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Old 05-03-2017, 06:54 PM   #1
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2016 Freelander Micro Ford 350HD

Hello! i have the above, bought Apr 2016. Have almost 20,000 miles on it. Would like to form a group, if there's an interest. thanks.
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Old 05-08-2017, 02:45 AM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kaybothell View Post
Hello! i have the above, bought Apr 2016. Have almost 20,000 miles on it. Would like to form a group, if there's an interest. thanks.
Is this for the Ford Transit gas or diesel chassis.
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Old 05-08-2017, 10:22 PM   #3
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Gas.
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Old 05-09-2017, 01:21 AM   #4
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Great!
We too, have a gas Transit. Ours is the Coachmen Orion 20CB. We would love to have a group of Transit based motorhome owners. Wished there were more on this forum. We bought ours at the end of March this year. And when we were doing research, it was very hard to find anyone who owned one. I know they are selling well. All that we were looking at are now gone from the dealers lots. What I found attractive in these motorhomes was the better mpg than either of the Ford V10 engines. We plan on doing some long distance traveling in the future and don't want mpg hurting our budget. I'm curious what miles per gallon you have been getting with yours?
We also like the fact you really don't need to tow a vehicle to get around your destination. With the small size you can get around just as easy as a large pick up.
Maybe we could bounce questions off each other until we can get more people involved. Like I said I could find so little when doing research before buying from actual owners. Everything I did find was positive. Only small issues were discussed.
So would love to hear back from you with your likes and dislikes on the motorhome. And I will share anything I know about it. And share our likes or dislikes. I am on the forum most days, so you wouldn't have to wait long for a response. I asked many questions and didn't get any replies until after we purchased ours. If we could get a group together it would help out people looking to buy one. Or just looking for an answer to a question one of us might know.
Can't wait for more owners to join in. Although they may move us to the owners forum. That would be okay since I found nothing there for these Transit motorhomes.
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Old 05-14-2017, 03:31 PM   #5
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hello.

shortly after we bought our 2016 Freelander Micro last April we took a trip West, think we had 12,000 mi on it when we arrived home! Made another trip to FL and TX this spring to add another 2000+ miles. Not bad for just a year old! The things that impressed us to buy were: more narrow: 7.5 ft vs 8.5 for most Class C. No slideouts, keeping it lighter. Since my husband is disabled, i do the driving and i wanted a rig that is easy to handle. Turns out it is. I gave up some comfort to have this rig: the full size bed in back is not big enuff for 2 people, imo, and both my husband and I are small. I made a permanent bed out of the sofa/table area. I find that trying to sleep on fitted cushions is just not comfortable so I bought a 3" foam to place over the made-up bed.We just leave it that way and use TV trays to eat from, then put them away. Actually, when we first bought it i was hiking up/down to the cabover to sleep, too old for that! The one thing i wish Ford had not done is placing the emergency brake where it is. It's hard to move around from front to back. But, we knew that going in. I wish i could relay this info to Ford, so they would fix it for future versions, altho it doesn't help me now. I will see what i can do to create an owners' forum. Goodbye for now! Kay
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Old 05-14-2017, 05:22 PM   #6
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Freelander Micro, 20CB

Hello, just checked with admin, and they will not form an owners forum for our type rigs until there's more interest. there should be quite a few owners by now and i'm eager to see what they have to say.
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Old 05-14-2017, 05:25 PM   #7
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username

p.s. i just had admin change my username.
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Old 05-24-2017, 01:46 AM   #8
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Hello again, Kay.
I just wanted to tell you that I just found an old video of a sales walk-through of a 2016 Freelander micro 20cb. It is the exact same floor plan as our Orion 20cb. They are both made by Coachmen so I think they are pretty much exact. The only differences that I could tell were the colors.

I see you have some good long trips made in yours. We have only made one long weekend trip so far in ours. A total of just under 500 miles. We are both still working so we don't get a lot of time off. We plan on taking a longer trip in late summer or very early fall. Our purchase was made to have a motorhome for retirement. And go see the sights we have wanted to see all our lives.

You mention that you find the rear bed too small. We too are small people. I don't find it too small as much as very difficult to get into it. Once in we found it to be very comfortable. I was up in the cab over bunk once to make an adjustment to tv cables and I agree that was no treat. That is a space more for children.

I never thought about using the dinette as a bed. I knew it converted but it doesn't seem long enough for an adult. But if it works for you and your husband I say go for it. We actually really enjoyed our evenings at the dinette.

I agree that this motorhome is so easy to drive that it doesn't even feel like it is as big as it is. One thing I did do was let the grey tank fill to 2/3 and the fresh water tank at 2/3 to see how it handled with the extra water weight and I couldn't even tell it was there. We had weighed the motorhome once we were on our way and I knew we were way under the limits for weight.

We really like our motorhome. We have found nothing wrong so far. Everything we have tried to to use has worked as it should. Our dealer was very good as to explain and demonstrate how everything worked and had me and my wife do everything so we wouldn't forget what he showed us.

After our trip I waited a few days and asked her what she thought about the motorhome. She said she really likes it. She really enjoyed everything about it but that at times it felt a little tight, like preparing a meal then washing dishes. But we both agreed that it actually adds to the charm.

