A smorgasbord of cars
By Jeff Rundles
This winter has been a smorgasbord of automotive delights, so I thought I would share some thoughts on several of my test drives and get all of our Baby Boomer readers in the mood for car buying season. I figure this buffet line of car offerings is particularly noteworthy this year as 2009, given the Great Recession, was most likely a time of wait-and-see. I’m guessing there’s pent-up demand now that most people have figured out their financial situations after a bad year. So here’s to a good year.
I’m going to offer up some brief impressions on a number of cars I have had the pleasure of driving over the past several weeks, in no particular order of preference.
2010 Lincoln MKS. I suppose in this day and age, the MKS has to be considered Lincoln’s flagship model, which is quite different from the heyday when the Continental, a luxurious boat of a car, led the Lincoln brigade. The Ford luxury unit still has the Lincoln Town Car, a largish throwback sedan, and the Navigator, a large SUV, but everything else has taken on a name with some variation of “M”, for reasons I do not know: The MKT is a mid-size SUV or crossover; the MKX a small SUV; and, the MKZ is the smaller sedan.
The MKS is a mid-size sedan and quite an elegant car. I thought that without any citizen input, as it were, but tons of people who saw it oohed and aahed and proclaimed it just that, elegant. I loved driving it. It is in the size and type category that you would think of with the Mercedes E, the BMW 5, the Audi 6, the Jaguar XF, and the like, although the Lincoln MKS is the largest of the bunch, but not by much. It comes in three trims – the 3.7L FWD (front wheel drive) and the 3.7L AWD (all-wheel-drive), both of which feature a 3.7-liter, normally aspirated V6 engine with some 273 horsepower, and the 3.5L with EcoBoost AWD. I drove the EcoBoost, and that was a treat. You’d think that EcoBoost is some sort of hybrid or gas-saving feature if you saw the EcoBoost leafy logo, but here they are making a different kind of statement: it’s a turbocharged, 3.5-liter V6 engine with a whopping 355 hp, so the point is it gets the gas mileage of a V6 – 17 mpg city/25 mpg highway – with the power and performance of a V8. The car is fast, handles beautifully and has every luxury your can think of, including heated seats in the back! I thought it would be more of what my wife likes to call a “dad car,” but actually it is quite sporty, has a huge trunk (a 4-golf-bagger), and is priced fairly well vis a vis the competition: $47,760 base price, and they added on navigation, rear view camera, a huge moonroof, an upgraded (wonderful) sound system, and the bottom line is $53,930. That’s a lot, I know, but you get a lot here, that is a very competitive price in the market segment, and the AWD, which I got to use for its intended purpose what with all of the snow around Denver this year, is great.
2010 Mercedes E350 4-passenger Coupe. Okay, I am not a coupe man; I prefer the sedan. But, people ask me all the time, “Hey you’re a car reviewer; what’s the best car?” My answer, invariably for years, has been the Mercedes E. It’s not a speed demon or an “ultimate driving machine” like the BMW, but the E350 is cool personified. Very luxurious, a ton of unbelievably intuitive standards and extras, this car is so nice that’s its actually anti-environmental: it beckons you to drive it, all the time. The leather is perfect. The 7-speed automatic transmission is the smoothest on the market. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s a luxury car and has all of the safety and extras you’d expect. The E comes in 5 trims, ranging from this E350 coupe, base price $48,050, to the E350 sedan, MSRP $48,600, to the E550 Coupe (5.5-liter V8 with 382 hp) at $54,650 base (the sedan is $56,300), and the beast, the E63 AMG Sedan, with a 518 hp, 6.2-liter V8, for a base of $85,750.
My test-drive model featured a 3.5-liter V6 with 268 hp, rated at 17/26 mpg although it felt more powerful than that, and as I said if I were to buy a car in this category it would be the E350 sedan (18/26 mpg). The drawback on this car, particularly after I drove the Lincoln, is the price: they added on Premium packages with stuff like navigation and voice commands and upgraded headlamps, yadda, yadda, and this thing comes in at a sticker of $59,225. If you want AWD (4Matic in Mercedes-speak), that’s another $2,500, and apparently not available on the coupe, just the sedan. So, you’re looking at $60k+ for a car comparable to the Lincoln MKS, loaded at $53k, but… Personally, I think it’s the best car on the market in this class, and I do mean class.
2010 Jaguar XF Premium. When I heard I was getting the Jaguar XF on the heels of the Mercedes and the Lincoln, I was excited. Same class of vehicle, I thought, at least same price range, and a good comparison. This proved to be something of a bad thing for Jaguar. First of all, many people who saw it thought it looked like a Ford (Ford owned Jag for several years, and when this car was designed [it’s now owned by Tata from India]), and it is a little too Taurus-like for my tastes. Nothing against Taurus – nice car, but it also costs half as much as a Jag. The exterior styling, in other words, leaves something to be desired.
Inside, the XF is a very beautiful car, but again, nothing much stands out versus the competition. The gear shift – which is actually just a two-inch dial that pops up out of the console – is a nice touch, but not nice enough. It is luxury and has all the right stuff – and it has enough beeping technology to warn of cars coming into the blind spot, a parking monitor, etc. that it beeps a lot – but it isn’t all that distinctive. Back in the day Jaguar was very distinctive, if not a little sketchy, but it had character. This is just a very nice Ford with the Jaguar name on it.
I will say that on the plus side the 5.0-liter V8 with 385 hp was a screamer. You can also get the car with a 4.2-liter V8 with 300hp, a 5.0-liter supercharged model with 470 hp, and an “R” model with the 5.0-liter tricked out to 510hp. My test-drive Premium model is rated at 16/23 mpg.
