Comparison Tests
The mud hole didn’t look that deep. As it turned out, it was deep enough to be on a catfish farm. We did use a maple branch to gauge its depth. Okay, so maybe we didn’t get the branch all the way out there in the, uh, middle.
See, what happened was, we made an error in judgment common to off-roaders who are wet, weary, and want beer. The trail got rough—too muddy, too rocky, too vertical—but a paved road was only 1.2 miles distant. Who’d quit at that point? Especially since the only alternative was a two-hour off-road ramble in reverse. In the dark. In weather three degrees above freezing.
About 20 feet ahead of this deep catfish hole, the Mercedes-Benz GL320 CDI camera car had gotten stuck in another gooey clay hole. We took a vote and agreed to dispatch our fiercest off-roader, the Jeep Liberty, to go set it free. That’s how it was similarly torpedoed. A sunken Liberty ship.
Our plan was to subject nine of the best-known compact SUVs to a mixture of light off-roading and challenging paved roads. Destination: Drummond Island, a 20-minute ferry ride from the eastern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Twenty-five miles long and 15 miles wide, it is the largest freshwater island in the U.S., a curious limestone escarpment dotted with cedar swamps, ridges, and prairie meadows. The island is home to 1200 full-time residents, not including bobcats, eagles, and wolves, and is the site of former Domino’s Pizza mogul Tom Monaghan’s controversial but bucolic 3000-acre resort, built in the late 1980s. We stayed next to the cabins that Pizza Man erected specially for his pals—a priest and two of his former employees, Sparky Anderson and Bo Schembechler. None of those guys showed up.
We hadn’t gathered this many soft-roaders since a snowy 2001 comparo that the Ford Escape won. Since then, the segment has exploded. "In a lackluster ’07," noted Automotive News, "this is where the action is." Sales of car-based SUVs climbed 23.5 percent in the first nine months of ’07. As of last fall, there existed 45 crossover nameplates, 11 more than the year before. The three hottest hot cakes? Honda’s CR-V, Ford’s Escape, and Toyota’s RAV4.
Our nine econo-ute contestants all featured four-wheel drive and stickers as close to $25,000 as we could arrange. Although Americans have thumbed their noses at wagons for years, these are, in fact, tall wagons.
None of our SUVs had a skid plate. None, apart from the Jeep and Suzuki, made more than faint claims to off-road prowess. "So how far do you want to take this?" asked our off-road guide, Craig Hoffman.
"Let’s just take the straightest route to the nearest beer-and-burger joint," we told him. Which is how we wound up having to return the next day with chains, come-alongs, snatch straps, a water pump with a three-inch hose, and a jacked-up Ford F-250. It took three hours, but we yanked the Benz and the Jeep back through the kind of primordial goo that would ruin an alligator. Both fired up instantly. Both continued unfazed.
"Tell me again, what magazine do you work for?" asked Hoffman.
"Women’s Wear Daily," I informed.
