Mercury Mountaineer Premier AWD Buffalo NY

BY ERIK JOHNSON

Some folks might say that on the grand scale of pointlessness, the Mercury Mountaineer—and the entire Mercury lineup—falls somewhere between the human appendix and rooting for the Cubs to win the World Series. That it's the automotive equivalent of a concrete life preserver. That it makes the Flowbee look like a good idea.

Now, this isn't because the Mountaineer is unpleasant to drive. It isn't. On the contrary, the Mountaineer is wholly capable, decently built, and even nice to look at in a boxy, American kind of way. No, the problem lies in the fact that there's already a vehicle that drives like and looks like and is almost in every way exactly like the Mountaineer called the Ford Explorer. GM seems to have gotten the memo that the American public is wise to badge engineering—witness the adequately differentiated Buick Enclave/GMC Acadia/Saturn Outlook triplets—so why can't Ford?

Nevertheless, FoMoCo continues to sell the Mountaineer, which was redesigned for 2006. (With about 30,000 copies moving out the door per year, we have to begrudgingly admit that we'd probably keep hawking the profitable ute, too, even with sales dropping by nine percent last year.) Like the Explorer, the Mountaineer is available with a 4.0-liter V-6 or a 4.6-liter V-8. We drove the top-shelf V-8 in our four-wheel-drive Premier test model, which clocked in at $39,335. Power running boards, floor mats, a tow package, power-adjustable pedals, satellite radio, a DVD system, and navigation were $5555 of the total.

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