So this is about the 5th wheel bearing replacement on our 04 Escape to date. I have posted on this problem before and again we have yet another wheel bearing failure, just like clockwork. It is also an expensive repair the way the Escape is designed, the service person I talked to said it's a press in bearing and is sometimes difficult to extract and get replaced. Great, again I question the design of this vehicle. As I have mentioned before I have owned older vehicles from the 1970s and 1980s with never a single bearing failure with well over 200,000 miles and they are usually easy to get to and service. Not to mention the older bearings I have seen are all roller type which to me make them last a lot longer. It appears that the newer vehicles have ball bearings. Why have engineers not used the proven ways from the past 100 years, why go and use a different design? Obviously it is not working as after 188,000 miles, we have replaced every single wheel bearing to date, and I believe now we have replaced at least one of them two times now. The first failures I recall were at around 50,000 miles. This is ridiculous!!! So, again I am forced with throwing money at this vehicle. I hope Ford has learned from its mistakes like this.

This is the third set of wheel bearings we have replaced. The first set (both fronts) went at 50K miles!! Way too premature. Then again, almost like clockwork, both front and back were replaced around 100K miles. Now yet again, we are replacing one side in the back at 178K miles. I have had two other vehicles in my lifetime with over 200K miles that had never had a single bearing failure, and this one has less miles and 3 failures. Almost to the point that it's predictable. This is just one failure of MANY suspension failures we've had with this vehicle, too many to list. This tells me the components are extremely weak for the tire and vehicle size, which is an engineering fault. I had always been a big Ford truck fanatic, but this Escape has shown me that Ford's quality has gone completely out the window on its newer vehicles. Once I get rid of this Escape, I will NEVER do business with Ford ever again.