The IT Nerd

“You’re testing a minivan? A mom-mobile? I’m a woman who wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those.”

Okay. I’ll admit that the minivan has a bad rap. And I’m sure I’m going to hear lots of comments like that all week long. But take a step back and look at this critically for a second. Minivans can carry a lot of stuff, a lot of people, or both. That makes them highly practical. So if you’re the type who has to has to haul around stuff or people, you’d be short sighted to not consider a minivan.

In the case of the Dodge Grand Caravan Crew Plus, which is brought to you by the company that invented the minivan, you’re getting not just a minivan, but a minivan with all sorts of features to keep everybody happy. How about second and third row displays? DVD player? Leather seats? UConnect? Power sliding doors and power hatch? All the electronic overseers that you can shake a stick at such as blind spot monitoring with cross traffic alerts, and a pile of airbags to highlight a few things?

Sounds sweet doesn’t it?

But the question is, what is it like to live with for a week and should it be on your shopping list if you need such a vehicle? That’s what I’m going to find out. I’ll be dividing this review into the following sections:

• Interior
• UConnect and other technology in the vehicle.
• Engine and Fuel Economy
• Drive quality
• Wrap Up

I’ve had the vehicle for just under 12 hours and I’ve already used it to take home some people from a holiday party as I was the designated driver. My initial impressions are as follows:

• It’s big on the inside and big on the outside, but it doesn’t drive big. Having said that, you figure out that it’s big in a hurry when you try to parallel park it.
• The engine (a V6 by the way) has a fair amount of power to it.
• It appears at first glance to be well screwed together
• It’s quiet for the most part.

So will I have a positive view of this vehicle by the end of the review? Tune in to tomorrow when we discuss the engine.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2012 at 10:03 am and is filed under Products with tags Dodge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.