2009 Honda Pilot vs. Ford Flex, Chevy Traverse, Hyundai Veracruz, Mazda CX-9, Toyota Highlander

2009 Honda Pilot vs. Ford Flex, Chevy Traverse, Hyundai Veracruz, Mazda CX-9, Toyota Highlander - Beat of a different Drummond: We compare six family haulers and, amazingly, drown none of them.

BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AARON KILEY
November 2008


When we last visited Michigan’s Drummond Island [“Mud Puppies,” February 2008], we compared nine Lilliput SUVs and quickly found ourselves in over our heads. Which is to say, we sank a Jeep Liberty. See, the island—a short ferry ride from the eastern tip of the state’s Upper Peninsula—is a 25-mile-long series of limestone bowls (which hold water) and cedar swamps (ditto) surrounded by Lake Huron (ditto times a million). Drummond Island, thou art thine own soggy enemy.

This time, we asked Drummond Island Resort’s driving expert, Craig Hoffman, to sketch out a somewhat drier 16-mile loop, two-thirds of which comprised twisty, smooth pavement and one-third of which bumped through the resort’s private off-road facility. On any off-roader’s scale of difficulty, these private trails (notice we said “private” twice?) hover wholly in Wally Cox territory yet still represent pretty much the worst that any owner would throw at his investment. Along this route, we then ran the vehicles back-to-back until the local bowling alley’s neon “BEER” sign lit up.

http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison_test/crossovers_and_suvs/2009_honda_pilot_vs_ford_flex_chevy_traverse_hyundai_veracruz_mazda_cx_9_toyota_highlander_comparison_test

2008 Ford Taurus X Limited

2008 Ford Taurus X Limited - Consider the attributes: First-rate crash ratings. Enough airbags to cushion a Mars lander. Seats for six or seven. Lighter than an Explorer, with a bit more cargo room. Minivan utility minus minivan stigma. Quiet interior. Rigid front-drive unibody. Ride quality that irons out lumps but maintains a hint of Euro firmness. Excellent all-around dynamics (although diluted by long stopping distances). All-wheel drive availability. Stability control standard.

With the exception of stability control, which is new for 2008, all these attributes applied to this vehicle when it made its 2005 debut as the Ford Freestyle. But if it was so terrific, why was it almost invisible? Could it have been the name, so easily confused with the Freestar minivan?

Ford has obviously thought better of that moniker, but there were more substantive issues—power, for one. A two-ton wagon was more than a 203-hp, 3.0-liter V-6 could propel with any zeal (0 to 60 in 8.2 seconds). And although our January 2005 road test gave the Freestyle’s continuously variable transmission a passing grade, this device was not loved by all. Then there was the bland styling, with its generic Ford face and cheap-looking wire mesh grille.

All of this adds up to a more desirable vehicle, albeit one that still defies easy classification. The shape says SUV, a message enhanced by a high seating position. But ground clearance is about the same as the Taurus sedan’s, and even with all-wheel drive (add $1850), off-road isn’t part of the deal here. Nor is there much towing capability (2000 pounds).

But if towing isn’t on your family menu, this X might mark your spot.

2006 Ford Futura Sprint GTA Wagon

2006 Ford Futura Sprint GTA Wagon - Forty-three years have passed and now comes another Futura Sprint, only this one’s a wagon based on the all-wheel-drive Ford of Europe platform that currently underpins the Asia-only Taunus and, of all things, the SEAT Toledo minivan.

But forget all that. What’s important about the Futura Sprint is that wagons are apparently again in vogue, despite the best efforts of Detroit marketers, who have, in recent years, applied the term “crossover” to so many models that the transgender community raised holy hell from Cleveland to Cedar Point.

The car’s New England designer, Emmett L. Brown, apprenticed for J Mays, and the two have long agitated for a wagon “from the early Beach Boys era — a woody without the wood.” Brown’s best-known previous creations include the Ford Cinnamon concept shown in Turin and — laugh if you will — a $900 art deco countertop radio for Panasonic that made it all the way to the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.

The dash and the IP are perhaps too relentlessly retro, with five memory pushbuttons on the radio and a push/pull headlight switch that doubles as a dimmer. Two of the steering wheel’s spokes are swathed in chrome, two are highlighted with what Ford swears is genuine teak veneer, and one is so populated by redundant radio controls that we don’t know what its surface is supposed to resemble.

The Futura Sprint GT/A is no rocket but does easily keep up with, say, a Chevy Malibu Maxx for the length of the quarter-mile. The car is more at home on a road course or skidpad, where its 17.5-inch Fulda Redcoats grip like Iowa chiggers, assisted by unflappable standard-issue Monroe triple-adjustable shocks, independently toggled to one’s preferred setting via a chrome rheostat next to the ashtray. The settings are imaginatively named. In order of firmness they are: Harbor Freeway, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Mulholland Drive. Brown reports that the original idea was for the firmest setting to be called “Good Vibrations,” but the marketing mavens nixed it.

