If you’re still bitter because the need to shuttle the kids and their gear around from ballet to soccer to Tae Kwon Do forced you to trade your beloved muscle car for a soft, soul-sucking SUV, start warming up your lead foot, because the all-new 2014 Dodge Durango is the answer to your suburban prayers.
We’re talking an SUV built for guys who still have a passion for driving, but need the space to carry 7 passengers and all their cargo. An SUV for dads tired of feeling neutered behind the wheel of a bubble-shaped “sport utility” that’s a sliding door away from being a minivan. An SUV for weekend warriors who want to tow the boat to the lake once in while, but still be able to take on winding roads when the fishing poles are in storage.
Because—with its available 5.7L V8 Hemi that boasts 360hp and 390 lb.-ft. of torque, sitting on top of a newly refined ultra-high strength steel unibody with four-wheel independent suspension and near 50/50 weight distribution—if you ignored the cavernous space behind you, you’d swear you were behind the wheel of a Charger or Challenger, instead of a vehicle that can tow up to 7,400 lbs. and haul 84.5 cubic feet of stuff wherever you need to take it.
If that sounds like I’m gushing, well maybe I am. I fall into the “need an SUV, but want a muscle car” demographic. When I was invited to test the new Durango up and down the winding mountain roads around Malibu, I took one look at the big, 5,000 lb. beast and figured it was going to be a long day of lumbering up hills and strong-arming the wheel into turns. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Durango attacked the turns like a vehicle half its size, with almost imperceptible body lean and a tail that never felt like it was going to start getting happy and loose. At one point, I looked over at my driving partner, an auto journalist who lives in the area and regularly uses those roads to test vehicles, and he was grinning from ear to ear, exclaiming between enthusiastic taps on the paddle shifters, “I haven’t been able to take some of these turns this aggressively in a few of the sports cars I’ve tested!” Yeah, it was smiles all around.
Add in premium comforts like heated and ventilated leather seats, available DVD player with dual 9-inch screens and second row captain’s chairs; the new, aggressive, “superhero” fascia and bold muscular stance with racetrack tail lamps; advanced technology like forward crash warning, adaptive cruise control and the ability to be a Wi-Fi hotspot—along with the availability of an S/T package—and you’ve got an SUV you won’t be embarrassed to take to your kid’s ballet recital. As long as she doesn’t mind taking some long and winding roads to get there.
The 2014 Dodge Durango starts at $29,795.
