Instruments have been pared down to the essentials (gone are oil pressure and voltage readouts, leaving speedometer, tachometer, fuel and coolant) and re-organized within a recessed pod surrounded by a satin-finish, metallic ring. It's a less-busy arrangement, but given the Mountaineer's workhorse capabilities, as evidenced by the V8 AWD's three-ton tow rating, we miss the omitted gauges. The dash is cleaner, though, with attractive, low-key, metallic accents.
The stereo and climate controls in the center stack have been updated to accommodate the screen for the optional navigation system, yielding larger, more finger-friendly buttons. The results here are mixed. The stereo and navigation system operate on separate power supplies, so you can have a map displayed without having the stereo on. That's not true of all navigation systems, including those from Mercedes. But sadly, the stereo's tuning function remains buried beneath a sequential rocker switch, forcing you to wait while it scrolls up or down through the frequency band to find any station other than one of the presets. The navigation system screen could be larger, but the information it provided was adequate and accuracy was above average.
The front seats are comfortable, with adequate thigh support and bolsters. Overall, passenger roominess is competitive for the class. The Mountaineer offers comparable headroom in the front seats as the the 2006 GMC Envoy and Nissan Pathfinder, trailing them by less than an inch; front-seat legroom betters the Envoy by an inch and equals the Pathfinder; front-seat hiproom is almost identical.
Second-row headroom and legroom is comparable to the Envoy, but the Mountaineer offers significantly 2.5 inches more legroom than the Pathfinder's second row offers, a noticeable difference. However, the Mountaineer doesn't have nearly as much second-row hiproom as the Envoy and Pathfinder do. The middle-row bench seat has full seatbelts for three but head restraints for only the outboard passengers.
The third-row seats in the Mountaineer are significantly roomier than those in the competition's, with nearly three inches more legroom than Envoy and more than six inches over the the Pathfinder. Headroom and hiproom are comparable. The third row is a bench seat with minimal padding and fixed-height head restraints, which loom large in the back window; they do collapse, but only by tugging a loop hanging out the backside. Much better are the optional third-row seats that can be power-folded via two rocker buttons in the left rear quarter panel, directly below a thoughtfully provided button for the power central locking.
Accessing the third row is a three-step process that doesn't strike us as all that secure. First, you pull a strap that releases the head restraints so they fold forward. Then you pull up on a stiff lever to fold the seatback down on the seat bottom. And then you lift the heavy seat assembly, rocking it forward toward the front seats, where it parks, unrestrained, while people crawl into and out of the third row seats. When I leaned on it while climbing out, it rocked back, almost dropping into place, which would have put it smack on top of my foot.
We like the look of some of the light-colored interiors, though we're concerned it'll get dirty. The light-colored, suede-like inserts attract dirt like a magnet and, once dirtied, are a hassle to spruce up.
The rear-seat entertainment system, controls and all, is housed in a black plastic box suspended from the ceiling and running the width of the roof immediately behind the front seats contains. The size of the drop-down screen seems behind the times in terms of size. When in position for viewing, the video screen combines with the rear head restraints to render the rearview mirror virtually useless. Outward visibility elsewhere is good, with less obstruction than expected from the thick C-pillars.
The door panels are an example of how safety and ergonomics sometimes don't mix well. The idea behind the layout of the interior door panels, front and rear, was to use the arm rest and door pull to supplement the impact protection hardware built into the door's innards. Thus, the separation of the arm rest and door pull, with one positioned below the other. The result, however, is a door pull well below and forward of the natural plane of the arm and wrist and, thus, ergonomically poorly positioned and basically just a bear to grab hold of and use to leverage the door closed. To top off the poor placement of those two features, the inside latch handle is all the way forward and on the top-most part of the arm rest, where it's a stretch to get to and at an illogical angle to operate. To its credit, Mercury (and Ford, which used the same design on the the 2006 Explorer) has announced the door panels will be reconfigured, possibly for 2007.
The Mountaineer offers less cargo space behind the third-row seats than either the Envoy or the Pathfinder, by nearly 10 cubic feet in the former and by nearly 3 cubic feet in the latter. Fold down the third row and it offers the same amount of cargo space behind the second row as the Envoy but more than 5 cubic feet less than the Pathfinder. With both back rows of seats folded, however, the Mountaineer prevails, by about 3 cubic feet over the GMC and Nissan. We'd like to have some hooks on which to hang grocery bags like those found on the Chrysler Town & Country and other vehicles.
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