Even the most casual observer of new-model trends on the roadway is aware of what vehicle manufacturers are referring to as the “sport/utility phenomenon.” (If you’re blind to the increasing preponderance of these yuppie trucks on the road, perhaps it’s because the elevated headlights of one of these cars pan-fried your retinas in a high-beam jousting match late one night.)
Known by the regurgitative-sounding nickname “sport/ute” or by the acronym SUV, this vehicle class is the bar-none favorite among almost every manufacturer. Almost every car consumer has heard of Ford’s Explorer, Jeep’s Grand Cherokee, and Chevy’s Blazer, which, together, account for 43 percent of category sales.
But even those manufacturers who were caught with their pants down and hoods open in the early ’90s are coming up with SUVs now—sometimes out of thin air, as in the case of Mercedes and the forthcoming All-Activity Vehicle it’s building down in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Or there’s the ol’ sleight-of-hand school of product presentation, which characterizes Subaru’s transformation of its plain-vanilla Legacy station wagon. With the judicious application of a few rugged-looking decals, the Legacy has been magically updated into the “Crocodile Dundee autograph edition” Outback Sport Wagon. (Subaru’s ’96 sales, by the way, are the highest this decade as a result.)
For more serious car observers, the great marketing mystery all along has been the absence of a true competitor for that land leviathan of SUVs, the Chevrolet (and GMC) Suburban. True, General Motors decided to compete with itself in ’96 by introducing a bobtail Suburban called the Tahoe (in Chevy trim) or Yukon (for GMC). Being shorter, barely, the Tahoe/Yukon now outsells the Suburban—barely. But until the ’97 model year, no company has posed a serious challenge to GM’s position at the top of the SUV food chain.
With the Ford Expedition, all this has changed. In what promises to become a battle royal of Wagnerian proportions between two automotive superpowers, Ford’s four-door, nine-passenger Expedition is posed as a direct roadblock to GM’s continued dominance of the full-size sport/utility category. Based on the world’s single best-selling vehicle for something like 20 years running (the Ford F-150 pickup), the Expedition also enters the scene as big brother to the best-selling sport/utility of all time, the ubiquitous Ford Explorer.
At the F&B (features and benefits) level, the Expedition offers a mix-and-match of two-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive versions along with a selection of two different power plants: a 4.6-liter V8 making 215 horsepower and a 5.4-liter V8 making 230 HP. Towing capacity is perhaps the chief reason for the larger, admittedly more fuel-thirsty motor: Despite a 20-percent increase in size that posts only a small increase in horsepower, the 5.4 Triton, as it’s known, delivers a significant 12 percent more pulling power, or torque. That translates into a towing capacity of 8,000 pounds (a healthy-size boat or camper trailer) and actual in-cabin payload capacity of 1 ton (nine not-so-healthy-size 225-pound adults).
Prices range from about $28,000 for a two-wheel-drive base model with the smaller engine to about $35,000-plus for the four-wheel-drive, Triton-powered, leather-swaddled, bell-and-whistle-clad Eddie Bauer model. Fact is, that’s not a world of difference from Chevy’s own pricing scheme, either for the Tahoe or the Suburban, both of which offer comparable if not identical features.
What it all boils down to, then, is the buyer’s personal preference for “this” versus “that,” “night” versus “day,” “yin” versus “yang.” The line separating Ford from Chevy is the automotive equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line; there are fanatical partisans on either side. But from an objective point of view, because the Expedition is the later arrival, it showcases newer engine technology, and its multimode four-wheel-drive system has a leg up on GM’s. Called “Control Trac,” Ford’s push-button system shifts from two-wheel-drive to four-wheel-low (for those gumbo mud bogs) to four-wheel-high (for less severe but still rugged off-road conditions) to automatic, all-time four-wheel-drive (for the long, icy driveway up to the suburban manor house).
The interior of the Expedition is arguably more modern too. The seating, instrumentation, and controls are highly integrated in that swirling, organo-morpho-space-pod motif that characterizes most of Ford’s renditions of interior design lately. Visually, it’s in the love-it-or-leave-it category; but from the seat of the pants to the tips of your fingers, it’s especially comfortable and convenient, because everything’s where it’s supposed to be for the easiest access with your eyes off the road for the least amount of time.
I’m prepared to quibble with Ford’s new, big-boss SUV only at the semantic level. Like that of its little brother the Explorer, the name of the Expedition arrogates to itself the image of Lewis and Clark in an age much better represented by Laverne and Shirley. What I’m driving at is that Ford knows darn well that there’ll be no Expeditions pushing back uncharted frontiers; there will be no Explorers driven onward by the lure of our collective manifest destiny. But there will undoubtedly be middle-class suburbanites believing that they are capable of these things. Having immersed themselves in the aura of rough-ridin’, go-anywhere frontier discovery suggested by the names and capabilities of Ford’s sport/utility vehicles, few buyers of the new Expedition, I suspect, will contemplate how little they are likely to discover behind the wheel.
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