The cushion on the Futura Sprint’s front bench is hewn from a single piece of high-tech memory foam that somewhat embarrassingly displays the exact contours of your backside for up to three minutes after you’ve departed. But the seatbacks — in keeping with the SoCal beach motif — are fashioned from the same webbing deployed so successfully in the costly Herman Miller Aeron office chair. We found those seatbacks stiff and unyielding, but at least they breathe and, like the cargo bay, are easily cleaned with a soapy scrub brush.

The somewhat featureless and uncarpeted cargo bay is a utilitarian touch in what is otherwise a stroll down Whimsy Lane, but it also seems to amplify road noise and echo whatever is on the radio — good if it’s Andrea Bocelli, bad if it’s the Mumps. The cargo bay looks as if it might swallow a surfboard, but no one surfs on the Detroit River, so we’re not sure.

Blue-oval execs say they’re aiming the Futura Sprint GT/A wagon at “the hip and clever 20-somethings who comprise the audience for reality TV shows.” To that end, they’ve contrived a bold new pricing policy that may prove too clever by half. Buyers must purchase the Futura Sprint in what Ford calls “provisional segments.” For instance, the chassis ($13,560) is naturally mandatory, as is an engine ($1150 to $2200, depending on output).

The Futura Sprint GT/A wagon is half the car that Ford intended but 108 percent the car that youthful singles at one time might reasonably have predicted. As such, that same old truism obtains: You can’t take to the bank what you still owe.

2007 Ford Expedition EL Limited 4X4

2007 Ford Expedition EL Limited 4X4 - If you think the Expedition EL is a big sucker, just wait till the Colonial III slides into showrooms. The book, which bills itself as “the comprehensive, all-color guide to the major spacecraft of the last century,” puts the TTA Colonial III’s cabin volume at 750,000 cubic dekameters, or 26.5 billion cubic feet. Finally, a vehicle you can toss a stroller into unfolded — and with a bit of extra knickknack room for, say, Las Vegas.

Yet the EL is smaller than the Excursion — at the wheelbase by 6.1 inches and bumper to bumper by 5.1 inches, the better to weave around apoplectic environmentalists. The EPA quotes no mileage figures for the EL, owing to its over-8500-pound gross weight rating. Ours ran 14 miles on a gallon.

No one could accuse the iron-block 5.4-liter V-8 and six-speed automatic transmission of getting off easily, what with 6280 pounds to tote in our EL Limited 4x4. The run to 60 mph is 9.0 seconds with all 300 horsepower and 365 pound-feet of torque working hard. The EL’s 8750-pound towing capacity (9000 with two-wheel drive) is down on a Suburban’s, which maxes at 9700. Still, it’s probably not worth waiting 38 years for the McKinley Ion Drive Model C2 to be invented.

The Expedition’s rear multilink suspension helps soften impacts and keeps the body stable and on course around freeway off-ramps. But even a tangle of control arms can’t lighten the EL’s heavy step or enliven its labored acceleration. The ride is commendably quiet, but parking the EL takes all the finesse of guiding the Colonial III between Saturn and its rings.

2008 Ford Escape Limited V-6 4WD

2008 Ford Escape Limited V-6 4WD - The small sport-ute segment is rapidly evolving, though, and for 2008, Ford is giving the Escape a face lift. It is still the same old Escape underneath, but with a new look—or a new face on the old look. The Escape’s new face will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a Ford SUV in the past decade.

For the Escape, that means cleaner sides and a new nose. A higher, more smoothly chamfered beltline over a barren rocker—less plastic cladding—adds visual height to the side view. A scaled-down, squared-off version of the trapezoidal grille and a power-bulge hood from the Explorer and Expedition mean that each of Ford’s SUVs is as unique as any wiener in a pack of Ball Park franks.

The Limited—only available with the V-6 and all-wheel drive—Escape we tested comes fitted with leather seats. The Limited Luxury package adds seat heaters and dual-zone climate control for $795. We found all seats—with the usual exception of the rear-middle one—to be comfortable, although none offers any substantial lateral support. Full-size adults in the second row might find that seat too upright for long stints.

One particularly hard point in the Escape is the center-stack and console surround. Vehicles with the tricolor tan interior get a classy sort of matte platinum trim here, but cars with the black interior, like our tester, have a high-gloss black plastic that looks cheaper than Kmart vending-machine jewelry and is so soft that our fingernails left scratches in it. Then again, we haven’t had a manicure in weeks.

