The Original Ford Explorer Changed the World Forever

this is a car i've always wanted to review this is an original ford explorer and it changed the world in my lifetime the single biggest change in automotive consumer behavior has been the switch from cars to suvs and it all started right here and today i'm going to review the original ford explorer one of the single most important vehicles in the last 30 years [Music] before i get started big news this explorer is currently for sale being auctioned live on cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website this is an unusually well preserved original explorer and it's offered with no reserve so someone's gonna win it so once you finish watching this video click the link in the description below to head over to the live auction for this ford explorer where you can bid on it and buy it only on cars and bids so let's talk explorer these days fully 75 of new vehicle sales are either suvs or crossovers or trucks but it wasn't always that way back in the 1980s suvs were rare and the few that did exist were off-roader four-wheel drives like jeeps and broncos and blazers aimed at mountain men who were driving their suv to go chop firewood for their remote mountain cabin the explorer went into production in february 1990 for the 1991 model year and it dropped any pretense of off-road capability press photos of the original explorer didn't show it off-road but rather in city locations because they knew that's where it would be getting used this didn't have a locking differential or off-roader tires or even that much ground clearance this was the first suv that wasn't about climbing mountains it was about shuttling your children around the suburbs and i've always wanted to review it and today i'm going to do just that first i'll take you on a thorough tour of the original explorer and show you all of the quirks and features of the first real family suv then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it the doug score all right i'm going to start my review of the original explorer with a little bit of a history lesson because i know there's gonna be a ton of people out there who are gonna take issue with me calling this the first real family suv the start of the trend i have all sorts of angry what about what about commenters and so i want to talk through why i'm saying this now the original ford explorer went into production on february 15 1990. in fact i am shooting this video on the original explorer's birthday 32 years to the day after it first went into production it was sold from the 1991 to 94 model years this is a 94 model from the final year of the original explorer production now of course there were other suvs before the original explorer came out but they just weren't the same for one thing most of the suvs throughout the 1970s and 80s were two-door models like the big chevy blazer the k5 and the ford bronco and vehicles like that jeeps from that era were all two doors so obviously that wasn't really a family suv those were more focused on the off-road capability rather than like the practicality of family life it wasn't something you thought about with an suv back then in fact the explorer's closest american-made competitor the chevy s10 blazer that vehicle was two-door only throughout the 1980s until general motors caught wind that ford would be making a four-door suv in the same size class so general motors rushed out and created a four-door blazer and they got it on sale only a few months after the explorer first went into production now probably the explorer's other closest competitor was the original jeep cherokee which was on sale for years before the explorer first came out but the cherokee was always marketed towards more of an off-roader go anywhere type of buyer and more importantly the cherokee just wasn't all that big cherokee was never more than 170 inches in length about 167 168 which made it about the size of a toyota corolla in this era by comparison the explorer was around 185 inches long it was the same size as a toyota camry it was a mid-sized suv designed for carrying families while the chair keep was just too small the cherokee was more for off-road use and you could carry your family sometimes but the explorer got the formula just right it was an suv that was actually designed for you to bring the whole family and on the subject of the cherokee i cannot emphasize enough how important the distinction is with the ford explorer and its marketing pitch up until the explorer every single suv that had ever been sold was primarily advertised for its capability automakers would show you what it could do off the pavement where it could go what trails it could traverse until the explorer ford didn't even bother trying to pretend that this could take you anywhere or do anything because they figured people wouldn't use it that way and i love looking at these old press photos and seeing it like photographed in a city in front of a theater because ford knew that's how customers were going to use it and they didn't even bother trying to fake it there were no off-road tires available in this there was no locking differential or recovery hooks or raised ground clearance and off-road suspension it didn't have any of that crap they knew people were never going to use it or at least that's what they thought and it worked and it worked and indeed the explorer's mass appeal was absolutely proven by its sales figures the jeep cherokee with its smaller size and more off-road appeal and marketing never really cracked about 125 000 sales per year in this era the ford explorer in its first full year on the