First Drive Review
Some folks might say that on the grand scale of pointlessness, the Mercury Mountaineer—and the entire Mercury lineup—falls somewhere between the human appendix and rooting for the Cubs to win the World Series. That it's the automotive equivalent of a concrete life preserver. That it makes the Flowbee look like a good idea.
Now, this isn't because the Mountaineer is unpleasant to drive. It isn't. On the contrary, the Mountaineer is wholly capable, decently built, and even nice to look at in a boxy, American kind of way. No, the problem lies in the fact that there's already a vehicle that drives like and looks like and is almost in every way exactly like the Mountaineer called the Ford Explorer. GM seems to have gotten the memo that the American public is wise to badge engineering—witness the adequately differentiated Buick Enclave/GMC Acadia/Saturn Outlook triplets—so why can't Ford?
Nevertheless, FoMoCo continues to sell the Mountaineer, which was redesigned for 2006. (With about 30,000 copies moving out the door per year, we have to begrudgingly admit that we'd probably keep hawking the profitable ute, too, even with sales dropping by nine percent last year.) Like the Explorer, the Mountaineer is available with a 4.0-liter V-6 or a 4.6-liter V-8. We drove the top-shelf V-8 in our four-wheel-drive Premier test model, which clocked in at $39,335. Power running boards, floor mats, a tow package, power-adjustable pedals, satellite radio, a DVD system, and navigation were $5555 of the total.
The V-8 is tons of fun in the Mustang GT, where it feels like there's an offensive lineman on meth under the hood, but in the Mountaineer, it's pretty snooze-worthy. Acceleration is decent (we recorded a 7.8-second 0-to-60-mph run in a similar Explorer), but the 292 horses the V-8 makes here (eight fewer than in the Mustang) just aren't enough to tug around nearly 5000 pounds with any real urgency, and its character is more longshoreman than movie star. Forget about the 210-hp V-6 unless you want to show up to Sunday service on Tuesday afternoon. Similarly, the steering, the brakes, the throttle response, and downshifts from the six-speed automatic (V-6s get a five-speed autobox) all happen at their own pace; there's no sense in asking any of them to hurry, because the Mountaineer will just ignore you. This is a high-ridin', easy-livin' sort of SUV.
Underscoring the Mountaineer's seeming redundancy, a similarly outfitted four-wheel-drive V-8 Explorer XLT is about a grand cheaper, although power running boards aren't available. If you absolutely have to have a Mountaineer, though, you'll definitely be able to put it to work, with a 6960-pound tow rating in all-wheel-drive V-8 form and nearly 44 cubes of space for stuff with the third row folded. The relatively spacious third row is standard and has a power-folding mechanism on Premier models but is optional on base Mountaineers, where buyers can also go for a manual-collapse version. So we certainly can't call the Mountaineer useless, but until Ford decides to give better reasons than a few trim options and a waterfall grille to choose the Merc over an Explorer, you'll likely find us nodding along when people call the Mercury pointless.
