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Friday Fleet Notes: 9.21.07

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Not too much to report today. We have a lot of new cars in the fleet, but we’re feverishly working on getting the full reviews done before the rest of the staff gets to weigh in on them. Until then, we get another take on the new Hummer H3 Alpha and some good real-life use of the Toyota Highlander’s nav system.

Hummer H3 Alpha

Even though the H3 is the smallest member of the Hummer family (it’s approximately the same length and width as a Jeep Grand Cherokee) it still feels big. Really big. Due to the H3’s height and the short windows, small cars behind me and along the passenger side would essentially disappear. In a 90-minute drive, there were three separate times I thought “Whoa! Where’d that car come from?!” as some compact seemed to zoom ahead out of nowhere.

My next adventure with the H3 involved parallel parking in two Chicago neighborhoods notorious for difficult street parking. The three times I tried parking I ended up at least two feet from the curb, sticking out into traffic like a parking newbie. (For the record, I successfully — and beautifully — park my full-size SUV on these streets on a regular basis.)

The limited visibility and added ride height made it particularly difficult to see what was around me. One thing I loved on this SUV, however, was the backup camera they attached to the rearview mirror. Rather than mount the display in the center stack like most cars, Hummer uses a mini display about the size of a playing card that pops out of the rearview mirror when the H3 is in reverse. Having the display at eye level next to the mirror makes sense and leaves me wondering why more manufacturers don’t do this. — Amanda Wegrzyn, Advice editor

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This navigation system is no friend of mine. I took some out-of-town family from Chicago to Sturgeon Bay, Wis., for the weekend, and we opted for the scenic route up the lakefront. No problem: The nav system charted out a few possible routes, and I picked the one by the water.

An hour short of our destination we stopped at a roadside produce stand. Upon returning to the main road, the nav system forgot the path it had kept since Milwaukee. It wanted to divert us some 15 miles inland to the interstate — the default “fast” route, apparently. I had to reenter the destination from scratch to keep the female voice from rerouting us at every turn. Leaving Sturgeon Bay, the system sent us a half-mile north through downtown … and around the block so we could head south again to Chicago. And more than once on the way back it placed the Highlander off in some cornfield, nowhere near the highway.

All tech quibbling aside, the Highlander proved a comfortable long-hauler. With cruise control at 75 mph and the A/C on, the trip computer showed instant gas mileage around 21 mpg. Over the 450-mile trip, I averaged 22.5 mpg — not bad for a two-ton, all-wheel-drive SUV. — Kelsey Mays, reviewer

Related
2008 Hummer H3 Alpha Expert Review (Cars.com)
2008 Hummer H3 Alpha Video (Cars.com Video)
2008 Toyota Highlander Expert Review (Cars.com)
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2008 Toyota Highlander Video

(Cars.com Video)

Managing Editor
David Thomas

Former managing editor David Thomas has a thing for wagons and owns a 2010 Subaru Outback and a 2005 Volkswagen Passat wagon.

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