market did 306 000 sales the mass appeal was absolutely undeniable and all the competitors started to take notice two years after the explorer first went on sale jeep came out with the grand cherokee for the 1993 model year as more of a comfort focused family-focused suburb-focused suv just like the explorer but the explorer was always cheaper it was always sort of more available and it always outsold the grand cherokee and its best years in this era the grand cherokee did about 260 270 000 sales per year but the explorer in its best year in this era 95 did 425 000 sales these things were everywhere and everyone was buying them and of course it wasn't just other american manufacturers who were desperate to compete with the massive success of the ford explorer the japanese also had suvs in this era but again they were either two-door models or they were pitched as ultra-rugged the nissan pathfinder for example as difficult as it may be to believe now was sold as a rugged off-roader suv back in the late 80s and early 90s toyota had the forerunner and the land cruiser both of which were not really family friendly they were more for going off the pavement and getting anywhere you possibly could but of course the japanese saw the success of the explorer and subsequently the grand cherokee and they too started pursuing the suburb focused suv although they did it with traditional japanese car brand cautiousness they started compact the toyota rav4 came out for the 96 model year and the honda cr-v came out in 97. it wasn't until the toyota highlander came out in 2001 and the honda pilot came out in 2003 that the japanese really had true competitors in the mid-sized family suv world which meant that ford got a 10 year head start on these japanese brands now i know that you're waiting for the quirks and features of the explorer and that some people will probably just stop watching because i've gone through all this history stuff but i think it's tremendously important to discuss the impact that this car had on the american family and its transportation this car was an absolute inflection point for everything that has happened since then and frankly i don't think that it gets the love that it deserves very few ford explorers were preserved because they were just family transportation and who bothers to preserve that who cares and an enormous number of these were crushed during cash for clunkers when the government paid big incentives for people to take these old inefficient vehicles off the road the explorer was the most popular car that was crushed and so finding a nice one is really really challenging which is a shame because it is such an important vehicle in the history of the automobile so to me that history lesson is important for you to understand this vehicle why it's so special and some of the context around why i have always wanted to review one of these so that on to the quirks and features so i'll start on the outside where you'll actually find in my opinion one of the explorer's keys to success which was its design it was a pretty nice looking suv that combined some boxy cool kind of rugged styling with some interesting car-like traits one good example of this is in back it didn't have a rear-mounted spare tire like so many of its rivals did instead ford figured correctly of course that the kind of people using this to shuttle their kids around the suburbs wouldn't need easy access to a full-size spare tire since they weren't really going off-roading so they got rid of the spare put it under the car and instead they did something cool they gave you split tailgate access you could open up the glass by twisting this handle to the left on the back and then you could pop open just the glass or you could open up the entire tailgate by twisting the handle to the right and then the whole thing would open that gave easier access to the cargo area for suburban families who would be accessing the cargo area often another cool thing that ford did with the original explorer was they blacked out some of the pillars on the side you can see the b pillar has been blacked out and same deal with the d pillar so it almost looks like it has a wrap around rear window now automakers do this to make the car seem visually a little bit smaller and a little bit less foreboding and imposing and that certainly worked here it gave it an suv but kind of car-ish look which helped sell buyers on it in my opinion same deal with the wheels you didn't have some rugged looking off-road steel wheels instead you had these happy little tilted stars that were just sort of fun and approachable like you might find in a car which helped people adopt an suv instead but on the flip side well the explorer did look sort of car-like in some areas it also had kind of a boxy rugged look too sort of a square shape overall similar to the jeep cherokee and that was especially true in the front where you had this upright grille and it had some brawny muscular presence now the reason for this grille is that it came straight out of the ford ranger pickup truck in fact the original explorer was pretty much just a ranger in its front half to create this vehicle they basically took the ranger pickup truck and made an suv out of it and that's how it was done so it has some of those ranger trucky design cues too but one of the main advantages of the explore over the ranger and over its crosstown rival the chevy blazer was width you see ford didn't just take a ranger and put an suv body on it they also made it wider which chevy didn't do with the blazer and as a result the explorer was five inches wider than the chevy blazer a pretty