2005 Mercury Mountaineer Test Drive

This Mountaineer's Aiming for the Top

In loading the Mountaineer up with more options than its bigger-selling twin, the Ford Explorer, Mercury has come up with one of the most refined SUVs in its class.

From The Driver's Seat

Here's what we like about the new Mountaineer:

A) It's huge. Flip that last row of seats forward and you've got room inside for a bike or that antique dresser you spot at a tag sale, or that 35-inch color TV you've picked up for the family for Christmas. And any of this stuff can ride comfortably behind the second row of seats, so you can still fit five passengers inside along with all your stuff.

B) Its 4.6-liter V-8 is very potent, with a smooth shifting automatic tranny and a manual overdrive lockout for quick passing power. The steering feel is also impressive; driving an SUV can feel like piloting a supertanker, all numb response until suddenly you're wandering into the median as you tune the radio. But Mercury has dialed the rack-and-pinion power steering unit here, and it's about as good as you could ever expect from a car this large.

C) The Mercury's automatic all-wheel drive is perfectly seamless, so you never have to think about turning it on (is it snowy enough now or should I leave it in 2WD?). Just drive, and the system adapts to conditions as needed.

D) Its smart-looking interior with nice leather seats and silver-trimmed cues throughout the cabin.

Of course there are things we don't like, and one thing in particular is so minor and yet big enough to be a turnoff for many buyers.

It's the seat heaters. Not that they exist, but the buttons to turn them on are situated right on the outside of the front seats, and your finger can't easily discern the difference between these and other switches for the seats. Moreover, the switches are so far down in the crevasse between the door and the seat that you'll almost inevitably scratch the face of your watch on the door.

A lame complaint? Hardly. We feel that if you spend $30K or more on a car, the engineers could figure out how to solve such little annoyances. $18K VWs have seat- heater switches on the dash, right? So on a car that costs so much more, this kind of little thing shouldn't even be an issue.

Still, what Mercury has to worry about is how its car stacks up against the Toyota and GM competition.

Here are those face-to face issues. The V-8 has great low-end grunt, but the engine is a bit drony at highway speeds and at higher revs grows course rather than smooth. Moreover, the excellent in-line six in the new Trailblazer can nearly match the Mountaineer's torque performance and has 30 more horsepower while getting superior mileage. We like the platinum-tone trim in the cabin of the Mountaineer more than the dark look inside the Trailblazer, but it's not as clean as the cabin of the Highlander. But the Highlander comes with a V-6 that's a lot less potent, so if you live somewhere that's hilly or you plan to do any towing, you have to throw out the Toyota as a viable option.

What else? The head and shoulder room in both the Trailblazer and the Mountaineer are excellent and nearly identical in the first two rows and superb in general for comfort. We like the Big Gulp-size cupholders on the doors of the Mountaineer. The EXT version of the Trailblazer is longer than the stock Trailblazer, but versus the standard Trailblazer the Mountaineer has about the same cargo capacity, 80 cubic feet with the second row of seats folded.

As for actual driving, the Mountaineer has excellent steering feel, as we said, and the newly developed rear suspension makes the Mountaineer ride very smoothly even on nasty roads. We give the Mountaineer a slight lead here, versus the Trailblazer.