Final U.S.-market Ford Edge rolls down the line April 26
The Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus for the U.S. market are built at the Ford Oakville Assembly Complex (OAC) in Ontario, Canada. Carscoops noticed that the union chapter that works the plant, Unifor 707, provided an update to its workers about what’s ahead in 2024 as the OAC retools to build five new electric vehicles. The third sentence in the update is this: “As communicated by the Plant Manager the last Edge is scheduled to be built on April 26th.” The Edge has been on death watch for at least four years, the summer of 2020 seeing the first public reports that Ford had killed its program to develop a next-generation Edge. In a span of 24 hours, Ford ignored the report, then denied it, then ignored it again, then talked around it to inquiring media and to Unifor 707. Insiders expected the execution to happen in 2023 or 2024, and although the speculated date has moved around a bit, here we are on schedule at the end of the road.
The 2024 Edge is the 2023 Edge, for obvious reasons, and you’ll be able to buy one for a while longer. The base SE starts at $39,960 after the $1,495 destination charge, the top tier ST starts at $48,700. This pricing is another sign of the Edge’s not being comfortable in the lineup. When we wrote in 2021 about purported reasons for the Edge’s demise, we said, “The Edge is said to be dead for good, thanks to Ford having four two-row crossovers in the lineup with the arrival of the hugely popular Bronco line, and a three-row Explorer that’s only $175 more expensive at the moment.” That Explorer is now nearly $1,600 less than the Edge in base form, an Explorer XLT not even $200 more than an Edge.
So ends 14 years of life for a very popular crossover. Since the Edge’s first full year on sale in 2007, the midsizer has fallen short of 100,000 sales in the U.S. on just three occasions: The Great Recession year of 2009, and the Covid recovery years of 2021 and 2022. And even those years weren’t bad, the Edge doing numbers in the mid-to-upper 80,000s. In 2023, the Edge was at cruising altitude again with 106,098 units moved in the U.S.
The only remaining Edge will be the modern, three-row Chinese-market version that debuted last year as the Edge L, built built in Ford’s factory in Changan, China. The Lincoln Nautilus will continue for our market as a Lincolnized version of that Chinese Edge. The 2024 Nautilus debuted last year, Ford recently using to announce the 48-inch display known as the Lincoln Digital Experience.
Next year, the Escape is slated to follow the Edge into the abyss. Assuming that happens, Ford’s combustion-engined SUV lineup would be down to the Bronco Sport, Bronco, Explorer and Expedition.
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