JUN2008 CARAN MOC.REVIRDD

panels. With Nissan’s muscular 3.5 V-6 as standard equipment, you can be sure of one thing: This bubba will boogie.

The three other crossovers in our quintet have been around long enough since their 2007 intros to have become thoroughly familiar faces in traffic. The blocky Ford Edge seems to stand tall on the road, a tidy, muscular look that sold 130,125 copies in its first full year in the stores. A discreet dis-tance behind at 92,421 sold is the Hyundai Santa Fe, substantially enlarged during its last redesign. Well behind at the checkout counter is Mazda’s CX-7, a sweetheart to look at, powered by the only four-cylinder of the group, a turbocharged 2.3-liter with direct injection.

All our test crossovers have the option of all-wheel drive. The Dodge and the Hyun-dai are available with third-row seating, although we did not include that capability in this test.

What about fuel economy? Federal watchdogs rate the Nissan highest for city driving at 18 mpg. The Dodge and the Ford tie for thirstiest at 15 mpg. On the highway, the Hyundai tops the tote board at 24; the Dodge, the Ford, and the Mazda bring up the rear in a three-way tie at 22 mpg.

When we picked up geologist Ranney in Flagstaff, elevation 7000 feet, we were on the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, a relatively stable area of the continent where the Four Corners of Arizona, Colo-

rado, New Mexico, and Utah come together. Immediately to the west is the Basin and Range region, where a stretching of the earth’s crust in ancient times resulted in the sinking of a broad area including Phoenix and Las Vegas. So we’d be driving downhill over the 144 miles to our destina-tion that night, Kingman, Arizona, eleva-tion 3300 feet. Along the way we would take notes, change cars, and stop to hear Ranney read off the geological stories captured in the many road cuts along I-40.

When we arrived, the late-morning sun was bright on our first study point—the north side of eastbound Interstate 40 at mile 89.1. This is a threefer, three distinctly different geological events in one road cut. On the right is a broad area of finely textured horizontal layers, on the far left a smooth wedge of cheesecake beige, and separating these two formations is a series of bold diagonal lines. What happened here, we ask? The horizontals are a sedimentary formation, the oldest part of the cut, 20 million years at least, Ranney judges, fine sand grains

cemented together by standing water and now quite hard. The stack was much taller then, and eroded material from above slid down and created the lighter diagonals. The alternating red stripes—think of them as hot plaster applied to the steep slope—were delivered by volcanic eruptions. The cheesecake came last, Ranney says. Geologists call it the Peach Springs Tuff, deposited by a volcanic event—one of the largest ever—that occurred 18.1 million years ago. We’d see much more of that material in Kingman.

MID-SIZE UN-SUVSCOMPARISON TEST

C/D RESULTS BEST IN TEST PRICE ($) DIMENSIONS (inches) WEIGHT TOWING (lb)

FUEL

TA

NK

(gal

)

INTERIOR VOL (cu �)*E

ST VEHICLE

BASE

AS

TEST

ED

LEN

GTH

WID

TH

HEI

GH

T

WH

EEL-

BASE

FRO

NT

TRAC

K

REA

R TR

ACK

CURB

(lb

)

% F

RON

T

% R

EAR

MA

X

AS T

ESTE

D

FRO

NT

REA

R

DODGE JOURNEY R/T AWD† $28,295 $34,300 192.4 72.2 66.6 113.8 61.8 62.3 4364 55.7 44.3 3500 3500 21.1 53 43

FORD EDGE LIMITED AWD $33,010 $34,505 185.7 75.8 67.0 111.2 65.4 64.7 4468 57.7 42.3 3500 2000 20.0 55 53

HYUNDAI SANTA FE LIMITED AWD $30,495 $32,365 184.1 74.4 67.9 106.3 63.6 63.8 4238 58.3 41.7 3500 3500 19.8 59 49

MAZDA CX-7 GRAND TOURING AWD $28,635 $32,640 184.1 73.7 64.8 108.3 63.7 63.5 3946 58.6 41.4 2000 2000 18.2 53 45

NISSAN MURANO SL AWD† $30,225 $33,995 188.5 74.1 67.0 111.2 63.3 63.4 4180 57.1 42.9 3500 3500 21.7 58 47

†2009 model year.

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