2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle

 Car Tech Blog

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle

This week we got the chance to review the 2021 Chrysler Pacifica for a whole week, and it was the top of the line Pinnacle trim level.  Click on the links below to view our video’s on this van, or click on the link below to our Youtube channel and see all our car videos!

Two Guys And A Ride Youtube Channel

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle - Full Review

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle - POV

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle - Walk Around

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle - How To - Driver’s Information Screen and Infotainment System

2021 Chrysler Pacifica Pinnacle - How To - Rear Entertainment System

The Driver’s Information Screen

The Driver’s Information Screen was a combination of analog and digital.  There are a analog tach and speedometer, and then sandwiched between them about a 5” digital screen.  The gas and engine temp gauges where digital as well.  The digital screen itself was fairly configurable.  You could change the top center, bottom right, bottom center, and bottom left areas and configure them to show a myriad of information from outside temp and compass, to instant and average fuel economy, or you could choose to make them blank.  The bottom center area contains the odometer.  The center part of the screen could be set to show any number of pieces of information from a digital speedometer, to driver safety systems, fuel economy and so on.  

I did notice a couple of things that stuck out to me.  One was the adaptive cruise control - which was the stop-and-go- type.  The sensors had a hard time distinguishing what was ahead of the van.  It would at times pick up a car in the lane next to me and slow me down, or on a curve, it would quickly lose the car in front of me.  I’m guessing the physical sensors perhaps were angled wrong, so that could be an easy fix possibly, but it stuck out to me.  I absolutely loved the sound system in this van.  It was a top of the line Harmon Kardon 20 speaker, 900 watt system.  What I liked about it was the sound quality, it was really excellent, and I had everything set right in the middle (bass-treble, balance, fade etc) plus I had it in surround mode.  There was a perfect amount of bass, treble and midrange for me, and it had a full rich sound, even when streaming via apple car play.  

The Infotainment System

The Infotainment system had a 10” screen running the new version of Connect 5 (which I really liked-easy to use).  It was a Harmon Kardon sound system with 20 speakers (including a 10” Subwoofer), along with wireless Apple CarPlay, Wireless Android Auto, Bluetooth, AM/FM and Sirius XM 360L Alexa, and built in Navigation.

The system itself was quick to respond and operated normally for me throughout the week, in other words, no little gremlins showed up while I was using it.  Some of my favorite things on the system were the FamCam, which is a camera located on the ceiling between the 2nd and 3rd rows of seats that you could turn on and see all the passengers behind you, you could also zoom in on any of the seats!! Great for families, or even people with pets that travel with them.  

Another favorite was the customizable screen.  You could customize up to five buttons that would stay at the top the screen for instant quick access.  You could then customize the main area of the screen by choosing what showed up in that area.  There were 3 preset areas on the screen.  You could not customize how many screens were present (well any more than 3, because it did allow you to take away one of the three areas of the screen if you did not want it). 

Two other favorites were the favorite buttons.  Connect 5 allows you to look at all the apps available on your system, then star (by clicking on the star next to the icon) the ones you use most.  It then placed all the starred apps, in a separate tab that you could click on, so you only saw the things you most commonly used, so much easier to find apps, than having to dig through a complete list of apps each time.  The other favorite was the internal communication system called Passenger Talk.  I could press a button on the screen, talk normally, and it would put my voice through the cars speakers.

Rear Entertainment System

This van had the new Rear Entertainment System which was quite good overall.  Chrysler has done many things here that other manufacturers have missed.  First of all, they straight up tell you in the manual that Apple products are not compatible…period.  And boy, thats the truth!  I tried to no avail to get an Apple product connected.  Now that that is out of the way, the rest is a good story!  This system has a Blue Ray
DVD player located in the front.  Thats right, a DVD player—no one else has that on their new systems.  Now it also has an HDMI plug in for both TV’s so you can run your favorite gaming system on it (there is a 120V household outlet just to the right and behind the right side 2nd row passenger), you can use a USB for audio books, Movies, or music.  The quirky thing here is that both TV sets have a USB port on them, right next to the HDMI port, but it is charge only….to us a USB for the TV’s you need to plug into the USB port in the front located next to the DVD player.  Be sure you read the owners manual on how to format your USB, and what type of movie files it will take.  I could only get low resolution videos to play on it via USB, but that doesn’t mean you can’t run 1080p videos, you might be able to, I just was not able to get that to work for me in the week I had the van.  Now onto of that it has a slither of built in games that can be played alone or players can challenge each other, and the screens can play against each other.  Some of the games I enjoyed playing with were Chess, Checkers, and of course it was handy to have the “are we there yet” game, that showed passengers (if a course was plotted in the Navigation system) how long until we arrive, how far do we still have to go and what’s our estimated arrival time.  Now if activated by the screen user, this info could be programmed to automatically pop up on the screen at certain intervals, like every 15 min, or every 30 min.  What a great feature!

Well, I really like this van.  I’m not a huge fan of the color of the interior, I think I personally would prefer a more baseball glove brown. Overall it was a great family hauler with tons of amenities and luxuries, the seats were very comfortable, the technology easy to use.