And the driver will need to watch the road, because the Escape communicates about as well as a week-old corpse, and there’s nobody from CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, CSI: Deadwood, or even CSI: Juneau around. There’s a disconnect in the steering similar to watching a movie in which the sound is a 10th of a second off. You stare and stare until you begin to wonder if it’s all in your head and everything is actually fine, but you’re not totally satisfied with that assessment, and then the movie goes to commercial. When it comes back, you know you were right, because now the problem is gone.

As noted, we had praised the previous Escape for its class-leading performance. Partly as a function of the class advancing, and partly as a function of the Escape regressing, the 2008 Ford Escape is no longer a class leader in any performance category. In fact, we measured distinct decreases in every one of our performance tests, despite this Escape weighing only 139 more pounds than the last Escape we tested.

Exhibit A—The Skidpad: For comparison’s sake, the weakest skidpad performance we measured in 2006 was for the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon, which moped around the skidpad at the same 0.61 g that we managed in the commercial-truck-based GMC Topkick pickup. The Escape we tested in 2001 pulled a comparably epic 0.75 g.

Exhibit B—Acceleration: Zero-to-60 mph in 8.5 seconds, the quarter-mile in 17.3 at 82 mph, 0-to-100 in 24.2 seconds. These numbers, ladies and gentlemen, are figures we recorded six years ago while testing the then-new 2001 Escape. Now here we are with the updated version, and with the Escape Limited churning full mustard, all we could extract was 0-to-60 in 9.5 seconds and the quarter-mile in 17.3 seconds at 82 mph.

The Escape now takes 10 more seconds to get to 100 mph than it did in 2001 and an additional 33 feet to stop from 70 mph (169 versus 202). It’s worth noting that number would have put the Escape second to last in the 2001 comparo. In a panic stop, that’s easily the difference between a whew and a hefty body-shop bill.

The Escape gets winded quickly when asked to run, and its new styling will have a hard time hiding among its softer-edged competitors. Ford’s chorus seems to be, “You can’t run, you can’t hide, but can you love my Escape?”

2008 Ford Taurus Limited

2008 Ford Taurus Limited - All-new in this context accurately describes the powertrain, the styling from the A-pillar forward, and the rear fascia. The rest of the reborn Taurus, like its Mercury Sable counterpart, is reworked Five Hundred (or Montego), with more front-suspension travel, some localized chassis stiffening, and lots of sound-deadening material.

That’s more than offset by the car’s new 3.5-liter aluminum V-6, whipping up 263 horsepower and 249 pound-feet of torque versus 203 horsepower and 207 pound-feet for the underpowered 3.0-liter V-6 in the Five Hundred. With a six-speed automatic (the unloved CVT is no longer available) powering the front wheels (all-wheel drive is also offered), the Taurus hustles to 60 mph in 6.8 seconds, 1.1 seconds quicker than that uninspiring test car of ’05.

This still isn’t quickest in a high mid-price group that includes brisk operators such as the Toyota Avalon and Nissan Maxima, but it’s in the hunt, and the power boost reduces the drama inherent in trying to pass on a two-lane.

As before, safety will be a major part of the marketing. With its five-star NHTSA crash ratings, Ford is already calling it “the world’s safest family sedan.” Congratulations, but there are a couple curiosities. For one, if safety is so paramount, why is Ford’s AdvanceTrac stability control standard on the Taurus X SUV and optional ($495) on the sedan? For another, braking performance from 70 mph to standstill has worsened by eight feet since our ’05 test—a longish 187 feet, aggravated by fade.

In October 1985, we praised the then-new Taurus as “the gutsiest car of our time” for its bold departure from tradition. The state of the art has obviously changed over the past couple decades, and it would be hard to connect those words with this latter-day “all-new” Taurus. But favorably comparable with the best ain’t bad.

Ford Freestyle AWD 2006

Ford Freestyle AWD 2006 - The Freestyle seems to fall into the same vague category as the Chrysler Pacifica. It straddles the line between SUV and minivan, claiming to offer the advantages of both while leaving behind the disadvantages. To simplify matters, we classify the Pacifica and the Freestyle as SUVs. The Freestyle will appeal to shoppers who want minivan practicality hidden by sport-ute duds.

What former minivan owners who get into the Freestyle will immediately notice and appreciate is the low step-in. The Freestyle has a low floor, and there isn't a whole lot of ground clearance; actually, it barely sits any higher than the Five Hundred sedan, so off-roading probably isn't in the cards. Once inside, you'll find seats that are perched high off the floor, providing the seating position so many drivers find as comforting as hot cocoa. Despite the Freestyle's car roots, you'll still be able to see over that pesky compact out front.

