Comparison Tests
Stone-faced and unblinking, four great presidents hold their pose as the cameras click. It's summer, America is on vacation, and Mt. Rushmore draws the Pace Arrows, Palm Aires, Bounders, and Born Frees from across the land to clog the roads of South Dakota's Black Hills.
This scenic section of the heartland was beckoning summer visitors long before pavement eased the trip. President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace came by train to Rapid City in 1927 for a three-week getaway. It stretched to three months, so agreeable were the terrain and the temperatures.
Seventy-nine years later, your reporters have arrived, but there'll be no water slides and Stuckey's stops for us. No, we're on a fact-finding mission: Does the traditional American-truck-based SUV have a future? Gas prices are stuck stubbornly at three bucks per gallon, bombs are exploding in the Middle East, the stock market is shuddering, and normally optimistic Americans are having doubts: Is our cheap-fuel way of living coming to an end?
If it is, the truck-based SUV is an endangered species. And that, in turn, promises a big change for U.S. families. Here's why. First thing on a July morning, upon awakening in the hospitable town of Custer, South Dakota — about 15 miles southwest of Mt. Rushmore — we hustled out into the sweet morning air to see what vacationers are driving. Here's what we found in the Comfort Inn's parking lot: 20 SUVs, 18 cars, 14 minivans, and 10 pickups.
Not included in our motel count were the five sport-utes we'd driven from Denver the day before. If the SUV is the king of our roads, as the parking-lot count suggests, then these five are the kings of kings, the top models from Cadillac, Lincoln, Audi, Infiniti, and Mercedes-Benz.
Yes, this is a comparison test, one of many we do each year, yet the question to be answered is much larger than the usual "Which is best?" This is America versus Europe — Detroit's newest and most expensive sport-utes face off against the latest choices from Germany for these same customers.
The SUV as a popular family hauler is an American invention, based on our indigenous pickup truck. The first Ford Explorer, and most of its subsequent competitors, were four-door passenger vehicles adapted from pickup frames and bodies. But pickups don't exist as mainstream vehicles in Europe, so European SUVs start from scratch as unit-construction vehicles.
Those two approaches meet head-on in this comparison. The Cadillac Escalade, new this spring, is the first wave of new SUVs and pickups to be based on the GMT900 body-on-frame platform. With its flashy swagger and 403-hp V-8, this new Escalade is already something of a celebrity. We promise to look past that.
Also new — so oven-fresh it wasn't in showrooms at test time — is the Lincoln Navigator. Sharing components with Ford's bestselling F-150 pickup, the 6119-pound Gator is Dearborn's flagship SUV. Were size all that mattered, the others would be scrambling for second place.
Representing the Euro approach, the unit-body Audi Q7 is a stretched-and-recarved VW Touareg SUV. From Mercedes-Benz we have the GL450, a made-in-Alabama unit body that shares certain underpinnings with the lower-priced M-class SUV and wagonesque R-class.
The Lexus LX470 is due for replacement soon and therefore not included here. But we did invite one more pickup-based SUV — the Infiniti QX56, built in Canton, Mississippi, of bones shared with Nissan's Titan truck.
Now that you've met the players, let's get to the question that brought us here: Can our traditional truck-based SUVs compete with Europe's latest unit bodies?