big number when you're talking about vehicle width and that translated to a much larger interior and especially a larger more family-friendly back seat which was absolutely key for the widespread adoption of this vehicle and indeed even sitting in this car now i feel like the back seat is pretty roomy knee room headroom legroom it's got it all even 30 years later it was great packaging and a great decision by ford and frankly anybody who really believed the jeep cherokee was the first mid-sized family suv has never tried to get teenage boys into the back of one it was just too tight the explore was much bigger much roomier it was just better for family use although by modern standards you look back here and you can't believe this was the back seat not because of interior room which like i said was great but frankly because of everything else take a look at the seat there are no like contours intended to make it more comfortable back here it's pretty much just a flat bench and yes sat on it and it doesn't even have headrests in the back we've learned a lot since this car first came out about the benefit of headrests and whiplash in a rear impact or a front impact your head can go flying and headrests keep that from happening they weren't just for comfort but back in the day ford didn't know anything about that stuff or at least they didn't care and so you didn't get head rests in your backseat you got hit from behind you or your children really were just left to fend for themselves with their neck snapping and yes the other thing you notice back here is it is blue very very blue in this interior which is kind of crazy by modern standards just how blue everything was but back in the day it was pretty common especially in american-made vehicles to have a fully blue interior and this one did you had blue seats both front and rear all blue which i guess you can understand but you also had blue carpeting every inch of carpet was blue in this vehicle the door panels were blue all the plastic pieces were all blue in addition to the carpeting and the seats even the dashboard was completely blue as you can see the vast majority of it you even had blue seat belts like you're in a porsche getting cool color matched seat belts well the 94 explorer had those two porsche people interestingly the one thing that isn't blue was the steering wheel and some of the gauge cluster area i guess they couldn't convince their supplier to make that stuff blue but everything else was made blue in this interior blue blue blue everywhere by the way one other blue related quirk even the floor mats were blue which is of course funny because they're blue carpet floor mats that you put on top of blue carpeting but i like how the passenger side floor mat still says explorer and that original explorer font a very cool throwback over on that side but anyway next we move up front in the original explore and the first thing i notice when i climb in here is that this whole front seat area is so ford ranger it looks like it was lifted straight out of the ford ranger pickup truck because it was ford didn't know that the explorer would be a massive hit so they didn't necessarily want to invest a ton of money into making it more beautiful and distinctive and so there's a lot of pickup truck in this front seat area for instance you have a column shifter like you did on most trucks from this era and not that many suvs you also have this giant hole between the center control stack and the center console just a carpeted hole here rather than like storage cubbies and cup holders like we would find in vehicles now because that's what pickups had since they usually had a center seat so you had that in the explorer too now with that said for as much utilitarian pickup truckness as you head up here the explorer was pitched as a family suv and so they did offer some creature comforts that were only just making their way into vehicles from this era for example cruise control in the explorer that wasn't that uncommon but the buttons on the steering wheel were that was becoming a big trend in the late 80s early 90s adding cruise control with those buttons and of course that later expanded to volume controls and all sorts of other controls mounted on the steering wheel and this is one of those starting points one other nice comfort touch in the explorer was cup holders you have these two cup holders mounted right here in the center which doesn't seem like a lot by today's standards but back then a lot of the rivals simply didn't have them i recently reviewed a gmc typhoon which was basically the same interior as the blazer from this era no cup holders at all so having these was a nice touch and you also had power windows power locks and power mirrors the trifecta of power operated things which wasn't that common on vehicles especially from this price point from this era so it was nice to see all those as well and one other nice comfort touch is the sun visor situation you can put down the sun visor like normal and of course move it over to the side like normal but you also had an auxiliary second sun visor you could use to give yourself sort of a little sun visor shield front and side i've noticed this more and more in modern vehicles but older ones didn't quite have it as much there was a nice comfort touch in the explorer but with that said looking back on this interior there's some trucky stuff in here and some comfort stuff like i've said but there is also some rather weird stuff that has gotten weirder with perspective one is the climate vents you had two climate vents on the passenger side of the dashboard the passenger side which