire size; in my case, multiply the tripmeter by 1.059 and then divide by gallons of gas). My van is an XL, though, so it doesn't have the fancy MPG display and such, haha.