The 2011 Chrysler Town & Country minivan is offered in three trim levels: Touring, Touring-L and Limited.
Moving up to the Touring-L model gets you 17-inch alloy wheels, auto-dimming side mirrors, remote ignition, leather upholstery, a power-adjustable front passenger seat, heated front seats and second- and third-row window shades. Other major options include dual sunroofs, a power-folding third-row seat, second- and third-row window shades, Bluetooth, Sirius Travel Link satellite data service, a rear-seat DVD entertainment center with dual video screens and Sirius Backseat TV.
The 2011 Chrysler Town & Country comes with antilock disc brakes, traction and stability control, active front head restraints, full-length side curtain airbags, front seat side-impact airbags and a driver knee airbag. For 2011, the Chrysler Town & Country’s interior gets a major makeover. With all three rows of seats in use, the Town & Country offers a healthy 33 cubic feet of cargo room. Behold: the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar minivan. Chrysler states that the Town & Country will now “live” in the $30K-and-up price range. No more budget minivans. The product, they say, justifies the price. Let’s figure out if they’re correct.
If there is really such a thing as a “premium minivan”, a black-and-chrome Chrysler is probably it. The exterior has been revised with a heavy dose of automotive jewelry, from the intricate headlights to the matte-finish silver-wing logo adorning the rear liftgate.
It’s driver-focused, it’s personal, it’s surprisingly intimate in dark colors, and it’s far more upscale than, say, the Playskool-button Sienna will ever be. As before, the “uConnect” system runs a distant second to Ford’s SYNC, not to mention the myFordTouch, but if your current frame of reference is the navigation system in a Sienna or Odyssey you are likely to think you’ve accidentally boarded the battlestar Galactica. The air vents are controlled by chrome rollers with rubber inlays, the buttons all operate with a definitive ‘click’, and the metal-look interior items are real metal.
It’s possible to manipulate the side-to-side manual-shift function with the fingers of one’s right hand while keeping the palm on the wheel — very WRC, if you ask me. What could the upscale minivan do?
Even though I handicapped myself a bit by pulling off, standing on the side of the road, waiting until some angry-faced journosaur squealed by in a V-6 Chrysler 200, counting to sixty, and then getting in the van to give chase, we quickly tired of running down our fellow writers on their “fast road drives”. The big Chrysler could have murdered him in a straight line — this is a more than acceptably fast van — so we hung back and instead worked the corners. There’s no pitching or rolling to cause nausea, just a buttoned-down suspension with better rebound control than many Audis have. Of course, ninety-nine percent of Chrysler’s customers won’t care how fast this minivan can chew up a back road, and many of them won’t even be particularly interested in one-piece dashboards or sound-system “theater imaging”. The Chrysler people freely admit that there isn’t much margin in these revised vans for incentives. They’re hoping that the market will pay more money for a better van. I don’t know if they’re right, but to misquote famous van driver E. Hemingway, it’s certainly pretty to think so.
The Grand Caravan is to be the automaker's minivan value leader, and wears price tags of less than $30,000. Chrysler is betting that a more refined look inside and out will help the T&C's luxury message reverberate with minivan shoppers faced with new vans from Honda, Toyota and Nissan. The Grand Caravan remains a more upright, square-jawed vehicle, while the Town & Country comes up with a softer approach. There's a broad chrome band gussied up with the latest Chrysler logo, and a smaller grille than last year. The styling tweaks are the most noticeable change from the Dodge minivan. The new "Pentastar" powertrain feels fine for tugging a full crew around from shopping spot to shopping spot.