The 2020 Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring, a new plug-in luxury hybrid SUV, is nowhere near ready to take on the Tesla Model X let alone the Audi e-tron or Mercedes-Benz EQC 400. But it does represent a start down a path to greener pastures for Lincoln.

Besides, its estimated 18 miles of electric driving range and anticipated EPA rating of 23 mpg in combined driving aren’t the important numbers to remember for the Aviator Grand Touring. These are: 494 and 630.

That first one describes the amount of horsepower that the Aviator Grand Touring’s twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V6 engine, 10-speed automatic transmission with an integrated 75-kW electric motor, and 13.6-kWh lithium-ion battery pack collectively produce. The second one is the amount of torque.

And here’s another figure to remember. Based on expected fuel economy ratings, Lincoln says you can drive an Aviator Grand Touring more than 400 miles between stops at a gas station or charging station.

When the Aviator Grand Touring goes on sale in late summer of 2019, Lincoln will offer the SUV in standard and Black Label specification, with a starting price of less than $70,000. To get first-hand experience with this new plug-in hybrid luxury SUV, I flew to California’s Napa Valley wine country* where I drove a top-of-the-line Black Label version priced at nearly $89,000.

Aviator Grand Touring by the numbers

Lincoln’s prescribed driving route started at elevation, ensuring that the Grand Touring would easily exceed the company’s quoted 18 miles of driving range. That’s why I covered 17.9 miles of electric-only travel in spite of starting the trip with an indicated 82% battery charge and 14 miles of range.

Using nothing but electricity, the Aviator Grand Touring is a quiet vehicle, but then so is the standard Aviator. All that’s missing is the pleasant background rumble supplied by the twin-turbocharged V6 engine.

On rougher pavement, the Black Label’s massive 22-inch wheels and tires generate more road noise than you expect, and at speeds above 70 mph there is some wind noise, but otherwise, the Aviator is a silent cocoon, an isolated sanctuary from the surrounding world.

In addition to the Aviator’s standard driving modes, the Grand Touring adds Pure EV and Preserve EV choices. In Pure EV, the Aviator operates solely on electricity. In Preserve EV, the system saves the battery charge for situations when using Pure EV mode is preferable.

Driven in Normal mode, the Aviator’s V6 occasionally activates to aid acceleration when necessary. That’s how I traveled a total of 21.6 miles before the battery reached its minimum state of charge (an indicated 0%), resulting in an average of 80.6 MPGe. Most of those miles were electric-only, but 3.7 of them involved the gas engine.

Once the battery was drained of range, I reset the trip computer. Over the next 69.3 miles, operated as a traditional hybrid, the Aviator Grand Touring averaged 19.8 mpg, well short of Lincoln’s expected 23-mpg rating in combined driving. Still, that as-tested number beat a standard Aviator under similar driving conditions by almost 4 mpg.

Another benefit is the Grand Touring’s electric motor, which provides instant torque the moment you step on the accelerator pedal. While the standard powertrain is quick to respond to prompts from your right foot, there is a slight delay off the line as the automatic engine start/stop system fires up the engine and the turbochargers spool up. By comparison, the Grand Touring leaps forward on sweet, instantaneous electric torque.

When equipped with the Dynamic Handling Package, which installs an adaptive air suspension and active steering, the Aviator Grand Touring’s handling impresses in spite of some extra body motion due to the weight of the battery pack. With no shortage of power, and the Black Label’s meaty 22-inch tires, responsive active steering, and Air Glide suspension, you can whip this SUV around corners with plenty of enthusiasm and a big grin on your face.

Slip into sumptuous surroundings

Remember when it was obvious that a Lincoln was nothing more than a Ford with extra chrome? Those days are fading fast. Especially in Black Label specification, the Aviator Grand Touring shares almost nothing with the 2020 Ford Explorer Hybrid — aside from its platform, vehicle architecture, and other components that are mostly unseen by consumers.

My test vehicle had the Chalet interior theme, which is supposed to remind you of a wintertime visit to a ski lodge. Materials match expectations set by the Black Label’s lofty price tag, with the exception of this theme’s glossy Silverwood trim, which isn’t the real deal.

Equipped with 30-way power-adjustable heated, ventilated, and massaging seats, the Aviator Grand Touring is exceptionally comfortable regardless of the weather. In hot, sunny conditions, the cabin kept me calm, cool, and collected.

