The second row wasn’t cramped before, but repackaging things has allowed Ford to increase the knee room here by 1.5 inches. Head room has always been plentiful in the Explorer. The seats slide fore and aft, recline and are heated – and there are plenty of power ports, including USB and a 110V household plug.

The two seats in the third row are usable for adults, but the wealth of head room doesn’t make up for the lack of both knee room and space for your feet. It’s great for kids though.

The sizable trunk, which you can open from the dash, your key fob or using the cool Hands-free feature, leaves enough room for several carry-on sized bags even when the third row is in use. Fold the third row down and you’re looking at 1243 litres of cargo space.

The Explorer Sport always had the upper hand on the road, where its sweet 3.5L twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V6 unleashed 365 horsepower and its road-wrinkling 350 lb-ft of torque put it into a category of its own. Not any more. Because the Platinum gets this engine too.

All that power doesn’t come cheaply, of course. The fuel economy isn’t stellar, but then again, nobody buys an SUV with three rows and this much power and expects a fuel miser. Ford rates it at 14.9 L/100 km in the city and 10.7 L/100 km on the highway. I’ve come to expect EcoBoost fuel ratings to be hilariously optimistic but was very impressed by our 11 L/100 km average over 450 km of mostly highway driving. How can that be impressive? Well, let me tell you about our trip and you’ll see.

Ford put together a fantastic event for the Explorer Platinum, and framed it with the hashtag #ExploreMore. Their thinking was that we should explore more of what we wanted to explore. Instead of the typically structured and scheduled-to-the-last-minute please-ensure-you-arrive-at-2:17PM-so-you-can-catch-the-shuttle-to-the-5:00PM-dinner itinerary, our trip was left up to us. I mean there wasn’t a single thing we had to do, not a single checkpoint we had to arrive at, and everything between our Vancouver starting point and our Kamloops destination was left up to us. There were 25 suggested things to check out along the way. You could try to see them all, you could ignore all of them, or pick and choose what tickled your fancy. What a cool way to do a trip! Best of all, we got to check out the incredibly lush forests, soaring views of fjords, bays and inlets, mountains, cliffs, hair-raising switchbacks, truly unbelievable altitude changes, and even semi-arid desert terrain all at our own pace. I’ve never enjoyed this much time behind the wheel of a vehicle at a first drive press event, and perhaps that’s what impressed me most of all – time to actually get a feel for the vehicle.

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