Our van was dark metallic grey and looked quite nice. The revised split-crosshair grille makes a HUGE difference in the exterior looks versus the massive floating chunk of chromed plastic the car used to wear. I'd say the car is actually nice looking. Minivan proportions are less than ideal, but this one has a nice clean, square-with-rounded-corners look going on. The details are nice...the tail lights have nice sculpting and multi-faced light rings.
It looked a lot like this, but with nicer 5-spoke wheels.
This van was pretty well equipped. It has the new Pentastar V6, which I was quite excited to play around with. It's a 3.6 liter V6 with lots of high tech stuff, and a lot of torque. I've heard some publications say it's a better engine than the venerable GM LLT/LY7 (and other high feature engines), which I hold in very high regard, so I was definitely interested to see how it fared. It also has a manumatic 6 speed auto. I'll talk more about that later. The sliding doors and liftgate all had power operation, which I thought was silly at first, but grew to like over time. It had a touchscreen entertainment center along with a medium-resolution LCD display between the tach and speedometer.
I'll start off with the passenger impressions, since that's where I found myself first.
I rode in the middle row, on the passenger side. Our van had Stow-N-Go seats rather than the swivel-n-go. I had cargo under my feet, and the seat folded easily to allow access to the rear row. The seat itself was not uncomfortable, with a nice tall headrest. The arm rests were less than ideal...folding rubber pieces that were too narrow for even my scrawny arms. Fortunately the window sill of the sliding door was broad and ideally placed for resting my right arm. There were cubbies located EVERYWHERE. 3 retractable ones in the center roof console, four cupholders PER ROW, lots of pockets, and a clever two-position drawer that comes out of the center console and slides rearward. It's about 18'' long, a few inches deep, and was perfect for my brother and I to stow our electronics in. It closes almost all the way, leaving two cupholders exposed. And if they're not needed it can be closed completely to free up foot space. The sliding door windows rolled down, as opposed to venting, which was nice. I'm 6'4'' and even with my seat all the way forward and the front seat all the way back, I had plenty of leg/knee/foot room to stretch out. Headroom was plentiful as well.
I do have a serious complaing about the middle row, though: Multimedia.
The car had a ceiling-mounted LCD tied into the in-dash dual-DVD changer. The screen is located just aft of the front row, and is very small, making the middle row the most ideal for viewing. The GIGANTIC problem there is that, while the car has about 57 speakers, NONE OF THEM are located in the middle. They are all in the front doors, the dash, or the c-pillar trim. With the audio sufficiently loud to be heard by middle-row passengers, the rest of the car's occupants are deafened. It's a dead-zone in the middle. The audio itself was crappy, with pure trebble in the front and pure bass in the rear, but middle-row occupants couldn't hear any of it anyway.
There are also no headphone jacks, so despite having multiple pairs of headphones on hand, we couldn't use those to overcome this design flaw either. There IS an RCA input just behind the left middle seat for game consoles, etc. Input but no output. Stupid.
There are also no controls for the damn DVD player in the back, which meant simply navigating a basic DVD menu required relaying instructions to the front passenger, who used the clunky touchscreen to control playback. There was a slot in the ceiling where the video screen closed that looked like it should hold a remote control, but it was missing from our rental.
This is a pretty damn terrible design flaw. For a car designed around ferrying children and a system designed around entertaining them, this kind of failure is hard to justify.
All side windows are tinted and polarized, but the sliding windows aft are particularly dark. I'm kind of a vampire (not the effing sparkly kind) and wear sunglasses EVERYWHERE. I did not need them in the Caravan. This was nice, because my polarized lenses disagree with LCD screens and even more with the parallax-3D of the 3DS I passed a lot of time with.
There's a button on the B-pillar trim that operates each sliding door. They're slow, but not arduously so. It was genuinely convenient, though I do find it irritating that you can't open the doors manually without using the master disable switch for all power doors (located above the driver's head). Even the normal door latches trigger automatic operation while that's enabled, and if you try and push faster it just fights you. I tried sticking various limbs in front of a closing door and it refused to sever them during automatic operation...but it also wasn't oversensitive in stopping for obstacles. The driver also has a button for each door and the liftgate above his head (and on the ridiculous silly stupid idiotic clunky fisher-price mess of a fatass Chrysler keyfob).
Now on to the part you care about: The driving.
I'll start by stating that I don't really like the "upright" seating position so many soccer moms feel empowered by. I like being low on the floor, with my legs stretched out and my arms relaxed. Can't do that in the Caravan. But I COULD still get comfortable. I managed a 300 mile stretch with no numb-cheek or knee pain after some seat fine-tuning (had a power ???-way driver seat about on par with my LS's as far as adjustability). But the ergonomics were still less than ideal. There wasn't a lot of space for my forelegs or knees, especially with the wheel tilted down (which is where I prefer it). And the arm-rests on the front seats are just as narrow and poorly-placed as those in the middle row...only with the added consolation of being pleather-wrapped and padded. The inboard arm rest was too close to the seat, too narrow, and too low to be of any use to me. The one on the door was fine, though.
The shifter is up on the dash, like on most modern minivans. But it's not like a column shifter of yore. The knob is angled straight back, and the ergonomics are awkward. This one had a manumatic mode (which merely sets the highest gear--useful for mountainous stretches of I-15 where the TCU can't decide between 5th and 6th). It's controlled by moving the shifter left and right while in D. It's not particularly natural in operation, and the knob's location makes it a bit weird as well. I certainly couldn't see using the function for more than just locking out overdrive...which could easily be accomplished using an old-school OD OFF button. But it's not hurting anything either. I never did get used to not having a shift knob to rest my right hand on.