makes sense but then you had two climate vents for the driver the weird part was there is a space for a third climate vent as you can see but they didn't use it they didn't want to give the driver extra climate vents for some reason so there's a dummy fake climate vent in here that looks just like a climate van i have no idea why they didn't just make it one but i guess they decided to cost cut out that extra vent also i love the fact that this explorer came with one key that opens pretty much everything all the doors and does the ignition but then also a second key that just does the glove box and the funny thing about this key is it says ford on one side the ford logo flip it over and it says family of fine cars which i guess must have been an advertising slogan at the time check out the ford family of fine cars and they printed that on the glovebox key not the regular key though also unusual a few items in the gauge cluster one is what happens when you shift into drive you notice there's actually two drives one is d and one is d in a circle d in a circle was overdrive which gave you access to all of your gears and it's what you would use on the highway this was pretty common for vehicles from this era to have a drive and an overdrive but it's weird to see it now and kind of confusing like which one do i shift into also weird in the gauge cluster is that several of the gauges actually give a normal range you can see here printed on them normal and so if your gauge is showing in that range you know that things are normal i guess also worth noting the cluster is the odometer you can see this car has less than 50 000 miles which is impressive but it makes sense given the condition it's really in beautiful shape except that's not actually true this car has a hundred and fifty thousand miles it was just kept fantastically over the years and they only put a five-digit odometer in these this had to have been one of the very last vehicles to have a five-digit odometer into the mid-90s ford obviously didn't have a lot of faith that these were going to be going long distances in the future now the other thing you notice around the odometer is of course the speedometer which only goes to 85 miles an hour this vehicle was clearly created in a totally different time period when topping out at 85 miles an hour was acceptable now that would be looked at as really slow but it's how it was back then now the reason for that relatively low top speed at least in the speedometer is this powertrain which frankly is laughable by modern standards this was a 4 liter v6 pretty big engine and it made all of 155 horsepower in the original explorer models although later they bumped it up to 160 horsepower in the later original explorers like this one this 94 so 160 horsepower from a 4 liter v6 not really all that much performance now interestingly you could get one of these explorers with an automatic transmission or a 5-speed manual it was available although it was really really rare as you can imagine most people buying a family suv for the suburbs wanted an automatic and so that's what most people got now this explorer was also offered with four wheel drive or with two wheel drive this is a two wheel drive model and you can tell on the outside by looking at the front wheels you can see this one just has normal looking front wheels with a smooth center cap four wheel drive models had a little circular cap mounted on the center cap it said four by four that's where the wheel locks were and so that's how you can tell apart a four-wheel drive original explorer from a two-wheel drive just by looking at it from the side kind of geeky original explorer knowledge for you and next we move on to the cargo area of the original explorer and like i said earlier you could choose between opening the glass or opening the whole tailgate which was a pretty nifty little feature but anyway if you open the tailgate you will quickly discover that there's actually quite a bit of room back here it's a nice roomy usable cargo area just like what these suburban families who bought this car would need there's even a cargo cover a roll back cargo cover which was quite a rarity at the time but they had it in the ford explorer you also had this little netted area off to the side next to the wheel well where you could stick more stuff if you didn't want it rolling around you're starting to see some of the beginnings of the nooks and crannies you'll find in modern cargo areas in this original explorer now the last thing i want to cover here is the trim level as you can see this is an explorer xlt it was the middle trim level for the explorer and it was also the volume trim level the highest percentage of explorers were xlt models you did have a base an xl model below xlt and you also had an eddie bauer version and a limited model above xlt but this version was the most popular in the lineup a good combination of features and value-packed pricing probably in the low twenty thousand dollar range back in 94. now one other badging related item worth discussing is that the ford explorer wasn't the only version of this car the original first generation explorer was also sold as the mazda navajo although the navajo was only offered in two-door form the explorer you could get as a two-door or a four-door and the vast majority of people chose the four-door the navajo you could only get as a two-door and it was an unusual vehicle lasted only for one life cycle and then it was gone now later versions of the explorer also expanded to include the mercury mountaineer as sort of a luxury model and then the lincoln aviator is an even more luxury