The second-row captain’s chairs sit fairly high off of the floor, providing excellent thigh support. They slide forward and back, and when moved up a click or two you can stash an adult in the third-row seat for shorter trips.

Additionally, this plug-in hybrid SUV supplies 18.3 cubic feet of room behind the third-row seat, enough for a few pieces of carry-on luggage. Fold the third-row seat down to create a spacious 41.8 cubic-foot cargo compartment. Maximum volume with the second-row seats folded down amounts to 77.7 cubic feet.

Tech takes center stage

Lincoln offers a long list of technologies for the Aviator Grand Touring, from the company’s new Phone As A Key system and a 12.3-inch digital instrumentation cluster to the Lincoln Co-Pilot360 Plus suite of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and a dual-screen Lincoln Play rear-seat entertainment system.

Designed to replace the Aviator’s key fob with your smartphone, Phone As A Key appears to be simple and easy. But, during a demonstration of the technology, it was clear that if something goes awry things get complicated, and fast. No doubt, many people will find Phone As A Key useful. I’m not convinced that I fall into that camp.

Equipped with a Sync 3 infotainment system and a 10.1-inch touchscreen display, the Aviator provides access to the digital amenities luxury buyers expect, as well as a choice between two thundering Revel premium sound systems. Classy warning chimes recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are standard.

Drivers can use the voice recognition technology to operate the infotainment system. It’s not as natural to use as Siri or Alexa, requiring specific voice prompts in some cases. And even then, it can misunderstand what you say, causing frustration. The Sync 3 infotainment system also sometimes takes too long to load and to respond to inputs. My bet is that buyers in this price class are going to expect better voice recognition performance.

The Lincoln Co-Pilot360 Plus technologies work with impressive accuracy and refinement. However, the lane centering assist system sometimes had trouble recognizing that I was still holding the steering wheel, prompting unnecessary warnings.

Should you purposely let go of the wheel, the system steers for about 30 seconds, then warns you to retake control for about 15 seconds. If you fail to respond to those increasingly urgent requests, the adaptive cruise control begins to slow the vehicle under the assumption that you’ve suffered a medical emergency. Lincoln says the Aviator will come to a full stop in the lane of travel, but it does not activate the hazard flashers or initiate a 911 Assist call like similar technology from other automakers.

A head-up display is also available for this SUV, and wearers of polarized sunglasses will be delighted to know that it remains visible with your shades on your face.

A little of this, a little of that

With just 18 miles of electric driving range and a best-case-scenario of 23 mpg in combined driving when used as a gas-electric hybrid, the 2020 Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring isn’t likely to appeal to people considering a pure electric luxury SUV such as an Audi e-tron, Mercedes-Benz EQC400, or Tesla Model X.

It does, however, appeal to people who want to dip their toes into the EV driving pool without giving up the security and familiarity of traditional gas stations.

While Lincoln says the Aviator Grand Touring recharges in less than four hours with a 240-volt public or home charging station, using one isn’t absolutely necessary. Just plug it into a standard household outlet and it should soak up a full charge of juice between the evening and morning commutes. And since it works as a traditional hybrid most of the time, you’ll never need to worry about finding an available charging station on a longer trip.

Furthermore, with 494 horsepower, 630 pound-feet of torque, all-wheel drive, an Excite driving mode, and an available Dynamic Handling Package, the Aviator Grand Touring is fast and fun to drive in addition to serving as a soothing isolation chamber on wheels.

In other words, it’s exactly what many buyers in this segment are looking for.

* Lincoln paid for the author’s flight, lodging, and meals, and provided the vehicle for testing.

2020 Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring Review was originally published in The Automotive Report on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 are three times more likely than drivers who are 20 or older to be involved in a fatal accident. Inexperience behind the wheel makes vehicle collisions the leading cause of death for teenagers.

TireRack.com wants to help you to make sure your children make it to their 20s. The company, in partnership with BMW, Michelin, the Sports Car Club of America, and others, has created a driving school that goes beyond the basic, rote instruction of a typical driver’s education program. For just $95 per student, you can enroll your kid in the Tire Rack Street Survival (TRSS) program.

Available at venues around the country, TRSS teaches your son or daughter how to control his or her own car under a range of unpredictable driving situations. Essentially, the program teaches your child how to deal with the emergency situations that typical driver’s education programs don’t.

