2004 Ford Excursion Review (continued)
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Walkaround

The Ford Excursion is big. Based on Ford's Super Duty F-Series pickup trucks, it's more than 7 inches longer than the Chevrolet Suburban.

Excursion's rear cargo doors are split three ways. You can swing the glass hatch up for quick access to gear. Below the hatch is a pair of half-height doors, like Dutch doors. So they can be opened when you've got a trailer attached, and can be swung nearly 180 degrees for easier access. This arrangement also offers much better visibility rearward while driving than the Suburban's full-height split doors yet offers the benefits of split doors.

Ford designed the Class IV receiver hitch, which comes standard, to prevent smaller cars from going underneath the rear bumper, while a specially designed BlockerBeam is designed to accomplish the same goal up front.

Interior Features

The 2004 Excursion comes with a nicely designed interior. The dash is attractive and well designed and all of the controls are easy to find and operate.

The seats are comfortable. It doesn't matter whether you're sitting in the front seats, second row or third row, all of the seats offer generous legroom, headroom and elbow room. Six adults can ride in comfort with 48 cubic feet of cargo space left behind them. For shorter trips, like going to a restaurant, the Excursion can seat eight people, or nine if you opt for the XLS with its front bench seat.

Remove the third-row seat, and the Excursion can easily carry five people and more than 100 cubic feet of gear. Removing the third-row seat is easy: Flip the seatback forward, yank a bar at the foot of the seat and pull the seat toward the rear of the vehicle; it glides along on rollers. The seat weighs 75 pounds, but in short order I pulled it out and threw it into the back of another SUV on a cold Montana morning before driving to a trout stream.

Set up as a two-seater, the Excursion can carry an outlandish amount of cargo. A sheet of plywood slides in easily and lays flat on the floor. Two people could sleep in comfort on the huge, flat cargo area. Believe it or not, we managed to fill an Excursion. We'd just finished a three-day float on Oregon's Deschutes. As planned, the river guide in charge of setting up camp had arrived at our vehicles ahead of us. He quickly stuffed all of the supplies from base camp and enough fishing equipment for eight people inside. When he was done stuffing, only seating for two remained and the rear-view mirror was rendered useless. Granted, he could have packed more efficiently, but he was grateful for such a large storage container. No question, the Excursion can hold a lot of gear.

After reorganizing the equipment and putting some of it into another vehicle, six of us piled into the Excursion and made the long trip back to town. Cruising along steadily with this load, the Excursion demonstrated its virtues of size, stability and power.