Look around your living room. Do you have leather-upholstered furniture? A flat-screen TV with a DVD player and satellite television? Maybe a good, nine-speaker stereo with wireless headphones, satellite radio and perhaps a hard drive of, say, 30 gigabytes that can store more than 4,000 songs?
If so, your living room is nicer and better-equipped than mine. Which is one reason I found the interior of the 2011 Chrysler Town & Country Limited so appealing. Yes, I have a nice leather chair, but it isn’t heated, and it doesn’t recline. Nor do I have Bluetooth streaming audio in my house, or voice command to turn a lot of the features on and off.
Let’s face it: Since Chrysler introduced the modern, front-wheel-drive minivan 28 years ago, the formula hasn’t changed: Minivans tend to look like boxes, mostly because boxes are very efficient shapes when you need to hold a lot of stuff. Minivans that have strayed far from that premise have usually failed.
Remember those dreadful GM minivans from the 1990s that looked like Dustbusters? And Chrysler minivans, and their slightly less luxurious counterparts built by Dodge, are boxier now than ever. You can dress one up with nice paint jobs and chromed wheels, but it’s still a box.
Manufacturers have then been forced to make nicer and nicer boxes, with luxury exquipment and clever features like rearmost seats that fold flat into the floor. On vans like the Town & Country, even that feature has been improved. For $595 extra, those rear seats are power-operated: Touch one button, and they perform some motorized acrobatics and disappear beneath the carpet. The test Town & County Limited, the top-of-the-line model, also had power-operated sliding side doors and and a power tailgate. You might wonder who needs all that, then as you dash toward the van with an armload of groceries in a thunderstorm you think: “Oh, I do.”
Inside, as mentioned, this Town & Country Limited is just loaded. It has Sirius satellite radio, and Sirius satellite “backseat TV,” as well as a DVD player, shown on two nine-inch screens, airing over wireless headphones, so front-seat passengers won’t have to listen to “The Little Mermaid” over and over. The van seats two up front, two in the middle and three in the rear. The middle row of “Stow & Go” seats fold flat, too. Even with all the seats in place, there is 33 cubic feet of luggage space at the very rear – lower the third-row seats, and you have 83.3 cubic feet. Towing capacity is 3,600 pounds, not bad for a front-drive minivan.
Engine choice has never been the Chrysler minivan’s long suit, and for years it looked as though the optional 2.6-liter Mitsubishi-built four-cylinder offered on the very first models may be the high water mark. But for 2011, the Town & Country gets the 3.6-liter, 283-horsepower Pentastar V-6, mated to a smooth, perceptive six-speed automatic, and suddenly the Town & Country has a powertrain that is as good as anyone’s. EPA rating is a decent 17 mpg city, 25 mpg highway, not that bad for a 4,632-pound vehicle. Mid-grade 89 octane gas is preferred, but the test model ran fine on 87 octane regular. The engine will also run on E85 ethanol, but the EPA says that instead of averaging 20 mpg overall on gasoline, expect 14 mpg on E85.
On the road, the Town & Country offers an excellent ride with none of the tipsy sensation minivans sometimes show on winding roads. Handling is good, but not remarkable. Someday some manufacturer is going to offer a minivan in the U.S. that is genuinely fun to drive – hasn’t happened yet. Safety features abound, and include side-curtain airbags for all rows, and a driver’s side knee airbag.
There’s little to fault with the Chrysler Town & Country Limited, though the price, $41,380, reflects the long, long list of mostly standard features. There are less expensive versions of the Town & Country, but none are cheap. At any price, the T&C Limited makes long trips seem much, much shorter.
SCSmith3@Tribune.com.
2011 Chrysler Town & Country Limited
Base price: $38,660
Price as tested: $41,380
EPA rating: 17 miles per gallon city driving, 25 mpg highway
Engine: 3.6-liter, 283-horsepower V-6
Transmission: 6-speed automatic
Length: 202.8 inches
Wheelbase: 121.2 inches
Parting shot: A worthy descendent to the original Chrysler minivan from 28 years ago.