This car had power adjustable pedals, but they seemed a bit silly in their design. The farthest-out (long-leg-mode) setting was still too close, and they only got nearer the driver seat from there. This contributed to the lack of kneeroom.
That LCD between the speedo and tach I mentioned earlier became indispensable for me. With my seat adjusted comfortably and the steering wheel all the way down, 80% of the tach and speedo were obscured. Since I was driving mostly on I-15, I only needed the 65-90 range, and that was completely blocked. No minor head movements like I use in my similarly (but less severely) afflicted LS helped, either. The wheel was RIGHT IN THE WAY. Terrible design. So I set the multi-function LCD display to show vehicle speed. I hate digital speedos, but they're still better than invisible ones.
As to driving dynamics...I've always understood that people buy minivans because they want something roomy and versatile that drives like a car. Having driven the Caravan, I have to wonder what kind of cars those people have been driving. This van drove like a truck. Distinctly. But a truck with the suspension from a 1988 DeVille. So floaty. Underdamped. It didn't feel top-heavy, but it felt dull and slow to respond. Gradual road oscillations became floating heaves for front seat passengers as the suspension tried to level things out. Of course we did have 5 adults and a teenager in the car, but once again, this thing is designed EXPRESSLY for transporting 6 people. It needs suspension tuning.
Steering was not as slow as I expected, but not fast either. It wasn't numb but wasn't communicative. I could feel as much as I needed and it took a natural, comfortable amount of motion to make small steering inputs. The 3 steering wheel spokes are far too huge. They are laden with buttons but they're so big that even so adorned there's tons of empty space. The split bottom spoke was, I am convinced, designed specifically to piss me off. Thick, uncomfortable, and stupid.
Now to the powertrain.
Our Pentastar 3.6 liter V6 is mated to a 6 speed automatic. Top two gears are overdriven, and 6th is VERY overdriven. That V6 spun at a mere 2000rpm at 80(!) miles per hour in 6th. Very impressive. Knock it down to 5th and revs shoot to a little over 3000. I spent a lot of time in 5th due to the numerous uphill stretches I drove on, and those stretches returned quite decent fuel economy (26-ish).
Shifts are smooth, but not slow or overly mushy. Under a lead foot, the engine will rev to 5500rpm before picking a new gear. The 3.6 had a lot of torque everywhere, and around town thrust was quite unminivanlike, with more than enough grunt on-tap to roast the terrible tires the van was wearing. The 6 gears make optimal use of that torque, but also allow for good fuel economy. With cruise control enabled, the transmission downshifts pretty intelligently for both more power AND for engine-braking. It was nice not to have to use the brakes to maintain the speed limit when going downhill. The car would drop a gear and level back out again. It's not as flawless as my LS at maintaining speed (in which the speedo needle NEVER MOVES once you set a speed, regardless of what the terrain is doing), but it certainly took some of the tedium I'm used to in older cars out of using cruise. Unfortunately, as torquey as the V6 was, it wasn't enough to make 6th gear ubiquitous. Long, gradual inclines particularly confused the transmission as it revved and changed gears incessantly. A couple taps to the left on the shifter would fix that by locking 6th out. Honestly, I wish my LS had a 6th gear and 2nd overdrive like the Caravan. The Lincoln's 5th gear is the only gear you need above 20mph unless you're trying to hoon it up, but I'd happily do a little more shifting for a 1000rpm 75mph cruise.
The V6 is powerful and smooth, but it drones unpleasantly from about 2800rpm to about 4000rpm. Fortunately on the highway revs are usually below that line, but passing and the like mean droning. Around-town, you get lots of droning since you're in the throttle rather than cruising. It's not terrible and not exceptionally loud, but it's definitely not on par with the engine's level of refinement elsewhere. And definitely not up to GM High Feature V6 standards.
The big knock against the car's powertrain is the electronic throttle. It sucks. It's amazingly nonlinear, slow, and unresponsive. It's IMPOSSIBLE to make fine throttle inputs, which makes small adjustments in speed very difficult. Adding a little tip-in does nothing. A little more does nothing. Then a little more and suddenly the revs are shooting up to 3 or 4k and the trans has downshifted. It's goofy and counterintuitive. Probably inefficient to boot. The pedal is also very, very lightly sprung. I've got size 13 boats for feet, and they simply squash the Hell out of the sad little spring behind the Caravan's throttle pedal. My ankle got tired more quickly in the Caravan than it ever has in any other car, and I had to be more conscious of modulating inputs because there was so much less feedback from the pedal than I'm used to.
There's a little green-leaf-iconed "Econ" button on the center console that has nothing to do with the A/C. It's a powertrain efficiency button, and what it does is put the car into Extra-Suck Mode. That crappy electronic throttle I mentioned before? It becomes a 3-position switch. You get Off, On, and Floored. Nothing in between. The Econ switch also delays downshifts to try to optimize efficiency. So now you've got a throttle that won't respond, a transmission that won't respond to IT, and tuning that makes them both behave slowly. Hills become Nightmares From Hell in Econ mode. You lose power until you floor it, at which point you continue losing power until the car admits it needs more stride and drops a gear. Then you get to wait for the power to come back as the throttle decides you might have been right all along.
I know why this button is here: 90% of Americans couldn't maintain a constant speed even within a 5mph variance if their lives depended on it. So this takes the user error away by smoothing out inputs. But it sucks, and it doesn't work, and I'd like to stab it in the face.
Overall, it was not an unpleasant car to drive. Dull, slow-witted, and dopey, but powerful and practical.
I was very happy to get back behind the wheel of my LS, though, where the transmission does what it's told and my legs have plenty of room. And I have a shifter to rest my hand on. Also that exhaust note.
