She’s a good ship. Mitsubishi’s crossover vehicle boasts of sizable sport-ute with wagon-size cargo space.

IT was named after the ship that Captain James Cook, hero of the seven-year war, commanded when he set off from England to conduct a scientific survey of Australia and New Zealand.

Now, Mitsubishi’s new midsize crossover wagon, the Endeavor, is not as hard to drive as the old ship of Captain Cook. It drives like a sedan, mainly because its rigid unibody structure and handling hardware, like the independent suspension for all wheels and responsive rack and pinion steering, match the mechanical equipment on a four-wheel drive.

The Endeavor looks like a sizable sport-ute in format and has a wagon’s cargo space, while the spacious passenger compartment comes with plush and comfortable seats arranged in two rows for up to five riders. It even has fancy amenities aboard.

Looking like the big brother of the Outlander, the Endeavor measures larger in scale. Under the hood, it packs a more powerful and sophisticated powertrain, a transversely mounted V6 with 3.8 liters, overhead cam and four valves per cylinder. It generates up to 215 hp and works through a four-speed automatic transaxle with Sportronic manual mode.

From the outside, the Endeavor is a comely looking SUV that really depicts the tag of a Mom Mobile. Its face has a smile that gleams when you see the grille and headlamp design. The lines are patterned more like that of a car than a truck and it flows smoothly from front to rear.

The Endeavor’s exterior styling extends into the cabin with a dramatic design for the dashboard featuring metallic finishes on the jut-out central column of controls and an instrument cluster with large round gauges washed by ice-blue LED bulbs. The Endeavor’s three trim designations include the entry-level LS, midlevel XLS and lavish LTD.

Step inside and one is greeted with leather upholstery that is plush and comfortable. The instrument panel is standard Mitsubishi making it very simple to understand the readout. The dashboard contains all the necessary things a family would like to have in a sport-ute. In fact, my wife, if I had one, would definitely want to have this as her personal conveyance.

The safety features on all Endeavors include dual-stage frontal airbags and front seat-mounted side-impact airbags, antilock brakes (ABS) with electronic brake-force distribution (EBD), traction control, and a tire-pressure monitor. Curtain airbags are not available. Oh, and wear your seat belts as they are your first line of defense in an accident.

All three variants for Endeavor are available with either FWD or optional AWD. Distinctive styling for Endeavor’s exterior package features sharply chiseled forms in strong geometric shapes with undulating slabs around wheel wells forging character lines on the flanks and the face fitted with an imposing split-port grille plus big corner headlamp clusters.

THE legendary Henry Ford has said it himself:  “I am not an inventor, I am an innovator.”

Although he is the acknowledged king of the motorcar, Ford was also known as among those who pioneered in building America’s freeway in the early 1900s. 

IT was named after the ship that Captain James Cook, hero of the seven-year war, commanded when he set off from England to conduct a scientific survey of Australia and New Zealand.

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