 I had a chance to drive 2016 Ford Explorer XLT 4WD for 9 days as a rental vehicle.   Throughout the years I have owned, rented and test-driven almost all vehicle makes and models of cars from economy passenger cars to luxury sports sedans, SUV's and even pickup trucks.Unfortunately I'm going to cross Ford Explorer off my shopping list and I cannot recommend it as a potential family vehicle even though I liked the previous Explorer I test-drove back in 2011-12.  It seems there are two vehicles within the Explorer.  On one hand you have a vehicle with a very nice drivetrain: a capable relatively apt and powerful engine (this is just a sub 300 HP V6 mind you in a heavy vehicle); an intelligent 6 speeds transmission; and a very comfortably tuned suspension.   We drove on freeways, mountain highways, uphills, downhills and engine and the tranmission coupled with Sports mode and steering-wheel mounted shifters enabled you to accomplish all the feats without much problem.    On the steeper hills though, regular Drive mode would behave more intelligently when going downhil, holding on the lesser gear and helping you brake with the engine.  On the uphills, regular Drive mode would however tend to constantly upshift even when you would manually downshift.  Once in the Sports mode, these problems would go away and the car would behave accordingly.However there is the other part of Explorer and that other part unfornuately makes the Explorer not so much attractive.  The faults I will list out are not new, but as have been already been pointed out by others in the reviews here.Seat design/driver comfort1) Terrible front seats with narrow hard bottoms, hard and high bottom bolsters. 2) Poor legroom area for the driver in width3) The above 2 is accentuated with absolutely terribly designed foot rest area.  The foot rest is very narrow, has a weird angle and also there is no space to rest your foot outward or stretch your foot  outward.   (And I was coming from just driving a Corolla and Camry).Many people here pointed out that these issues might be experienced partly because of the driver height.   But I'm a pretty short guy and I've experienced all these issues to a such degree that after about 30 mins of renting the car, I was complaining non-stop and had to tell my wife that I could not bear to drive it any longer.  Even after I switched to the passenger front seat, the 1st issue was still bothering me there as well.   I was ready to ditch the car and the only thing that stopped me was that I couldn't reach the rental agency and we were already far away from the pickup location.   My wife however was not bothered as much.  This leads me to believe that this is not as much of the height issue as the female vs male issue.  Females naturally don't mind seating with their legs close together whereas we males prefer to open our legs as wide as possible. Only after putting some bath towels, we luckily had, in the center of seat and thus leveling the surface I was able to somehow mitigate issue 1.  Child seatOK, so you would think that given how large the Explorer is and it's target audience it would do really well in child car seat accomodation department.   I was really hoping that I could install my convertible seat in the most safe position possible - center seat facing rear.  But I could not.  I couldn't use the center position even for the front facing installation.4) There is not that much space in the 2nd row seats as you would think, even with the short drivers and passengers5) The mechanism for folding the seats in the center seat is so large and obstrusive that it conflicts with seat installation, both front and rear.6) The same mechanism makes it hard to use latch installation even on the side seats especially in the rear installation.Minor thingsNow these things by themselves maybe minor but when coupled with the things above just add to the less the desirable portrait of the vehicle.7) Car very loudly honks when you exit with the key and engine turned on and there is no way to turn the feature off.   This proved extremely annoying and aggravating as you are trying to warm up the vehicle and it's interior and need to exit in and out of the car.8) Multimedia and instrument screen controls are needlessly complicated.  It took me  awhile to literally figure out how to do even the simplest things such as browing the folder structure on the MP3 CD or to reset the trip odometer.   There were absolutely no hints or labels on the controls to suggest that they would accomplish this or that feature.9) Locking the car.  Till the last day I could not figure out exactly how to easily lock the car by using touch feature.  Sometimes I would have to touch it twice, sometimes I would have to hold my hand there for a couple seconds, sometimes it would refuse to lock altogether no matter what I did and I would have to use the remote.10) Only one charge port upfront ???!!