There’s really nothing bad to say here. The car has all of the luxuries, a very quick and responsive engine, and it drove great (I had it during a snowstorm and while I got stuck in a curb parking and needed a push, it did quite well on the icy/snowy streets once I got going. It doesn’t come with AWD).
Okay, there is one bad thing: the price, especially considering the competition. The base price on the XF Premium is $56,150 (just the plain XF is a MSRP of $51,150). It came with a lot standard – all the monitors, the nav and Bluetooth, etc. – and they only added on a Bowers & Wilkens Sound System with HD Radio for $1,875 (it was special). So the bottom line here is $58,875. Again, nice car, but I would prefer the other two I wrote about above, and the Lincoln, at $5k less money, has all the bells and whistles and is more distinctive.
2010 Mazda6 i Grand Touring. I have driven several Mazdas over the last year or so and what I find is a mixed bag. The Mazda5 – the mini-minivan is quite nice; the Mazda3, particularly the Speed3, is wonderful. The RX-8, to rotary throwback, should be taken off the market. The Mazda6 is the car, I suppose, they intend to compete with the Honda Accord, Nissan Altima and Maxima, and the Toyota Camry, that mid-size sedan that not’s quite luxury, but a step above. My take is that if you are Mazda, your entry into the mix has got to be either something more special than the competition, or priced significantly less as an incentive. Unfortunately, this Mazda6 is neither. You’d have to check the name plate to find out what it is because, like everyone else, it looks like the Toyota. It’s also a dog – the 2.5-liter I-4 engine puts out 170 hp that feels like 120. I found this ironic in that the license plate holder had the Mazda slogan on it: Zoom Zoom. And didn’t they used to call this the 4-door sports car? Whatever; now it goes Putt-Putt and is a 4-door golf cart. You can get the Mazda6 with a 3.7-liter V6 with 272 hp for just a little more money (MSRP on the i Grand Touring is $25,935; the s Touring Plus with the bigger engine has a MSRP of $26,450) – and you’d better if you want to arrive somewhere on time.
It’s not a horrible car – there aren’t any horrible cars out there today – but on my test-drive models they added a few thousand dollars for navigation and some additional technology and came up with a bottom line sticker of $30,665. I could – and would – get the Honda Accord for that kind of money. Mazda needs to rethink this one.
2010 VW Golf. Aside from the fact that everywhere I went in this car people punched me – as in “Punch Dub,” the new advertising campaign – I really liked this car. A good size, a nice shape, the Golf has entered into the venerable category. Like the Jetta, VW has been making this car a long time, doing it well, and the buyer benefits from all of those years of experience. I drove the 2.5-L 4 door model, which features a 2.5-liter I5 engine with 170 hp. Here the horsepower is zippy. This is the easiest car to drive I can think of. It zips in and out of traffic with ease, handles the highway with power to spare, parks easily, Is very roomy, and with the hatchback, it handles errands very well. This would be an excellent run-around-town car that has the extra benefit of feeling heavy enough to feel just right going up to Vail in the mountains, too. Plus, I drove the front wheel drive car in plenty of snow and ice, and it was great; no slipping, great breaks. Just a nice, solid car. The MSRP is $19,190, and they added on $1,225 for a power sunroof and heated seats and mirrors. The bottom line is $21,165, and it’s plenty of car for that money. After all of the luxury cars I have driven, it was nice to get cloth seats that felt comfortable and durable, power windows and doors, keyless entry, ABS brakes, stability control – some extras – for not a lot of money. I would recommend this car to anyone.
2010 Jeep Patriot Limited 4X4. I thought I’d throw this one in for those of your considering an SUV: here’s one you should consider. Jeep, of course, is the venerable SUV maker and has something in just about every category. The Wrangler, the classic Jeep, is probably in a class by itself, and the Compass is a Dodge dressed up as a Jeep and probably shouldn’t be in the lineup, or your consideration, at all. But then you have the big SUV, the Commander, The mid-size, the Grand Cherokee, and then two smaller one, the Liberty and this Patriot. I didn’t like the old Liberty because I thought it was too narrow and tippy, but they have fixed that, and I still just can’t think of why they have both the Liberty and the Patriot because they are essentially the same size and seem to appeal to the same audience.
The advantage of the Patriot is in its smaller price tag: the Liberty has a MSRP ranging from $23,255 to $28,735, while the Patriot goes for $17,795 to $24,550. The Liberty features a 3.7-liter V6 with 210hp, and all of the Patriots come with a 2.4-liter I4 engine with 172 hp.
I, of course, got the most expensive model of the Patriot, the Limited, and after they added a few things on – continuously variable transmission, an engine block heater – they pushed the bottom line to $30,510. This is not a fast vehicle, more of a lumberer, but it gets the job done. I took it on some dirt roads to at least test out the vaunted “Trail Rated” AWD, and it felt solid. Around town in the snow and ice, it was a tank, I can tell you. The vehicle is kind of plastic-y, with all of the controls a little on the sub-standard side, but that wouldn’t dissuade me from buying a Patriot; it would just push me to by the Port 4X4 model that has a MSRP of $19,545, and go more pedestrian with the same engine. I like the size and shape of the Patriot, and with a 20/24 mph rating – in an AWD vehicle, no less – I like the economy. Inside, it’s roomy up front and in the back, has plenty of cargo space in the way back, parks easily, and is a very solid, if a little stodgy, vehicle. If you can get what you want and come in under $25k, this vehicle has to be on your shopping list.
Well, there you have it. A quick hit of some of the things I have driven over the winter. And by the way, this is a great time to buy a car: the prices have held steady for the first time in years, and many of the dealers are willing to deal because sales have been so slow. Likewise the lenders; rates are pretty good to move some inventory. And, like I said earlier, in today’s automotive world, there are no bad cars. It’s like Automobile Farm: all autos are equal, but some autos are more equal than others.
