Handsome gray wood accents, adjustable pedals, a telescoping steering wheel (CY2002), and increased seat travel make the Explorer fit a wider variety of body types. Big coat hooks accommodate thick hangers and big loads of dry cleaning. Nicely designed cubby holes with rubber mats and a relatively large center console help keep odds and ends in check. Interior door handles seem a bit awkward, though, especially on the driver's door; I found myself fumbling around for it at night. Map pockets on the insides of the doors are handy and swell at the end to hold water bottles, but they wouldn't accommodate my one-liter Poland Springs water bottle.

The front seats are comfortable. They are wider and offer more fore-and-aft travel than before. Seat heaters are part of the Eddie Bauer way of living. They keep you warm while the truck is still heating up. The buttons for them are mounted on the sides of seats, which is a bit awkward. Reaching down the side of the driver's seat, the left hand is confronted with an array of seat adjusters. Finding and pressing the seat heater button illuminates a small indicator for each seat on the climate control display. Your passenger will fumble around a bit the first time he or she tries to turn it on. Likewise, it isn't always easy to find the height adjuster. Rake is easy to adjust and there's a knob on the uplevel seats for cranking in some lumbar support.

The decision to add a third row of seating drove much of the design and engineering of the 2002 Explorer. As a result, Ford has done an excellent job of making the third row as roomy as possible, while enabling the driver to quickly flip it out of the way when it isn't needed.

The third row offers as much headroom as the second row, but legroom, shoulder room and hip room are significantly compromised. After flipping the second-row seat neatly out of the way, you can climb back there, fold the second-row seat back into position and slide your feet underneath, which provides somewhat tolerable legroom. It isn't comfortable for an adult, however. There's little shoulder room, and the third-row bench is a bit hard on the outboard edge; it pushes you away from the outboard side toward the center. It'll work okay for small children, but if you need six- or seven-passenger seating on a regular basis you may want to consider a Windstar.

Also, there's not much room in back for groceries or other items when the third row is in place. When cargo space is needed, simply squeeze a lever and lightly push the third row forward. With some practice, it's possible to unlock the rear hatch, open it, and flip the third row out of the way with one hand, which is important when juggling an armload of groceries. The third-row bench folds neatly into the foot well. Well, maybe not so neatly.

The downside here is that the cargo floor is not flat in seven-passenger Explorers. Neither the second nor the third rows fold perfectly flat. So the floor slopes back toward the rear hatch. A sliding cover bridges the gap between the two folded seats, but you could still lose small items through the cracks. The sloping floor took Caesar, the 140-pound English mastiff, aback at first, but he quickly adjusted to it; the sliding panel made a popping noise when he stood on it, but that may have been because it wasn't fully deployed. (Be sure to fold all the seats down to see what we're talking about here.)

Though we haven't seen one, five-passenger models are supposed to get a flatter cargo floor, a bit more cargo capacity, and a useful storage area below the floor. Seven-passenger models offer 81.3 cubic feet of cargo space, while five-passenger models offer 88 cubic feet.

That cargo floor is 7 inches lower at the rear than the previous Explorer and significantly lower than the load floor of a Dodge Durango. That lower load height makes a big difference when loading and unloading. Pressing a button on the rear hatch opens the rear glass separately. The lower edge of the rear window is very low, making it easier to lift things up and put them through the rear window. A grab handle on the inside of the hatch makes it easy for the height-challenged to pull it down before closing.

The second row of seats, the row we recommend for those who didn't get to drive or sit up front, is quite comfortable. Sliding your feet under the front seats increases legroom.

Extra auxiliary power outlets in the front and second-row seats are useful, but they didn't put one in the very back.