Miscellany: Dodge Grand Caravan SXT review

This fall, we had a fun old-fashioned family road trip through New England. Our vehicle of choice? The Dodge Grand Caravan, easily the most common minivan in American rental car fleets.

By most measures - performance, comfort, technology - the aging Grand Caravan is terrible compared to contemporary SUVs and sedans. The pokey Pentastar V6 struggled to get up to highway speed, and keeping the thing planted on New Hampshire's winding mountain roads was a white-knuckle experience (not in a good way). Road, wind, and engine noise became downright intrusive at 75 mph, and we never warmed up to the Caravan's cheap interior and last generation head unit. Incredibly, the thing didn't have Bluetooth, much less Apple CarPlay; to connect an iPhone, I resorted to a 3.5mm aux cable scrounged from a Rite Aid in Montpelier.

On the other hand, the Caravan excelled in the one thing you need from a minivan - the ability to carry seven passengers and a lot of luggage from place to place. I suppose we could have rented an expensive giant three-row SUV, but even that would have lacked the Dodge's handy dual automatic sliding doors and stowable second row seats. So, when you consider the Grand Caravan saved us from the logistical headaches of guiding a second car through Boston traffic, you can understand how we grew a bit attached to it during the vacation...though not so attached that we didn't breathe a sigh of relief getting back into our cars back home.