I have one friend that bought into Flex because he had to be different. And he will now learn the cost of being different. Following the herd makes sense in a lot of instances, especially when "different" doesn't offer any real superiority.
I've NEVER seen anyone using Flex in the real world. As I think I said on page one, they probably had 1% of the cordless tool market in the US.
There is FLEX, and there is FLEX cordless.
Both are owned by the same company.
FLEX at one point was, and may still be, one of the high end names in auto detailing for polishers.
Porter Cable at one point owned FLEX, and the Porter Cable polisher was the cheaper FLEX alternative.
After Black & Decker bought Porter Cable/Delta, FLEX hot sold off, and purchased by Chervon, who had likely already been manufacturing some cordless tools for FLEX, and also doing manufacturing for other brands like Bosch, (and probably still are).
Chervon also bought the Skil brand from Bosch.
As far as the 24v line goes, I suspect that was to separate out the FLEX tools sold at Lowes from the 18v FLEX cordless tools sold to industrial suppliers that sell the fairly expensive FLEX polishers to detailers, and maybe other industrial FLEX tool dealers.
Given some of the tests Torque Test Channel guy has done using higher voltage batteries in tools designated for lower voltages, I sort of wonder if the 24v batteries could be used in other tools if an adapter was supplied. (Preferably a fairly slim adapter since a lot of aftermarket adapters are sort of big).
The newer cordless tools FLEX is coming out with look nice.
Various obscure Chinese tool brands seem to be doing well on Amazon, so if Lowes ditches FLEX 24v tools, maybe Chervon will just start selling the tools thru Amazon if no other major retailer takes the FLEX brand.
Alternatively, maybe Lowes will simply have adapters made so that the Kobalt 24v batteries can be used on FLEX tools, or vice versa, since Lowes has done that with some of their weird Kobalt hand tools in the past.
