Overview
Practical, comfortable, graceful, and undeniably handsome, the 2022 Chrysler Pacifica has family transportation down pat. It’s offered with either a regular V-6 or a plug-in hybrid powertrain, and can be equipped with optional all-wheel drive. Its refined road manners make the Pacifica a pleasure to drive, whether you’re logging interstate road-trip miles or simply shuttling kids to the high school football game, making it worthy of an Editors’ Choice award. Cargo capacity is vast, especially with the second and third rows folded flat into their built-in alcoves in the Pacifica’s floor. Its base price is loftier than rivals such as the Kia Carnival and the Honda Odyssey, but that’s because the Pacifica’s entry-level trims are marked under the Chrysler Voyager name, a van we review separately. While the rest of America continues to crave SUVs and crossovers, we’ll be over here beating the drum for the more practical minivan—the Pacifica, in particular.
What’s New for 2022?
In addition to a new in-cabin air-filtration system, the 2022 Pacifica also gains an optional Amazon Fire TV feature that will allow passengers to connect to streaming services to watch movies and TV shows through the optional rear-seat entertainment systems. Pacificas equipped with this feature also will display content on the front infotainment screen, but only while the transmission is in park. Elsewhere, the hybrid model gains a Max Regeneration indicator for the gauge cluster and Silver Mist joins the color palette.
Pricing and Which One to Buy
The midrange Touring L offers the best mix of features and value as it adds a host of additional features over the base Touring model. Those standard features include a heated steering wheel, perforated leather upholstery, heated front seats, and 18-inch wheels. We’re fine sticking with front-wheel drive, but we’ll let you make that call if you want all-wheel drive. We’d suggest staying with the standard 3.5-liter V-6, though, as we had a few reliability hiccups with our long-term Pacifica hybrid.
Engine, Transmission, and Performance
It’s not the quickest minivan we’ve tested, but the front-wheel-drive Pacifica is far from sluggish (it reaches 60 mph in 7.3 seconds, about midpack in terms of performance) and feels plenty peppy around town. In nonhybrid guise, it packs a 287-hp 3.6-liter V-6 and a nine-speed automatic transmission. The Pacifica hybrid makes less total horsepower (only 260 ponies) from its 3.6-liter V-6 and two electric motors backed up by a 16-kWh lithium-ion battery. In our testing, its zero-to-60-mph time trailed the gas-powered model by 0.5 second. We’ll perform instrumented testing on the all-wheel-drive Pacifica soon and update this review with its results.
More on the Pacifica Minivan
Fuel Economy and Real-World MPG
In addition to being space efficient, a minivan should also be fuel efficient. The Pacifica Limited we tested delivered an impressive 31 mpg on our 75-mph highway fuel-economy route—that’s tops for minivans. According to the EPA, the Pacifica hybrid can travel up to 33 miles on electric power and is rated at 84 MPGe combined. Around town, we were easily able to match the EPA’s 33-mile estimate. On the highway, the Pacifica hybrid managed 23.4 miles of electric-only driving before the gasoline engine kicked on. While we haven’t had the opportunity to test the new all-wheel-drive model, we expect to update this review with test results soon. For more information about the Pacifica’s fuel economy, visit
