Yep, I checked that this morning when I plugged in the OBDII and it checked out fine, read 70 cold and 213 hot.
FWIW, the muffler fell off my Escape recently. The bolts that hold the two halves together at the flange rusted right through.
Funny you say that, I forgot that I actually replaced mine some time back. The old one worked still but something was loose inside it and made quite a ruckus so found one for $40 on amazon and tossed it on for the sake of the neighbors lol.
Well, just got done battling 2 bolts on the intake manifold for most of the day, oh and got the PCV replaced. The old hose was collapsed but actually not leaking much. I did find another small vacuum leak but not enough to make a different I am afraid.
After starting it back up , it started a bit better and idled a bit better but only slightly. Driving was exactly the same, zero power at all.
I then ran a compression test, all good at 200psi across the board.
The spark plugs did look a bit rusty? No idea why, I wire wheeled them and tried again with no improvement.
I am at a loss, everything I check seems to be fine yet is still has zero power at all. Been quite some time since a Car had me stumped.
Maybe a bad ECU? That seems very unlikely and very hard to test since it would be expensive to buy a replacement.
Lack of power without other signs is almost always an ignition problem.
Ignition or fuel. If you hook up a scan tool and run for codes that may be stored in the ecu that may tell you something. Is it misfiring? Other possibilities on a vehicle that old…if the compression is good (may want to do a leak down test, could have a worn valve seat or burned valve). Most of these issues would have a DTC with them, but sometimes it will fool you.
Clogged catalytic converter (seen this before)
Fuel pump or fuel pressure regulator
Fouled spark plugs (I know you cleaned them, but I would change them out for the Motorcraft thin wire double platinum)
Bad injector (but would have rough idle, hesitation)
Vacuum leaks (but you checked-also check evap vacuum lines and egr)
Bad ignition grounds
Failing ignition coil(s)
Dumb question. Have you measured fuel pressure under load?
All great advice. +1
I agree it is ignition or fuel but everything I test comes back clean which is the most annoying part.
Yep, already checked for codes, nothing active, stored or pending.
I looked at the intake valves when I have the intake off, they looked good, other then a little oil/carbon build up everything was in good shape.
Clogged catalytic converter (seen this before) - possible but the scan tool showed the correct temperature in it, I would think it would either be high or low if it was clogged.
Fuel pump or fuel pressure regulator - yes, my next thing to test, I checked the fuel pressure at idle and it was fine, going to test it driving tomorrow.
Fouled spark plugs (I know you cleaned them, but I would change them out for the Motorcraft thin wire double platinum) - yeah, also my next plan is to toss in some new plugs, although the lack of any kind of misfire doesn’t instill hope that this is the issue.
Bad injector (but would have rough idle, hesitation) - It is not a single injector for sure, it runs way too smooth for that, all of them being clogged is possible but no other signs of this being the issue, fuel trims are on point in the ECU.
Vacuum leaks (but you checked-also check evap vacuum lines and egr) - I checked all the vacuum lines, they are good now. Evap was checked. EGR I have only glanced at but saw nothing saying it has an issue and the ECU says it is working fine.
Bad ignition grounds - anything is possible, I checked a few grounds while I was under there and a bit dirty but nothing that concerned me.
Failing ignition coil(s) - I just replaced the coils like 5k miles ago but I do still have the old set (turned out they were ok), I plan to swap those in when swapping the spark plugs to see what happens.
I can only think of 1 time that a car got the better of me, one of my RX7’s was a money pit and finally got to the point I was fed up and put it up for sale and had it sold a few hours later. Broke even on it though lol.
If I could get into the tune on the ECU I am sure I could track the issue down, I always hate working on cars with locked ECU’s.
Not specifically, this was also my thinking since it idles fine (except when coming to a stop it will try to die sometimes) but has issues under load.
It was fine at idle but don’t remember checking under load.
I plan to test this tomorrow.
Thanks for the help everyone, this is the strangest issue I have run across in over 25 years of working on cars. Normally something is wrong and when testing things there are signs that can clue you into where the issue lies.
This car just says everything is great with no clues! lol
We used to duct tape a gauge to the windshield and drive around. Very common for lift pumps to fail this way… check fuel filter too. May be collapsed and clogged.
Yeah, done that before.
In this case it outputs the fuel pressure on the OBD, so it makes it a bit simpler lol.
Ok, just drove around with the ODB scanner and like before everything checks out with what I would expect.
Fuel pressure is good both at idle and while driving.
Only anomaly I found is a rather unhelpful “engine load” and “engine load absolute”
At idle these are sitting at 55% and 30% respectively. If I give it any gas or while driving it basically sits at 90-100%. This is also what it feels like, the transmission constantly downshifts and it just acts like it thinks it is under a high load.
The TPS reads the correct throttle position though, so not sure what is giving it this impression.
Only other thing that stood out was the MAP sensor was reading between 3-14psi depending on throttle position, but I think that is just relative vs absolute values.
Gonna grab some spark plugs later today and try my old set of coils to see what happens, these plugs were new when I got the car and I got the nicer plugs as well. New coils as well so strange they would already have issues if that is the case.
That’s actually not unhelpful. This points to an airflow calculation error, if I’m not mistaken. Could you report MAP values and check units (“Hg vs psi) with engine off, idle @ 0% TP, and at ~1200 rpm?
Before I dive in fully and look it up myself, does this only have MAP, or is there a MAF as well?
Also, when was the last time you’ve done a capacitive discharge/reset the ecm?
Yeah, I said “rather unhelpful” 
I will check the numbers again, nothing stood out when I looked at them before although there are a few different places it is reported.
It is a MAF + MAP setup, was actually not aware of the MAP until I took the manifold off and saw it mounted to the bottom.
I disconnected the battery all day yesterday while working on it, but maybe I need to do the full connect the battery leads together to discharge everything rout? I can try that tonight and leave it overnight.
Here are the values at idle, exactly what I would expect:
Here it is at ~1000-1200rpm:
And here is the load at idle:
I did see my first sign that it might be an ignition issue though, when watching the O2 sensor and holding ~3k rpm, I was getting a stumble / misfire intermitently and the O2 sensors would freak out when it happened leading me to think it was a misfire.
So maybe it is ignition related. I guess I will know in a little while.
Quick experiment proposal…
Pull the intake hose off so that the MAF isn’t in the flow path. Does it still run? How similarly?
Interesting idea, I will give that a try.
The second screenshot shows 0g/s MAF. Was the engine running at that time?