The one-day program is for drivers aged 16 to 21, and the car they drive must meet minimum condition requirements. For more information, including dates, locations, vehicle requirements, and more, be sure to visit the Street Survival website for all of the details.

Parents, this will be the best $95 you’ll ever spend.

Take Your Kid to TireRack’s Street Survival School was originally published in The Automotive Report on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, my wife was telling me a story about a parent who posted to a Facebook page for local moms. She was complaining about her car, and how it flipped onto its side in an accident. “I bought an SUV because I thought they were safe,” she complained, in reference to her Dodge Journey.

Vehicle safety is important to parents, but we all have different ideas about what constitutes a safe vehicle, not all of them rooted in research, facts, and basic laws of physics. For example, SUVs have higher centers of gravity, which means they roll over easier. See? Science.

Years ago, when I was the editor-in-chief at Edmunds.com, a member of my team had his first child. He insisted that his 1970 Plymouth GTX was perfectly acceptable as a family car. Because he loved his vintage muscle car, which was gaining in value with each passing day, he told himself that Nixon-era steel and weight were superior to Clinton-era air bags and structural crumple zones.

Back in 1970, Volvo was one of the only car companies seriously exploring ways to make its products safer. Most others begrudgingly met new federal safety regulations, like the installation of lap seat belts, while focusing on style, performance, and squeezing every last dime of profit out of whatever they were selling.

Today, modern cars, trucks, SUVs and vans from all automakers are safer than they’ve ever been. From the use of high-strength steel in key parts of vehicle architectures to driver assistance and collision avoidance systems such as forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking, new vehicles do a great job of protecting their occupants.

What is driving this innovation? While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has long played a role in improving vehicle safety, its crash-test procedures and standards have not been updated since 2011. Thus, many of today’s safety improvements are driven by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Both the NHTSA and IIHS are great sources of safety information. But, unless you’re willing to do the research, you’ll end up buying a Dodge Journey because you think its an SUV, and because you think SUVs are safe. Or, you might buy an old car thinking its safe for no other reason than its heavy.

That’s where Kid Haulers comes in. I’m a parent myself, my kids ranging in age from 8 to 20. I’ve done the research dating back to the 2000 model year, and I’ll be sharing what I know about the safest used vehicles, the safest new vehicles, the latest technologies, and future family-friendly models for which you just might want to wait.

Helping car buyers choose the best vehicle they can afford has been my life’s work, and I’m particularly passionate about making sure people select something safe to drive.

Especially if they have kids.

Christian Wardlaw has been writing about cars and the automotive industry since 1994. He is the editor for the Autos section at the New York Daily News, and is a contributing writer to J.D. Power Cars and CarGurus. He really wants you to put your kids into the safest vehicle possible.

My mother says that my first word was “car.” In the days before seat belt requirements and, apparently, parental understanding of Newton’s First Law of Motion, I would stand up in the back seat, point out the windows, and name the different cars surrounding our own.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by cars. As a child, I amassed quite a collection of Hot Wheels and Matchbox vehicles, and when I bored of whatever Matchbox City play set I owned, I would flatten cardboard boxes, create networks of roads and parking lots of my own using markers and crayons, and spend entire afternoons in my room, orchestrating the comings and goings of my bustling metropolis’s residents.

When I became a teenager, I continued collecting Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, but stopped opening the packaging. To this day I occasionally buy them, tucking them away in boxes in my garage. Recently, my mother shipped my old collection to me, adding to the hoard, and my wife occasionally picks them up for me when she makes Target runs. Often, they’re duplicates, but her thoughtfulness and acceptance of my car geekery are so sweet that I smile, pretend I’ve never seen that paint color or stripe treatment before, and tuck them away in the garage.

I’ve been reading Car and Driver magazine since elementary school. Somewhere along the line, someone bought me a subscription and I’ve had one since. From the days when the inimitable David E. Davis ran the publication to today, as it thrives under the talented stewardship of Eddie Alterman, C/D has been the best ongoing education I’ve ever paid for.

Written with humor and sarcasm, and bucking the trend toward basic language and uncomplicated structure, C/D brilliantly simplifies complex subjects and never takes itself too seriously.

