2009 Dodge Journey

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2009 Dodge Journey R/T AWD

Crossover vehicles are all the rage. There is nary a midsize sedan on the market that isn't in line to be redesigned as a small wagon or SUV loaded with family-friendly options and sold as a minivan substitute. Into this fray comes the 2009 Dodge Journey R/T AWD, riding on a stretched Avenger platform and squeezing a third row of seats into the bargain.

So how does Chrysler, inventor and ongoing proponent of the minivan, fare in its effort to de-minivan the minivan? A lot about the Journey is good, especially the available interior electronics. It's available with an onboard 30GB hard drive for navigation and the capability to rip music from CDs, or copy music from MP3 players and portable-storage devices via USB. Chrysler's experience with maximizing seating and storage capabilities is certainly on display in the Journey. General reaction to the styling from both the auto show circuit and our experience on the street seems to be positive; however, especially in the brightest colors, we found aspects of the exterior garish.

To get the most powerful engine and outfit the interior with the go-to gizmos gets to be expensive. Build quality, refinement, and interior materials don't convincingly match a fully loaded Journey's sticker price. Dodge also touts the Journey as offering best-in-class fuel economy (for the base engine package) but our V-6 equipped tester displayed some dismal average gas mileage after our week with the car. Frustratingly, a two-liter diesel engine mated to a six-speed dual-clutch transmission will be available on the Journey as sold in Europe, but not in North America.

Test the tech: USB me
At the heart of the Journey's $2,200 Entertainment Group II package is the MyGig multimedia system, which lets you store music files and pictures on its onboard 30GB hard drive. We've seen a couple of such systems before (notably in the Mitsubishi Lancer GTS and an earlier 20GB MyGig in the Dodge Grand Caravan SXT), but this time we decided to focus on the USB connection and its versatility to test the tech. We gathered up a myriad of devices and their USB cords from around the office and spent a lunch break seeing what MyGig liked and what it just plain ignored.

As CNET's Wayne Cunningham discovered when trying to transfer photos from his digital camera to the Caravan's MyGig hard drive, the system isn't keen to recognize devices that generally come with software needed to connect them to PCs. We plugged our Canon PowerShot SD700 IS into the USB port to no effect. However, all was not lost, as we had a handy SanDisk SD+USB card in the camera. When we removed the card from the camera, flipped it open to expose the USB connector and connected it to the car, the MyGig recognized it immediately, and we saved a large Journey glamour shot onto the hard drive very rapidly.

Still optimistic, we thought transferring a picture off our phone via USB might work, since connecting our Sony Ericsson k790a to our laptop this way requires no extra software. Again, however, neither the phone nor the MyGig reacted to being connected, and the same went for the Palm Treo that we also tried to connect.

Although the MyGig system promised iPod integration, it didn't work with our older generation Nano.

Things went a little better on the music front, although not totally satisfactory. According to the owner's manual in our car, which did not cover the optional navigation system, an iPod connected via USB would be fully controllable through the car's stereo. However, the iPod Nano we connected would only transfer files to the hard drive, not actually play music.

We weren't able to determine how to specify which tracks to copy, so we ended up sitting through the transfer of an entire playlist just to see what it was we'd "selected." (To whomever drives this Journey next, enjoy the series of French language lessons we left on the hard drive.) All that said, a lot of MP3 data made it onto the hard drive in a reasonable amount of time. To play music off the iPod, we had to hook it up through the auxiliary input jack as you would any other player, which was a letdown given the manual's promises.

The best way to get data onto the MyGig's drive is via a thumbdrive or similar portable-storage device. The system finds music and photos on such devices quickly, there's no confusion over what you're copying, and transfers are very quick.

In the cabin
Taken as a whole, the interior of the 2009 Dodge Journey nicely encapsulates the two sides of the Journey's design: electronic highs temper the plasticky lows. As should be clear by now, we dig MyGig. The navigation system bundled with MyGig is similarly impressive, with a supercrisp seven-inch LCD recessed in a hooded binnacle atop the center stack showing beautifully rendered maps.

Rendering speeds are fast, as expected from a hard drive-based system, and the package includes a year's subscription to the Sirius satellite traffic service to go with the standard year of Sirius radio service. Traffic hot spots show as color-coded stripes along the roads on the maps, and a list of local alerts can be called up quickly from the main navigation menu.