2015 Ford Expedition Platinum 4X4
Type of vehicle: Full-size, eight-passenger, four-wheel-drive SUV
Price as tested: Pre-production model with no window sticker, but similarly equipped models cost about $64,000
Fuel economy: 15 mpg city, 20 mpg highway
Weight: 6,155 pounds
Engine: Twin-turbocharged, direct-injected 3.5-liter V-6 with 365 horsepower and 420 pound-feet of torque
Transmission: Six-speed automatic
Performance: 0 to 60 mph in 6.4 seconds
—SOURCES: Ford Motor Co.; Car and Driver
For a while, Ford found gold in every truck it touched.
Fast-selling Explorers, Expeditions and F-150s kept the cash registers in Dearborn, Mich., spinning like Sinatra’s slot machines in Lost Vegas.
As you may recall, the heavy-metal Expedition and Chevy Tahoe ignited the oversize SUV craze that filled U.S. roads with giant two-box trucks in the ‘90s.
Anyone looking for America back then could probably find it in a lumbering, eight-passenger, four-wheel-drive SUV.
But love and money, as most of us know, can be fleeting.
In the dark days of 2008 — when Ford rushed to reinvent itself as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy — product planners decided the Expedition was about as relevant as Bon Jovi.
They kept it in the lineup but figured that younger, hipper buyers wanted much smaller urban wagons such as the agile new Escape crossover.
Like an old bachelor, the Expedition lived alone somewhere outside the mainstream, its boom days faded from 233,000 sales in 1999 to about 32,000 a decade later.
Last year, though, Ford planners must have realized that, gulp, maybe they wrote off gas-swilling, pickup-based SUVs too quickly.
Although the full-size segment shrank by about half during the recession, it is slowly growing again, and GM absolutely owns it now with the big SUVs built in Arlington, Texas.
So the old bachelor is back, its party clothes neatly pressed and clinging to new muscles.
And against long odds, the metallic gray 2015 Expedition Platinum I had recently still had a lot of strut left.
You’ll recognize it instantly. Still immensely square and slab-sided, the Expedition wears a crisp new three-bar grille up front with contemporary projector-style headlamps.
High-end models also get running boards that extend and retract automatically when the doors open or close — a feature I first saw on Cadillac Escalades a few years back.
To my jaded eyes, the flat, featureless sides of the 6,000-pound Expedition didn’t seem any different.
And in back, you will still find enormous vertical taillamps and a rear hatch roughly the size of a picnic table.
But thanks to the new grille, hidden running boards and fine-looking 22-inch wheels shod with 285/45 tires, the Expedition actually looks refreshed — sort of tanned and lightly pumped up.
It could be an inner glow. Beneath the Expo’s slightly raised hood, buyers will find the turbocharged 365-horsepower EcoBoost V-6 that has powered the F-150 pickup for the last few years — the most significant addition to the truck.
By swapping the 3.5-liter V-6 for the Expedition’s tired 5.4-liter V-8, Ford infused the big SUV with 55 more horsepower and torque — and greater power at a lower rpm.
Stomp the throttle with the traction control off, and the Expedition can actually smoke its rear tires, which is a bit like watching an elephant tap dance while juggling.
It just seems improbable.
More important, the EcoBoost Expo will sprint to 60 mph in 6.4 seconds, according to Car and Driver, three-tenths of a second quicker than a Chevy Tahoe equipped with a 5.3-liter V-8.
No three-ton behemoth will ever be agile, but the Expo was fairly easy to drive in traffic once I got accustomed to its high-rise “command” seating, which felt kind of like sitting on top of my old house in Richardson.
So don’t attempt high-speed curves or bat turns in the 6-foot-5-inch tall Expo, which tended to plow in moderate-speed corners and leaned some.
I wasn’t sure what to conclude about its interior. Though the truck I had was a pre-production model with no window sticker, similarly equipped models cost around $64,000.
While the interior was definitely upgraded for 2015, it didn’t quite feel near-luxury to me, which is how I would define a $60,000 vehicle.
That said, I give Ford pretty high marks for the Expedition, which will supposedly get a new aluminum body in the next couple of years.
The company managed to make an old — albeit revitalized — SUV competitive with Chevy’s all-new Tahoe.
Now the Expo’s wrinkles look mostly like character lines.
Where do we go for that treatment, by the way?
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