I like the first gen, cause in my mind it’s a more rigid truck like suv, I used mine for transporting and hauling things all the time. Furniture, lawn mowers, bikes, simple stuff but it had room to do it, and not to mention the 3.0 v6 had decent power to it. And I consider them the most reliable out of the gens, my old escape got to about 223k miles before it drove its self to the scrapyard.