As I stated in a previous post we bought this for some long trips and to get the better mpg. Our plans are for trips to national parks in California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota from where we live in Georgia. We kinda agreed that after our long voyages we would maybe look for something a little bigger for trips closer to our area. If things work out as we plan we may become full timers in retirement. But I think you would agree that more room would be needed for that.

One question that I had asked in a previous post that you didn't reply to was what mpg you were getting? I got about 12.5 on our short trip but that had mountains and some interstate driving in it that I was going faster than I really wanted to go.

Well that's about it for now. I will reply with any answers to any questions you may have.

Frank
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Old 05-25-2017, 07:09 PM   #9
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ORION

Hello. I didn't realize you have a 2017. I just saw the Orion when i went to the dealership the other day to get a key to lock the outside storage. I just thought of something very important to tell you. On our first trip last summer we had a breakdown and had to be towed. Ford had to replace a part, and we were down 5 days waiting to get it done. I would guess they remedied that problem with the 2017s. I just looked in my maintenance folder to find out what that part was, but the paperwork isn't in there. It had to do with the choke. It was a module that had to be replaced. I'm pretty sure it was corrected tho, because Ford spent quite a bit of money towing us 2 or 3 times to get it fixed. They indicated that several 2016 owners that spring-summer had the same occurrence, so i would bet it's been corrected. P.S. the Orion i looked at was beautiful! More amenities, nicer detailing than our Micro. I would be very happy with it! Cheerio for now. p.s. i am getting about 12 mpg also, less if in the mountains.
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Old 05-26-2017, 12:27 AM   #10
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[QUOTE=mrsbonzell;3616219]Hello. I didn't realize you have a 2017. I just saw the Orion when i went to the dealership the other day to get a key to lock the outside storage. I just thought of something very important to tell you. On our first trip last summer we had a breakdown and had to be towed. Ford had to replace a part, and we were down 5 days waiting to get it done. I would guess they remedied that problem with the 2017s. I just looked in my maintenance folder to find out what that part was, but the paperwork isn't in there. It had to do with the choke. It was a module that had to be replaced. I'm pretty sure it was corrected tho, because Ford spent quite a bit of money towing us 2 or 3 times to get it fixed. They indicated that several 2016 owners that spring-summer had the same occurrence, so i would bet it's been corrected. P.S. the Orion i looked at was beautiful! More amenities, nicer detailing than our Micro. I would be very happy with it! Cheerio for now. p.s. i am getting about 12 mpg also, less if in the mountains.[/QUOTE


Hello,
Thanks for the heads up on engine problem. I looked it up on a Ford forum page. They are saying it is a throttle body sensor. Does that sound like what the dealer told you? This is causing the engine to not get the proper air /fuel mixture making the engine run rough and stall. The key was a lot of the posters there were saying the same thing you said. The dealers were replacing 4 to 5 a day and it is with all vehicles with this engine, Fusions and Mk's along with the Transit vans. I couldn't find any info on whether they have corrected the problem for 2017 models. I almost want to go order one to keep on hand should this happen to me. Did you say that it happened 2 or 3 times? Or just once with multiple tows? Usually an auto manufacturer will have put all their engineering staff and that of the supplier to find and correct the problem when these things happen. Just so sorry it happened to you. Also I had known about a problem with the mass air sensor that I had read about before we bought. One person complained about this and said it was a design problem with the air intake from the hood of the van. It is pretty much the same way all vehicles get their air to the engine so not sure what he was talking about. I didn't find any others complaining about it though.

Also you mention the Orion. You say more amenities and nicer detail. In all the pictures and the video I saw things look pretty much the same as the Freelander. Just color differences. Although I haven't seen one in person. The only thing that I am sure is different is the mattress. This was an upgrade to a 12 inch thick Serta. Very comfortable. From looking at so many smaller class c's I couldn't believe how thick that mattress is.

Thanks again for the the info. I wish we had more time to be in ours so I could send you things we have learned about. I will keep in touch when we find anything out that we can pass along.

So goodby for now and happy travels.
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Old 05-27-2017, 05:03 PM   #11
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throttle body sensor

the above captioned sounds like the correct part for the issue we had. Once it started happening, the Ford would only run a mile, or even a few miles b4 it would again shut down. We had traveled from the East coast to Idaho, to SLC, Utah, to western Nevada, and into Utah again, near Moab, without any incident, before the first shut down. We were towed into Moab (the Ford dealership there didn't know what to do) then to Grand Junction CO to an authorized repair shop (not a dealer) who could have fixed it, but Ford wouldn't give them the authorization (so why did they tow us there...we don't know!) We were then towed to Vernal, Utah! The dealership there said they had heard of this issue. I had asked them ahead to order the part as diagnosed by the Grand Junction shop, so it arrived the next day, we were on our way by 2pm, after 6 days down! I haven't heard of that other issue, but maybe i'd better look into it b4 our next trip (altho we've already been to TX and back this spring!) with no incident. I hope you folks get to do some traveling when you can. Your day will come! I know how you feel. We longed for the day when we could travel fulltime. Then before he retired, my husband had a serious stroke (from a brain tumor surgery) that left him paralyzed on the right side. He still can drive, tho! He stopped driving last year because of bad eyesight, but we're getting that corrected with cataract surgery, one eye done, the next one in June! So you see, where there's a will, there's a way! Best regards, Kay Bothell (i didn't want my real name visible as a username so changed it to a mispronounced version of our name-ha ha!)
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