I realized I was probably off Alan Mulally’s Christmas card list shortly after I stepped into the lobby of Ford’s product development center in Dearborn for a briefing on the new Evos concept and a sneak peek at the 2013 Lincoln MKZ last week. (You’ve already seen the stunning Evos here at motortrend.com, but I can’t tell you anything about the new MKZ other than to say it’s not another badge-engineered Fusion, and that former Cadillac designer Max Wolff’s dramatic styling will knock your socks off.) We’d barely exchanged the usual pleasantries when the Ford PR guy pulled me aside and started talking about the Explorer EcoBoost review. Ah yes, the Explorer Ecoboost review, which was clearly now that Explorer Ecoboost review.
Any automotive review starts from one of two baseline premises. “Mate, all cars are sh*tboxes until proven otherwise,” is how Phil Scott, the hard-nosed newspaperman who was my predecessor in the editor’s chair at Australia’s Wheels Magazine, approached the task. Peter Robinson, who edited Wheels for 17 years before Scott took over in 1988, and went on to become the main man in Europe for the influential UK weekly Autocar, took a different view: “I want every new car to be great, and I’m disappointed when it’s not.”
I’ve tended to follow the Robinson approach over the years, probably because, like Peter, as a life-long enthusiast I want every new car to be great, and am genuinely disappointed when one falls short of the mark.
It would be fair to say we savaged the Explorer EcoBoost, and the Explorer product team, the Ford PR guy explained, was feeling a little miffed. After all, every one of them had just put several years of his or her life into creating this thing. They simply couldn’t understand how the four-cylinder Explorer had been given such a negative write-up. If you looked at the numbers, the Ford PR man said, it was a very competitive vehicle.
Now, numbers are useful data points, and having edited the leading automotive titles in Australia and the UK, I know Motor Trend’s audience can’t get enough of them – objective testing, and publishing the results, is one of the core competencies of this brand. But what happens between those data points is also revealing. That’s where the difference between disappointment and greatness often lies.
Mazda’s Miata is a case in point. Performance, braking, lateral g – run down the numbers in the road test chart, and you won’t find any one that particularly stands out. But drive a Miata as fast as you dare down a winding canyon road and I’ll bet you climb out from behind the wheel with an ear-to-ear grin on your face. That’s greatness right there. It’s in the telepathic steering, the sublime chassis balance, the easily modulated brakes, the snick-snick quick shifter; in the rare sense of mechanical cohesion that’s difficult to define and impossible to enumerate, but immediately obvious to anyone who loves driving.
Nissan’s GT-R is another. It’s tempting to write off the GT-R a sanitized supercar for a video-game generation; a digitized speed experience that lacks grit and soul and… character. True, it may not have the rosso romance of a Ferrari Daytona, the charming idiosyncrasy of a Porsche 911, or the aw-shucks muscle of a Corvette ZR1. But in form and function it is a supercar that deftly defines both its era and its origin. And it’s a car that’s greater than the sum of its numbers: A Ferrari engineer recently confided to me they’ve punched the GT-R’s salient data points into the computer that runs track simulations at Maranello and still can’t figure out how the thing gets around the Nurburgring Nordschliefe as fast as it does.
Greatness doesn’t mean perfection, by the way. I’ve long been a critic of the current Mustang’s live rear axle, and will continue to be until Ford drags the car into the 21st century with the next-gen model in 2015. But the current Mustang GT is a great car: Terrific performance and handling, fabulous V-8 noise, and the best steering of any production car ever made in the United States. I love the Mustang GT, despite the cheapskating that led to the live rear axle. The Porsche 911 is another imperfect great: Having the rear engine slung out behind the rear axle is a dumb idea – and the engineers in Weissach know it – but the way the 911 does things that almost defy the laws of physics is the definition of greatness.
What lies between the numbers in any review, then, is this: How well the vehicle performs its intended function; how well it does the job it was supposedly designed to do. The Explorer EcoBoost’s promised trade-off between performance and fuel efficiency hasn’t made the transition from the EPA lab to the real world. Then there is the poor packaging, the dull dynamics (despite a suspension that is noticeably stiff for a family vehicle) and the confusing My Touch system. The Explorer EcoBoost simply doesn’t do a very good job of being a largish, affordable, efficient family crossover.
As I explained to the Ford guys, the Explorer EcoBoost should have been great. It’s not. And we’re disappointed.
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