By MARYANNE MURRAY BUECHNER	E-mail this article to a friend

February 1, 2005

Chrysler Town & Country The minivan's interior comes loaded with family features

Normally I wouldn't drag my family to the car on a wintry Sunday to make a two-hour day trip to a friend's house just to show off. But I've borrowed a top-of-the-line Chrysler Town & Country minivan, loaded with all sorts of high-tech bells and whistles, and I'm determined to get some mileage out of it. My mission: check out what the latest-greatest minivans have to offer, from satellite radio to parking guides to vanishing seats.

One out of every 17 "light vehicles" sold in the U.S. last year was a minivan, for a market share of less than 7%, according to data from WardsAuto.com, an auto industry information service. That's down slightly from previous years-one factor is the increasing popularity of "crossover" vehicles, 7-passenger cars that drive more like station wagons, look like minivans on the inside and SUVs on the outside, and get better gas mileage. Still, notes Ward analyst Haig Stoddard, "Minivans are a significant part of the market and will continue to be for a long time." It's also a very competitive one: the number of makes and models has jumped in recent years, while leaders Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Chrysler have all done major redesigns in the last couple of years.

That's all good news for consumers and may help explain the recent explosion of nifty new features and high-tech options. The Honda Odyssey's optional navigation system, for example, responds to 637 spoken commands, including those that control the air conditioner and radio. Toyota offers laser-guided cruise control (the laser detects vehicles in front of you) and high-intensity discharge headlights (super-bright bulbs that contain Xeon gas, mercury and metal halide, previously seen in sports cars) as standard features in its top-tier Sienna.

So let's ride. As we herd our two boys toward the vehicle, a silver, 2005 Town & Country Limited (with a sticker price of $37,500, it's one of the most expensive ones out there), I thumb the key fob to open the sliding side doors and we shoo the kids inside. I hit the key fob again to open the rear liftgate and plop the stroller into the cargo well. I don't fold it up because, well, there's so much room I don't have to. My husband Terry settles into the driver's seat, hitting the No. 2 memory button on the door to reposition the seat, foot pedals and side mirrors according to his customized settings. (I'm No. 1). He adds Finding Nemo to the five-disc DVD changer embedded in the front center panel and hands me the remote. Conor, our 4-year-old, has already pulled the DVD screen down from the ceiling and is whining for us to start the movie even before we've pulled out of our parking space. That's the trouble with this stuff, I think: you give the kids a little onboard entertainment and they come to expect it every time, whether it's a long haul or a 15-minute trip across town. It takes willpower not to use it as a crutch. Terry is equally ambivalent. "It's nice to have TV in here," he says, "but it feels a little like we're drugging them."

Today, though, we need the break. I grab the wireless headphones (included with the optional $1,700 DVD entertainment system), check the volume and fit them to my kids' heads so Terry can listen to the satellite radio through the main speakers. Now only the kids can hear Dory and Marlin bickering, and we're listening to Car Talk on NPR Now (Sirius channel 106). Terry switches on the navigation system, inputs our destination address and in second we've got a route from our home in Brooklyn to my friend Lynne's house in Bryn Mawr, Penn. Eventually we have to silence the thing; the spoken directives, while dead-on, are interrupting Click and Clack.

Sprawled out in the third row with a laptop on my thighs (it's plugged into a nearby outlet) I ask Terry to bump up the temperature in my "climate zone" so that I can warm my toes. I don't have to shout, and not just because the kids are near-catatonic. There's very little noise coming from the engine or the outside. Chrysler says its new "quiet steel" technology—two layers of steel with a sound-proofing agent in between—and spray-on dampeners help muffle the sound.

Silence is nice, but it's safety that sells, and new features on that front have become a big part of the pitch. Many manufacturers now offer both side and side-curtain air bags. The Honda Odyssey has sensors that can detect a pending rollover and will trigger deployment, while our Chrysler Town & Country offers a special airbag for your knees (it's called the inflatable knee blocker) and an "enhanced accident response system" that automatically turns on the interior lights and unlocks the doors when an air bag is deployed.

Tire pressure monitors have also become more widely available across different brands. These systems rely on sensors placed on each tire; when one detects a drop in pressure, a warning light appears on the instrument panel. (False alarms are not uncommon, as I discovered: when outside temperatures drop below freezing, the air inside an otherwise healthy tire can compress, setting off an alert. After driving around for a bit, though, pressure returns to normal.) The Honda Odyssey takes things up a notch, adding a "run-flat" tire technology that lets you keep driving—up to 125 miles at 50 mph—after one of your tires has been punctured, thanks to a protective nylon ring inside the aluminum wheel.

My favorite little extra, the rear-parking assist, feels more like a gimmick than a safety net, but I dig it. In the Town & Country, four proximity sensors fixed to the rear bumper trigger tiny lights on a display that's right in your line of sight, whether you're looking over your shoulder or at the rear-view mirror (it's directly above the rear window). As you get closer to another car, fence, tree, or some other stationary object, more and more lights appear; first they are yellow, then red, then you hear beeps; a final long beep tells you that you've gone as far as you should go. It took a few tries before I felt I could truly trust the technology, and even then I'd still gauge the situation with my own eyes, but it definitely helps. With the Honda Odyssey, you can get back-up sensors that also beep on approach, but if you opt for the $2,000 navigation and DVD entertainment package, you also get a real-time video image of what's behind you, captured by a tiny camera and displayed on the navigation screen. The Toyota Sienna's version uses a graphic displayed on the dash and buzz sounds as alerts.

A better investment for some people might be the UConnect hands-free mobile phone system, a $300 accessory Chrysler is touting that uses Bluetooth (a short-range wireless link) to put calls through from your cell phone, assuming it's compatible (meaning your handset has a Bluetooth chip of its own). The system uses voice recognition to place calls, and you hear the person at the other end through the car speakers. Programming it with all your important numbers looks laborious, however, and the system can't pull numbers directly off your phone's address book.

When we make it to Lynne's, it's the Town & Country's Stow 'n Go seats that get the most praise. (DaimlerChrysler spent $400 million developing this design coup, and is the first—and so far only—manufacturer to enable both second and third row seats to fold flush into the floor.) But there's something Lynne wants even more than disappearing seats, more than parking sensors or a DVD player with wireless headphones. If she's really going to give up her Toyota Land Cruiser SUV for a mom-mobile, she wants built-in car seats for her little ones. As it turns out, Chrysler had to discontinue integrated child seats—the five-point harness restraints flipped down from the seat backs—because they didn't work with the new Stow 'n Go design. Even in the new high-tech cars, I guess you can't have everything.

—With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

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