model and that continues today but back then it was the explorer or the tudor mazda navajo and so those are the quirks and features of the original ford explorer now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the original ford explorer i've wanted to review this car on this channel for so long now i got a story for you about this car from when i was a kid my family we lived in colorado and so we wanted like an suv and off-roader we were kind of at the beginning of that trend because it was a little bit more necessary there and so we went looking for a family suv in 1992 and we test drove a bunch of them and i still remember as a four or five year old sitting in the back seat of the ford explorer test driving that car with my family one of my very earliest memories in the end we couldn't afford one of these and my parents instead bought an isuzu rodeo with a manual transmission it was it was what we could afford um but i remember this was the one to have and there was a kid in like my elementary school class whose parents had one and he was the cool kid so anyway driving this car obviously years later it's laughable that we all thought it was so cool back then because it's it's just a crappy old truck but it changed it really changed the world and driving it actually isn't as bad as i remember in fact the first generation model i drove a second gen explorer pretty recently the first generation model to me drives a little bit better almost it feels like a little tighter and smaller which it was the second gen which came at 95 was really just a facelift of the first gen but it was a larger vehicle without really a market improvement in power and so it it always kind of felt a little bit slow and ponderous and all that the first gen doesn't quite feel like that as much part of it could be because this one was really well preserved so when you get in this car you look around it you can easily tell why people liked it from day one for one thing you're sitting up high and that was the main thing that people liked about suvs back in the day it gave them a higher seating position than the sedans that they were used to they could see they could look around see over the road and that was a big deal and it still to this day feels like a high seating position compared to a lot of the crossovers that have kind of become smaller and more bridge that car suv gap now it's important to point out i mentioned earlier that the explorer was not like a truckee off-roader focused vehicle but it was body-on-frame it was not a unibody design that didn't really become popular until the late 90s and early 2000s so this still had a truck platform it was based on the ranger but to me it was the buyers never made that much of a distinction between that stuff anyway it was more how it was pitched and how it was used that really sold this on being kind of the fam the first family suv one interesting thing feels very smooth uh in terms of the transmission that was a problem that a lot of these had but this one seems like it's totally fine this explore has obviously been tremendously well kept um really really the nicest one i've seen since the period and i wouldn't be surprised if a new transmission went into it at some point now in terms of the smoothness of the ride i got to say a little bit different though this is the transmission i this is trucky and it feels trucky and it's actually amazing how far suvs that have now become crossovers have come in all these years they're so much smoother you go over a speed bump in this and it's just kind of punishing now it isn't like creaky and rattly like i expected it would be and like so many explorers are you kind of saw how american buyers and people just changed generally with the ford explorer the original one this sort of trucky thing they were trying out and then it became so mainstream and then it became a crossover and uh it's it's just it's been so much of a part of like american vehicle culture basically my entire life that it is interesting to go back and see how it first started especially because it's so different from how it is now and for so many people they represented our childhoods and it's just cool to spend some time with one from a modern perspective in such nice shape and really go back to that early 90s when this car was starting a segment that nobody really knew if it would succeed and as i passed a gmc acadia and toyota highlander and a rav4 and a rav4 and a crv and acura mdx it succeeded and i really believe it started right here and so there you go that's it the original ford explorer this vehicle is an icon tremendously important one of the most important cars in the entire history of the automobile industry here in america some off-roader 4x4 suvs came first and some family suvs later did it better but the explore was the very beginning of a trend that has become monstrously popular in the united states and across the world and now it's time to give this explorer a doug's score and the dug score is here 37 out of 100 which places the explorer here against some similar cars dead last but that's not to say the explorer is bad just that it's not as cool as say the bronco or as capable as a jeep wrangler or as fast as a gmc typhoon but that was never the explorer's purpose this car got an entire generation of kids to school parents to work families to the grocery store it's a total icon and i'm thrilled i had the chance to review such a nice one [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 729,036

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Id: RmIThRFrzLY

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022