the Dodge Grand Caravan or Ford Windstar, but it's roomy compared to the
Honda Odyssey's 102 cubic feet.
Moving from the front seat back to the rear is fairly painless, although
the fold-down armrests on the second-row captain's chairs limit the pass-through
space to about eight inches. The front and second-row captain's chairs
are quite comfortable, but passengers on the rightmost or leftmost seats
on the third-row bench will feel themselves listing toward the center.
Driver's seat headroom was sufficient for our 5-foot-11 test driver,
but taller passengers in the second or third rows may feel a bit scrunched.
Rear legroom is also a bit limited--unless, of course, you're a typical
minivan buyer and your rear passengers are children.
Our test model was equipped with the power front seats--eight-way for
the driver (including a power lumbar support feature) and four-way for
the passsenger. But when reaching for the power switch, your forearm gets
pinched between the seat and the armrest.
A flat cupholder pulls out and snaps down from the console side of the
front passenger's seat, and there are integrated cupholders on the backs
of each of the rear seats.
One feature we really liked was the separate rear-seat climate control
and stereo control switches--complete with two headphone jacks--built into
the modular armrest to the left of the second-row captain's chair. Ditto
the info center on the smart-looking, digitized instrument panel of our
test van. A push of a button yields such data as fuel economy--both average
and instant--and the number of miles before the fuel tank is empty. And
for the globally-minded, the info center can convert everything to metric. Next Page