THE LAST TIME I drove a car with a V10 engine was at Sears Point Raceway near San Francisco. It was a bright red Dodge Viper roadster with a six-speed manual transmission and two very snug seats. It was fast, fun, noisy and a blast to drive on a race track.
The next time I drove a car with a V10 engine was last week when I hoisted myself up (with the help of a running board) into the captain's chair of a 2000 Ford Excursion Limited 4X4, a vehicle that is, compared to the Viper, slow, not much fun to drive, fairly quiet and of no use whatsoever on a race track other than to tow wrecked racecars back to the pit.On the other hand, the Excursion holds up to nine people and most of their worldly goods, can plow through snow deep enough to bury the Viper, and if the two cars ever happened to collide on the freeway . . . well, let's just say I'd rather be in the Ford.
The Excursion is the King Kong of SUVs, the Godzilla of family haulers, the Great Pyramid of Giza of sport utes, the . . . well, you get the idea. It has supplanted the Chevy Suburban as the lord of suburbia.
OK, you want specifics. Just how big is this thing? Well, it weighs 7,156 pounds, has a wheelbase of more than 11 feet and is just shy of 19 feet long overall, nearly 7 feet tall and more than 6 feet wide. You might want to go out right now and pace off your garage to see if it will accommodate this mother of all SUVs.
If ever a sport utility was long on utility and short on sport, this is the one. In addition to holding an entire baseball team and all their gear, it is rated to tow up to 10,000 pounds, which is a pretty hefty boat, horse trailer or camper. For the Excursion, Ford used its Super Duty truck platform for the underpinnings.
If you need even more hauling capacity, the Excursion has an ingenious roof rack that is recessed into the roof (it sits lower than the high point of the roof) so you can take your rig into most parking garages without losing the rack (although the non-adjustable radio antenna whangs away at every concrete crossbeam in our parking terrace).
Under the hood, there are three engine options: a 5.4-liter, 260-horsepower V8 that is standard in the rear drive models; the 6.8-liter, 300-horse V10 , standard in all of the 4WD versions (including my Limited test car) and an optional 7.3-liter, 235-horsepower diesel V8. A four-speed automatic is the only transmission.
Fuel "economy" is not an issue here. If you're a worrywart about gas mileage, don't even think about buying an Excursion. The EPA does not rate trucks of this size for mileage but Ford estimates 12-15 mpg. I got between 12-13 in mostly freeway driving and just me in the car.
Last month, I talked to a guy in Cedar City who was filling up his Excursion at mid-run from Los Angeles to Park City and he said he was getting 9 mpg, but his vehicle was crammed to the headliner with enough stuff to furnish a two-bedroom condo. I suspect he was exceeding the vehicle's rating of one ton of passengers and/or cargo.
The tank holds 44 gallons so expect to spend about $60 at fill-ups.
Considering the sheer mass of the Excursion, pound for pound it's a bargain as luxury cars go. Prices start at $33,460 for 2WD and move up to $36,775 to get all four wheels into the act, which anyone who lives in Utah will want to do.
The flagship Limited model has a base price of $40,205. A skid plate added $75, heated front seats $290, and delivery charges $675 for a bottom line of $41,245 for my tester.
I mentioned seating for nine. That's true in the Excursion models that have two bench seats behind the front buckets, but the Limited substitutes two more captain's chairs for the middle bench, reducing the seating to eight. But that still leaves a whopping 50 cubic feet of cargo space behind the rear bench, which answers a complaint I've heard from several Ford Expedition owners who say they have little space for cargo if they haul a full complement of passengers. (Expedition is the next step down from Excursion.)
Maneuvering an Excursion around town is not as difficult as I expected, but you can't zip through traffic. You have to pay close attention to where the car's corners are and swing wide on turns. And instead of ignoring freeway exit speed signs like you do now, you really do want to slow down. A 3.5-ton vehicle neither turns nor stops on a dime.
I would never think of buying this vehicle as a daily driver. As a family trip hauler, or a way to get my boat to the water (if I had a boat) or other such overland duty, it would be a good choice. But as a commuter car, or something to take to the store for groceries (where you'll be looking for a really big parking space) it makes no sense.
You may recall that environmentalists demonized the Excursion when it was first announced last March. The Sierra Club ran a contest asking its members to give it an appropriate name. "Ford Valdez: Have you driven a tanker lately?" won but "Fordasaurus" was a close second.
This was a personal embarrassment for Ford Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. , a professed "Green," who has vowed to make Ford "the world's most environmentally friendly automaker." But he wasn't put off enough to stop the project. "What we do to help the environment," said the chairman, "must succeed as a business proposition. A zero-emission vehicle that sits unsold on a dealer's lot is not reducing pollution."
Presumably, the Excursion will not sit unsold on dealer's lots, not unless the price of gasoline shoots up over $2 per gallon, and maybe not even then.