The drive from Toronto to Thunder Bay offered plenty of time to get to know this minivan—and reminisce on Caravans past

Driving.ca loves to spend the time around Canada Day celebrating the endless kilometres of pavement that stretch across this vast country. That’s why we’ve got a whole road-trip itinerary’s worth of, well, road-trip articles, new and old, for you to peruse. Check out Derek McNaughton’s account of his epic trip from Whitehorse, Yukon to Toronto in a Toyota Tundra last month; or Brendan McAleer’s story on how a Mustang helped him find his inner cowboy. Nicholas Maronese recounts childhood road trips from Thunder Bay to Toronto in Chrysler minivans 25 years apart; while Matthew Guy selects his favourite stops on a drive along the coast of Newfoundland. Stephanie Wallcraft and Jay Kana made the portage to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in a Kia Sportage; or, finally, you can revisit 2014, when Brendan McAleer sought to help a Nissan Micra join, uh, the mile-high club, climbing the Rockies.

It took me quite some time to fall in love with my parents’ 1995 Dodge Caravan. When I got my driver’s licence in it circa 2005, I thought of it mostly as just a used minivan. Bought new in a three-door, short-wheelbase configuration, powered by a 3.0-litre Mitsubishi-sourced V6, and painted in Candy Apple Red Metallic with a handsome side body-stripe borrowed from the Ram truck line, it didn’t exactly stand out in the high-school parking lot. I was almost shooting jealous glances at my classmate’s teal PT Cruiser.

But I think it started to grow on me not long after I graduated and moved from my hometown of Thunder Bay to attend university in Toronto. The Caravan had been our road-trip machine my entire childhood – the driver’s side of the second-row bench, with its huge window and parcel shelf where the sliding door should be, that was my seat – but the kilometres we put under its tires multiplied rapidly during my college years.

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The trek between the two cities is, after all, roughly 1,400 km each way, better than 14 hours of driving — it’s perhaps best split into two days, but my father and I always preferred getting up early and doing it in one go, him doing most of the driving, and me only periodically taking the wheel. We became rather familiar with the stretch of the Trans-Canada between the head of Lake Superior and the provincial capital, making the drive back and forth more than a half-dozen times.

And, each time, I became more familiar, too, with the Caravan. The stark, simple gauges and controls and their positions became muscle memory; the glossy plastic dashboard, a frame for the Northern Ontario brush all around us; the grey mouse-fur upholstery, a more-than-comfy-enough surface for a nap. That’s when I started falling in love with that minivan, and its conservative, squared-off styling, an aesthetic little hit of instant nostalgia when parked next to the curvy, organic forms of the vehicles that came out in the 10 years after it did.

I hadn’t driven another Chrysler van since I moved permanently to Toronto and left the ol’ Dodge behind. So when it came time to borrow a press car for yet another Toronto-Thunder Bay back-and-forth with my brother playing co-pilot – this time to haul not my personal effects, but some just-inherited car parts and magazines – the Chrysler Pacifica Touring S AWD offered to me by Stellantis seemed like a fantastic fit that’d for sure fill the drive with flashbacks.

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The 2022 Pacifica, like the third-gen Chrysler minivans that succeeded our ’95, wears curvier, swoopier styling than its predecessor. That said, the DNA of that original K-car-based Caravan is still apparent in this much younger Windsor Assembly Plant product — I could see the family resemblance even with the bodywork cloaked in a dynamic, modern-feeling Fathom Blue, instead of, say, red metallic. While Chrysler still offers a more modestly priced Grand Caravan model, Pacifica means “premium,” and you’ll feel that even in the blacked-out 20-inch aluminum wheels, exclusive to the ‘S’ appearance package.

The nostalgia faded fast once we stepped inside. The S package offered up leather seats, which were heated front and rear and eight-way power adjustable; and the Uconnect Theatre Family Group got us a 10.1-inch touchscreen display, which absolutely dominated the dashboard. Yes, these sort of amenities seem de rigueur these days, but I wasn’t quite expecting them in a Chrysler minivan—call me green to the segment, perhaps.