Furthermore, while it is clearly a publication aimed at car enthusiasts, it remembers that its audience faces certain financial realities and family situations. So while there is always coverage of Bugattis and Ferraris and Lamborghinis, as shown in the photo above, C/D will also perform multi-car comparison tests of family sedans and compact crossovers because real people buying real vehicles in the real world still want to know if a Honda CR-V is more fun to drive than a Toyota RAV4 (the answer, by the way, is yes).

Perhaps, one day, I’ll land a gig there. But that’s a story for another day.

Shortly after I turned 16, my dad generously offered to buy me a car. At the time, I was planning to attend college far away from Michigan, so I needed something dependable, fuel-efficient, and practical. Given the budget he gave me, a used 1979–81 Honda Accord Sedan would be perfect.

Instead, a couple of months later, Dad pulled into the driveway with an 8-year-old 1976 Mercury Grand Monarch Ghia with a 351 Windsor V8 engine and a whole bunch of electronics just waiting to go haywire. He’d bought it from a friend whose wife rarely drove it, and the car had just 29,000 miles on the odometer. But those were 29,000 indifferently maintained miles, and while my dad paid big bucks to cosmetically restore the car so that it looked like new, underneath the fresh white paint was a rotting piece of mid-1970s Detroit crap.

I hate to sound ungrateful, and I know that my father certainly meant well, but I was crestfallen. Getting about 10 mpg, that Mercury literally burned through all of my money. Additionally, after a couple of years of trying to fix its various mechanical maladies, it finally required a complete engine rebuild. We finally sold it for $1,000 during my freshman year in college, after it had racked up more than $12,000 in purchase, restoration and repair receipts between 1983 and 1986.

After the not-so-grand Monarch, I bought a used 1984 Ford Escort, which I had for a short time before needing to pull some cash out of it to pay for tuition.

Then I bought a car that David E. Davis had always loved: a 1978 Ford Fiesta. Tiny, German, and fun, it cost me less than $2,000. It had a stick but an inoperative parking brake, and one day it rolled away, down a hill and into a parked car. I replaced it with another Fiesta, but a $500 repair estimate to replace the entire, rusted-out braking system was too much. At this point, I was done with used cars.

My first new car was a 1990 Ford Festiva. It was tiny, but it was not German and fun. Still, it was based on Mazda design and engineering, it was bulletproof, it was efficient, and it was cheap enough that I could afford the monthly payment while still in school. It also did not have air conditioning, so when I moved from Michigan to Arizona, I had to get rid of it.

A new 1994 Ford Escort GT replaced it, equipped with a Mazda-sourced 4-cylinder engine, a stick, a sport suspension, and a compelling blend of performance, utility, and affordability.

Shortly thereafter, I drove a Mazda Miata for the first time, and I’ve never been the same. My first one was a dark blue 1997 STO Edition with tan leather seats and appealing Enkei 5-spoke aluminum wheels, one of the final first-generation Miatas to come to the U.S. After that, I owned a succession of new and used Miatas, the last one a 2004 MX-5 Mazdaspeed that I bought new and still own.

The Mazdaspeed has just over 34,000 miles on it. It spends plenty of time in the garage, getting out every couple of weeks for a warm up run and to keep the battery in fighting shape.

When I haven’t driven it for awhile, I start thinking that perhaps the time has come to let it go, spend the money on a kitchen remodel, or dump it into my retirement account. But then I dust it off, fire it up, put down the top, release the clutch, and head out for an extended drive on my favorite roads in the local Santa Monica Mountains.

And when I get home, I tell Liz that I’m never selling it.

Cars are central to who I am. “Car” was my first word. Cars dominated my childhood play. A car magazine was instrumental in teaching me how to write, and specifically how to write about cars. I’ve been lucky enough to earn a living writing about cars and the industry that creates them, and fortunate enough to drive thousands of them ranging from a Yugo GV to a Lamborghini Murcielago LP-640 Roadster, and on roads and racetracks from The Road to Hana to the Nurburgring Nordschleife.

To say that I love my job is an understatement. But that’s a story for another day.

Christian Wardlaw is married, a dad, a California transplant, and a car geek who turned a love of automobiles and travel into a career. Currently, he is the editor for Daily News Autos, is a contributor to Car Gurus and J.D. Power Cars, and is wishing he was sitting on a beach on any of the Hawaiian islands.

My First Word was originally published in The Automotive Report on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.