Honda Pilot tops shootout among seven 3-row SUVs
— -- CHICAGO — The family-size SUV market is an action movie.
New and freshened entries. Rising fuel economy. Zooming technology. Flashier styling. All of which would mean nothing if buyers weren't impressed. But they are.
Ford Explorers, Chevrolet Traverses, Honda Pilots and other three-row, family SUVs account for one of every seven new vehicles sold, reports J.D. Power and Associates, and buyers are paying a segment-record average transaction price of about $33,000.
Our latest Shootout comparison is a face-off among seven vehicles in the heart of that family SUV market: 2012 Chevrolet Traverse, Dodge Durango, Ford Explorer, Honda Pilot and Kia Sorento and the 2011 Mazda CX-9 and Toyota Highlander.
Our experts, plus the Koch family of Hoffman Estates, Ill., tested and rated them for the Cars.com/USA TODAY/MotorWeek$37,000 Three-row SUV Shootout— a mouthful that signifies we set a size range and sticker-price cap judged most relevant to the most buyers.
The top overall scorer in a close competition: Honda Pilot. Complete model-by-model ranking, scores, features, judges' reactions and some reasons why each one finished as it did, are above.
But here are some broad, overall impressions:
•$37,000 doesn't go far in this crowd.
All the test SUVs were more than presentable, but not all had leather upholstery, for instance, or backup cameras. Only two had navigation systems (Explorer and Sorento). Only one (Pilot) had a rear entertainment system.
And none had all-wheel drive, which buyers in some regions would consider necessary. All could be equipped with all-wheel drive for a price: $1,600 for the Pilot, for example.
The automakers supplied the test vehicles (except for Ford) and picked the combination of features and options they hoped would get the best mileage (10% of the total score) and make the best impressions on the expert judges and the Kochs (pronounced "Cooks") — Tarek and Heather and their two children — picked to leaven the tests with a real family's input.
•Despite differences in size, weight and government fuel-economy ratings, all got about 24 miles per gallon on the highway in our real-world gas mileage test.
The results from our 230-mile open-road jaunt, in which each vehicle was rotated among the expert judges, were in a range from 23.5 mpg (Chevy Traverse) to 25.4 mpg (Kia Sorento).
The results are somewhat surprising. The mpg-winner Kia's vigorous V-6 encouraged heavy-footed driving.
The Chevy's large size and weight made it less frisky and provided no incentive for hard driving.
•Being new wasn't necessarily a trump card. Ford's redesigned Explorer rolled out in late 2010 as a 2011 model with new styling, features and drivetrain, yet tied the Sorento for lowest score.
Ford is selling Explorers two to three times as fast as a year ago, so buyers might dispute our ranking.
Honda Pilot, meanwhile, just got a very mild update — the exterior's hard to distinguish from the previous version unless they're side-by-side — and it finished first.
An aging member of the group, the Mazda CX-9 launched in 2007 and little changed since, came in at a respectable third.
•Though these family SUVs were similar in concept, there were significant differences in how they drove, how much cargo space they had, how many passengers they carried and how comfortably they did so.
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