How many of you out there drive an Eagle?
That's what I thought. Eagles are a rare bird, maybe rarer than real eagles. Most people who go car shopping at a Jeep/Eagle dealer (not too many of those, either) come away with a Grand Cherokee or Wrangler, not a Vision, Talon or Summit.And that's a shame. Because the 1996 Eagle Vision TSi, four-door sports sedan I've been driving this past week, is one of the two or three best cars to grace my garage in the past year or so, certainly the most innovative.
It's also Chrysler Corp.'s best kept secret. Eagle Vision is one of Chrysler's "LH" trio of cars that include the Dodge Intrepid and the Chrysler Concorde, both of which are much better known than the Eagle - especially the Dodge - and have garnered the lion's share of the praises that LH cars have earned since their introduction in 1993.
But if I were going to buy an LH, I'd choose the Vision TSi. That's because I prefer its aggressive looks a bit better than its siblings. Also, I might be able to make a better deal on the Vision because it's the slowest seller of the three. But most of all, I'd take the Vision because it is the only LH that is available with Chrysler's new AutoStick transmission.
The only other cars I know of that offer anything like AutoStick are the Porsche 911 with its Tiptronic transmission, a car I have driven, and the Acura NXS-T, which I have not. Both cars cost about three times as much as the Vision. More about price in a bit.
AutoStick allows us racer wanabees to have our cake and eat it, too . . . make that have our automatic transmission and our stick shift, too.
In the daily commute in rush hour traffic, just put the shift lever on "D" (the top half of the unit has the usual PRND notches), and it's a four-speed automatic transmission like any other - albeit one of the better ones around.
But we don't spend all of our driving doing the ol' go-whoa on the freeway. Sometimes we have the road pretty much to ourselves, maybe making an early morning run up Big Cottonwood Canyon or a Saturday afternoon cruise to Kamas and Mirror Lake on the secondary roads.
Those are the times when you grab the Vision's shifter and pull it straight down. Now, it's SHOWTIME! as Jim Carrey likes to say.
At this point, AutoStick has become a manual transmission . . . sort of. No, a clutch doesn't magically pop up out of the floor; your left foot never becomes involved. What happens is, you now can decide which of the four gears you want to be in, just like with a manual, only without clutching.
The shifter unit looks something like an upside down letter "T" (you'll have to use your imagination here since my keyboard insists that all letters remain upright).
With the shifter at the bottom of the T, it now works from side to side rather than up and down. To shift up manually, from first gear to second and so on, you simply nudge or tap the shifter to the right, toward the plus sign. To shift down, from fourth to third and so on, you nudge it left.
After you nudge (a more descriptive term than "push" in this case) the shifter returns to center. In other words, it's like pushing and releasing a button.
As I was trying out AutoStick for the first time, my left foot kept reaching for the missing clutch, but it quickly gave up the search and settled down. Because the movement of the lever is so short - you nudge it maybe an inch to shift gears - it isn't really like conventional manual shifting.
Nor will its computer let you do anything foolish, such as winding it out so far in first gear that you blow the engine. If you don't shift and the tachometer needle looks like it's going to shake hands with the red line on the dial, AutoStick will decide you must be incompetent or unconscious and will automatically shift to the next higher gear, thus saving the motor for another day.
Same goes for the return to first gear when you stop. Did you forget you were in AutoStick mode and try to start up again from fourth gear? No problem. AutoStick sighs, shakes its cybernetic head, and automatically shifts down to first gear. You will drive away never even knowing that you had left it in fourth. Try that with a conventional manual transmission!
I must confess I didn't use the manual mode of AutoStick as much as you might think. When you don't have to shift manually it's not worth the hassle, and that comprises about 90 percent of daily driving.
But for that other 10 percent, when you are going up Parleys Canyon and want to hold the car in third gear, or you're making like Emerson Fittipaldi through the twisties of East Canyon, then AutoStick earns its cost. The extra power you can get out of second and third gear is the main appeal of AutoStick. You can power into and out of a curve in a way that an automatic transmission will not allow.
On a more practical note, I also found it useful during the recent blizzards to leave it in third gear when navigating really slippery roads. Combined with the TSi's standard Traction Control, I found myself cruising through snowdrifts that would give a 4wd vehicle pause.
It's too soon to know whether Chrysler will make AutoStick available in its other cars, but it should. The only thing they've said so far is that AutoStick will be the transmission of choice in the 1998 Plymouth Prowler, the purple hot rod that attracted the most attention at last week's Utah Auto Show.
I've used a lot of space here describing AutoStick because it is so unusual, but the Eagle Vision TSi has much more than its transmission going for it.
Like the other LH cars I've reviewed in the past, the Vision is a really nice ride with interior room rivaling "luxury" cars costing thousands more, thanks in part to the so-called "cab-forward" design that you've heard so much about.
On the road, the Vision also is quieter than many of its pricier competitors, and its handling, and overall fit and finish was excellent. My test car was jet black, one of the toughest paint colors to get right, but the Vision's was flawless.
Best of all is the power plant. Equipped with the larger of the two available LH engines, the 3.5 liter, 24 valve V6, the TSi is a rocket ship that will leave most four-door sedans eating its exhaust.
The TSi continually reminded be of how thin the gap has become between midprice cars and their upscale counterparts. The TSi isn't even a so-called "near luxury" model, but it has every comfort, convenience and luxury appointment that any reasonble person could want, including gorgeous leather seats and a really nice sound system that accommodates cassette tapes and CDs.
Dual air bags, four-wheel independent suspension, antilock brakes, power seats, windows, mirrors, remote entry locks, cruise control, automatic climate control . . . how much more does a car need to be deemed luxurious?
Base price of the TSi is $23,835. AutoStick is standard on the model so it's difficult to tell how much you pay extra for it. My test car had a "customer preferred options group" that included the upgraded sound system, the leather seats, a security alarm, conventional spare tire and a cargo net.
Another $220 brought the "performance handling group" of special tires and a beefed-up suspension, money well spent. Destination charge was $550.
The sticker had a built-in "Eagle discount" of $185, bringing the bottom line to $25,655. Fuel mileage is rated at 17 mpg city and 26 mpg highway, not bad for what the EPA rates as a "Large Car."