New Explorer delightful to drive despite glitches

0 Comments | USA TODAY, November, 2005 | by James R. Healey

The Explorer SUV is a huge deal to Ford Motor. It's still the best-selling SUV, even though it's a truck at heart and buyers nowadays favor car-based SUVs, called crossovers.

Explorer is so popular, such a standard against which other SUVs are judged, that it pulls a lot of shoppers into Ford showrooms who otherwise might not be there. And its many owners are a big pool of potential buyers for Ford's other products.

So the makeover for the 2006 model year is no small thing. You might think it so because Explorer still looks like it has for years, more or less. It is about the same size, has the same-size engines, rides on similar suspension.

But almost everything's different. Even the basic foundation, the frame, is new. The only significant part carried...