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On the other hand, the Uconnect Theatre group’s Blu-ray player and twin second-row 10-inch displays built into the front seat-backs are, I’m pretty sure, not standard in most minivans, and had me immediately reaching for my DVD shelf and daydreaming of whiling away maybe two or three of our planned 30 hours on the road watching movies in the back. Unluckily for me, the process of getting the screens paired to a required Wifi connection and streaming The Right Stuff disc I’d popped in proved to be troubleshoot-proof, and I couldn’t get them working.

Other changes between our road trips then and now became more apparent after we hit the highway. The drive from Toronto to Thunder Bay includes elevation changes totalling more than 1,000 ft (320 m). I don’t recall our Caravan – with its 142-hp and 173 lb-ft 6G72 six-cylinder – ever struggling, per se, but the Pacifica’s 3.6L Pentastar six – up half-a-litre in displacement, but boasting double the power, at 283 horses and 260 lb-ft – offered respectable climbing power and made passing trucks no problem.

Our Touring also boasted all-wheel-drive, though its presence went largely unnoticed. Natural Resources Canada says the Pacifica should return 14.1 L/100 km in the city and, on the highway like we were logging our miles on, about 9.4 L/100 km; real-world testing put us in that ballpark, and wowed us with its range between fill-ups.

As we found out on the way back, after we loaded up the big blue van with boxes and boxes of tired ’80s car audio equipment and disco-era volumes of Hot Rod and Car Craft, the Pacifica boasts plenty of cargo space—3,979 litres (140 cubic feet) maxed out, or 2,477 L (87 cu-ft) if you leave the second row up. The modern iteration of the Stow ’n Go seats fold away easily and quickly, though I will note the second-row chairs don’t go right into the floor, and so leave you with a bit of an awkward loading surface. Perhaps that beats the alternative the old Dodge had proffered (and the best its competitors can do nowadays), though: fully uninstalling the benches and keeping them in the garage.

Call Stow ‘n Go a parlour trick, but I’d argue it is a handy, practical feature. It’s also one you’d perhaps expect on a minivan wearing the sticker price our Pacifica Touring S AWD did: $62,375, up from the model’s base MSRP of about $55,000. All of the above considered, the Pacifica made for a fantastic road-tripper with a premium feel, and it was perhaps the ideal vehicle for moving a tonne of stuff 1,400 kilometres. Whether all of its options justify that price tag, though, I’m not so sure. Were it my own money, I might opt for this Chrysler, sure, but leave some of the bells and whistles unchecked on the order form.

But let me back-track to our arrival in Thunder Bay, where my parents confirmed what I already knew: the ’95 Caravan, sold to a family friend around 2015, had long ago been relegated to the scrapyard, annihilating any thoughts of a side-by-side photo shoot of the two people-movers. It’s a fate I still can’t quite fathom, considering when I’d last seen it, even as a miled-up 20-year-old ’90s relic, it was nearly pristine, its cabin immaculate thanks to protective seat covers, home-made van-wide floor mats, and dad’s no-food-in-the-car rule; and its paint just beginning to show its age, a loonie-sized spot of rust on the left rear wheel lip the only real blemish on its candy-apple finish.

I understand some parts were starting to beg for replacement, which was fair, considering it’d shown us no real trouble outside of a bum alternator during those two decades of service. But it made me think, too, of how long this particular 2022 Chrysler Pacifica might last before it meets its end, especially since the 3,000 kilometres we added to the odometer represented a majority of its lifespan so far, the van having basically rolled off the Windsor assembly line and into my parking space.

How many more decades of road trips like this one, from Toronto to Thunder Bay and back, would this Pacifica see? Who would fall in love with it? I’ve at least a few more such trips ahead of me in my lifetime. And I lament only that they won’t be in that ’95 Dodge Caravan.

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