The Ford Endeavour is not your run-of-the-mill Sports Utility Vehicle, it is surprisingly an extremely capable off-road vehicle
Every week I get several calls from friends and acquaintances for car-buying advice. Usually, they are asking for what one would call “confirmation bias”, in the sense that they have already made up their minds about a car and want their choice “verified.” Fair enough. After all, a car is a major purchase and everybody needs peace of mind that they are not spending their hard-earned money on a lemon.
But there are those occasional calls or even conversations I have with people I meet where you hear of a ridiculous car choice. Usually these involve a large SUV. Personally, as much as large SUVs make sense as highway cruisers, in a city like Delhi, actually any city in the world, a large SUV is a ridiculous choice of car. And not only do people who buy these cars want to buy a large SUV, they wish to buy the biggest, baddest specification level of that SUV. That means buying a four-wheel drive.
That brings us to the new Ford Endeavour. Until the new Toyota Fortuner launches in the next couple of days, this is by far and away the best SUV in its price category. And when I first drove the new vehicle earlier this year, I drove the two-wheel drive model with the smaller 2.2-litre engine. The Titanium-spec model came with all the toys and despite the heft of the car, the 160PS engine was more than powerful enough to get the job of city driving done. The Endeavour as I noted back then was extremely spacious and a massive improvement on the previous generation.
And frankly, the 2.2 litre two-wheel drive version is more than enough car if buying a large SUV is what you want. But, according to Ford, two in five buyers are buying the fully-loaded four-wheel drive version of the car. The top-end four-wheel drive model costs 2.5 lakh rupees more than the two-wheel drive model. And you really wonder whether the costs are worth itIJ
So recently, Ford India invited a few journalists and customers to a remote farmhouse near the boundary between Gurgaon and Faridabad to show off the four-wheel drive chops of the new Endeavour. The first thing you notice is that the Endeavour has a “terrain response dial” similar to those on land Rover vehicles. That is because it is a markedly similar system primarily since Ford owned land Rover when the system was developed.
It works on the same principles, turns the dial depending on the road surface and the car automatically adjusts the way it delivers power to its wheels. On sand, slate or snow, it will give as comfortable a driving experience without the need to dramatically alter your driving style. It makes driving on difficult terrain idiot-proof.
So why then do you need four-wheel drive. And not just regular four-wheel drive, but proper low-range locked-differential four-wheel drive. Explaining differential drive is a bit complicated but I won’t attempt it here, but it suffices to say that this system will allow you to conquer all but the worst terrain that planet earth has to throw at you.
Now the fact is that you can do this on far cheaper vehicles, the most popular offroading vehicle in India being the extremely capable Mahindra Thar. The Endeavour does not look the role, it is big, it is rather luxurious and has all sorts of creature comforts. You can plug-in and listen to music off your iPhone while sitting on lovely cushioned seats with powered controls. I mean, this is comfortable. This is not the way one should go offroading, but I’m glad I did.
Yes, you could always go luxury offroading in land Rover and Range Rover vehicles but this is less than a third of the price of a Discovery 4. And offroading in luxury is the way to go. This was fun primarily because the Endeavour is extremely capable as an offroading vehicle, it can storm up hillocks and go down steep declines comfortably. It waded through water as it was an amphibian on a demanding track set up by off-road expert group Terrain Tigers and as I sat with a friend Niloy from the Tigers, even he, a veteran offroading expert, was impressed with the car.
Chances are that the average Endeavour buyer will never put his or her car through this demanding test. And 99 per cent of the time, even people who do put the car through difficulty, won’t need to use its full ability. But for that one per cent of the time, you know the Endeavour has you covered.