Review: 2013 Dodge Grand Caravan Crew Plus – Part 5 [UPDATED]
The Dodge Grand Caravan Crew Plus comes with a feature called Uconnect which allows you to control things like your radio, phone and other entertainment functions from a single place either from the touch screen in the center console, via redundant controls on the steering wheel, or via voice commands. When it comes to the latter, I like the way Uconnect works. When you press the Uconnect button on the left hand side of the steering wheel, it will tell you what options are available relative to what function you’re currently using, or you can simply say “main menu.” The advantage of this sort of design is that you do not have to remember the entire command set or ask the system for help on a constant basis. That makes the Uconnect system easy to use. Points to Dodge for coming up with this. The other thing I will note is that it had no problem recognizing my voice. None. I was really impressed by that.
I was able to quickly pair my BlackBerry Torch to the system via bluetooth and control it via voice. Once paired, it downloaded my address book so that I can dial numbers via voice. If I needed to dial a number that was not in my address book, I can tell it to “Dial 4 1 6 5 5 5 1 2 3 4″ (or any other number) and it would dial the number. Another note, you can pair up to 7 phones to the system. The sound quality on both ends of the conversation were quite good, which is what you want.
When it came to using the USB ports (there’s two of them, one in the front of the system and one in the upper glove compartment), I got mixed results. When my wife plugged in her iPhone 5, it recognized it instantly and she was able to access her playlists. However, Uconnect only played the MP3 files that were on her iPhone. The AAC encoded music were off limits. So that means if you do what Apple wants you to do and buy your music from the iTunes Store, you won’t be playing it via USB. That’s a bit of a fail. I then tried my BlackBerry via USB as that had over 1100 MP3 files on it. Uconnect took about three minutes to figure out what was on it and started to play the MP3s in alphabetical order and I could only move through them in that order. Even though I had playlists on it, it didn’t see any of those. I could only conclude that it saw my BlackBerry as a glorified USB stick. I had better results using my BlackBerry via bluetooth. I could chose the playlist that I wanted to play from the Blackberry and stream it over bluetooth. Of course, the downside to this was the battery life of my BlackBerry. One other thing to mention, the music would occasionally pause for a split second and then keep playing. Weird. I’m not sure if that was the phone or Uconnect. If bluetooth or USB doesn’t do it for you in terms of music playback, there’s also a 1/8” audio jack as well.
This particular Uconnect system has two DVD players. You can route the video to either the middle LCD display or the back LCD display (which by the way are very clear and have excellent picture quality) so that you can play one DVD on each screen. The audio can apparently be heard independently via wireless headsets as well, but I was not able test that as Dodge didn’t supply me with headsets or the remote control that is apparently included with this vehicle. It also has AV jacks and a 115V outlet so you can plug in an Xbox or PS3. All of this is controlled from the touchscreen and for the most part, it’s easy to set it up to do what you want it to do. In terms of audio, this minivan has 9 speakers with a subwoofer. The audio quality is good for both DVDs and music. It won’t blow you away, but it won’t have you wishing for something better.
When it comes to the navigation system, it’s a mixed bag. It’s perfectly competent at navigating you to your destination. But if I compare how it does it to my Garmin 1350 LMT, it doesn’t do so efficiently. From what I can tell, it doesn’t take the most efficient route to your destination. Instead, it may take you an extra kilometer or two via major streets to get you to where you want to go. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not going to save you gas or time. The other thing I’ll point out is that the screen is way too busy. There’s a lot of virtual buttons around the edge of the navigation screen that I don’t think are required. Dodge could likely make things look better by cleaning that up. One nice touch, all the audio commands that the system hands out are aimed at the driver. By that I mean the balance of the audio changes so it becomes slanted towards the driver seat.
One other thing to note is that the system comes with SirusXM radio, AM and FM radio and a CD player along with a 28GB hard drive to store music and pictures. Everything here works as you would expect it to.
So, what do I think about Uconnect? It seems to work good enough. There are areas that need some work, but they’re nothing that a software update couldn’t cure.
The final part of the review will tidy things up and also give you my final impressions.
UPDATE: Apparently the wireless headsets were in the vehicle. They were located in the passenger side Stow N’ Go area that I didn’t think of checking. Updated review of Uconnect to come.
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