The Freestyle offers an exterior that looks butch enough not to embarrass you or the kiddies when you pick them up after school. There's a long SUV-like snout that protrudes far enough so no one will confuse this for a Freestar, and the tame front-end styling borders on anonymous. To soothe the nervous parent, there's all-wheel drive, adding $1700 to the bottom line, side-impact and curtain airbags that protect all three rows for $695, and a Volvo-inspired crash structure that costs nothing extra.

This is the first use of a CVT in something as large as the Freestyle, but its operation will be familiar if you've ever sampled one of these novel transmissions in a smaller car. Driven gently, the engine revs stay unobtrusively and quietly at low rpm, much as they do in a conventional automatic. But if you floor it, the engine will rev to 5800 rpm and stay there until you back off, whereas a conventional transmission would change to the next gear.

Our Freestyle did the run to 60 mph in 8.2 seconds, which beats the V-6 Explorer's 9.0-second time. It even beat the 8.8-second ramble of a Porsche Cayenne V-6. However, those 8.2 seconds are a bit uncomfortable, because the engine note never changes from a constant 5800 rpm, and the sound from the 3.0-liter engine is about as enjoyable as an American Idol reject.

Ford claims to be spending quite a bit more development money on its interiors. The F-150 pickup was the first to enjoy the extra cash, and its interior is far better than anything else in the full-size-pickup segment. The Freestyle interior shows some F-150 influence, but what is great in a pickup truck is merely good in a family vehicle. The plastics are nicely grained and the center stack has a tasteful metallic carbon-fiber-looking piece, but the entire dashboard feels hard and somewhat hollow to the touch.

Point the Freestyle down an interstate, and enjoy the silence. Wind and road noise are subdued, and the serenity goes a long way toward making the Freestyle feel like a more expensive vehicle. At 70 mph, the Freestyle registered a respectable 68 decibels, but to our ears the sound doesn't seem to increase much as you creep up into big-ticket territory.

Despite its larger dimensions, the Freestyle is lighter than the Explorer and feels smaller than its stablemate. No matter how bad the pavement, this SUV never sets a foot wrong or shudders from blows. The feeling of refinement is probably the most satisfying aspect of the Freestyle driving experience and makes it a far better vehicle to live with than Ford's own Explorer.

Clearly, the Freestyle is designed to move people instead of trailers. Certainly, its high level of refinement makes it a stellar people mover. So it's not a hard-core truck, and well, it's not a minivan, either. It's neither fish nor fowl, but rather a different type of beast that belies its 203-hp engine and combines plenty of utility with a decent driving experience.

2007 Ford F-150 FX2 Sport Extreme

2007 Ford F-150 FX2 Sport Extreme - The Lightning was a hot-rod version of the Ford F-150 pickup that first appeared in 1993 with a 240-hp V-8 and a $20,000 price tag. Production only went until 1995, but a second-generation version bowed in 1999 with a supercharged 360-hp V-8 that eventually produced 380 horsepower before it was put to rest in 2004.

Almost everyone expected the Lightning to continue when the current-generation F-150 hit showrooms in 2004. It’s hard to say exactly why that didn’t happen, but part of the blame lies with the Ford GT supercar because it soaked up much of the engineering resources of Ford’s Special Vehicle Team, the division that engineered both Lightnings.

Start with any F-150 that has the 300-hp, 5.4-liter engine, which in this case is a two-wheel-drive FX2 Sport extended cab (base price: $30,390), then add the supercharger kit ($5530, or $6079 for the polished one on our test truck), a side-exhaust system ($589), a heavy-duty radiator ($660), 20-inch wheels ($1360), a suspension-lowering kit ($688), a 4.10:1 rear-end gear with limited-slip differential ($690), and finally, a big-brake system that has not yet been priced, but figure about two grand. Installing these parts runs about $1000.

The old Lightning hit 60 mph in 5.2 seconds and the quarter in 13.8 seconds at 104 mph, thanks to a lighter body. Lightnings were only ever available in the lightest and smallest pickup body offered: the regular cab. This project truck was built on a SuperCab, which has a set of rear-hinged doors and a back seat fit for humans. Those are handy, for sure, but the 4702-pound Lightning was a whopping 826 pounds lighter.

In addition to the extra weight, this project truck (first shown at SEMA last fall) suffered when compared with the Lightning due to a wheelbase that is 12.7 inches longer. Whereas the Lightning would feel almost agile — at least for brief spurts — there was no such sensation with the project truck; the driver was constantly aware of its size and bulk.

The best option for speed-minded folks like us is to begin with a regular-cab XLT with the 5.4-liter engine. That truck costs $26,945, and if you added just the supercharger and rear-end parts (roughly $7000 including labor), the result would be a $34,000 truck that’s as close in spirit and stamina to the Lightning as we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.