The Saleen XP8 Was A Performance Ford Explorer Before Many Brands Even Had SUVs At All

A large percentage of cars out there could be considered “disposable vehicles,” products to be unlovingly deployed until they are well and truly used up and then unceremoniously discarded. Exactly what the “most disposable vehicle of all time” might be is hard to quantify, but if nothing else, I found some statistics that could provide some insights.

You might remember Cash for Clunkers, the scheme to spur on car production and potentially help the environment by giving alleged clunker owners a guaranteed possibly-more-than-book-value sum for supposedly worthless “gas guzzlers” if they traded them in on a new car. There was much gnashing of teeth over the few enthusiast cars on the list that met the crusher due to this scheme, but the vast majority of machines that were literally bricked would almost certainly be considered “disposable”.

The data showed that the number two “clunker” taken off the road was the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager minivans with 23,998 destroyed. However, the number one car on the list had nearly twice as many victims as the second-place Caravan. Yes, 46,676 functioning examples of the second-generation 1995-2003 Ford Explorer (and its twin, the Mercury Mountaineer) gave their lives to the cause – and a further 11,612 of the first-gen Explorers took the number-nine spot on the top-ten Cash for Clunkers list.

Thankfully, around 120 or so examples of this underappreciated best seller probably did escape from the junkman’s grasp. That’s because these Explorers were specially modified by a noted high-performance car builder to be one of the first enthusiast-oriented SUVs that put on-the-road prowess over trail running capability, not to mention possibly the first factory-sanctioned supercharged one. Let’s take a look at the ultra-rare Saleen XP8.

What “Competition” Would A BMW X5 Be In Anyway?

Today, an AMG Mercedes or “Competition” BMW SUV doesn’t raise any eyebrows, but in the nineties, when the sport utility craze was in its infancy, the focus was on off-road readiness, or at least the appearance of such capability. Want a car that looks like the equivalent of your jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirt, and puffer vest? That’s what you were getting. The idea of such a vehicle that specialized in carving up asphalt roads but might get stuck in a pile of wet leaves was unheard of.

Regardless, in the mid-nineties, it must have been hard for Mustang tuner Steve Saleen to ignore all of the Ford Explorers prowling the streets. Introduced for 1991, Ford’s mid-sized SUV quickly became one of the best-selling vehicles on the market. It’s believed that Ford man Saleen realized with the arrival of the second-generation Explorer in 1995 that these ubiquitous vehicles weren’t going away. Next, he figured that it had an engine up front and four wheels, so what excuse could there be to not make it handle and go faster? Saleen was just the person to make it happen.

If you’re at all familiar with Steve’s Mustang builds, you know that he is far from content with making a straight-line warrior. Adding power is rather easy, but making an elephant dance is a bigger challenge. Starting in 1997 with either a 2WD or 4WD Explorer, he began by dropping the suspension a full two inches, installing springs and shocks from his company’s Racecraft components; a move that not only transformed the handling but improved the looks substantially, since lower is always better.

The 18-inch genuine magnesium wheels were rolling stock of Saleen’s own creation, fitted with Pirelli 255/55SR18 Scorpion S/T radials. Disc brakes all around included the option of special 13” front models that reportedly had issues with cracked brackets, resulting in them being recalled and replaced with stock factory units.

With this upgraded chassis, the XP8 was now begging for more power from the 302 V8. Saleen only offered the four-speed automatic, but you could go the puffer-or-no-puffer route. The normally aspirated version was a bit of a disappointment, with the only modification being a new intake that increased power by a mere 7 horsepower. That gave you a total of 222, barely any better than the stock V8 in the same year Grand Cherokee.

No, the supercharger version was the must-have, with the bolt-on blower increasing power to 286 horsepower. That was enough to drop the zero to sixty time from 8.8 seconds on the normally aspirated XP8 down to 7.4 with a quarter mile of 15.7 seconds at 88.1 mph, according to Motor Trend.

On the outside, custom front and rear fascias were installed, along with side skirts and door cladding to tie it together. A subtle rear wing on the hatch finished off the look, along with relatively subtle graphics that included the exclusivity-flexing production number on the front bumper.

There’s a fine line between being too subdued and looking like you took a Saturday afternoon trip to the Pep Boys “customizing” section, but Saleen always seemed to walk that line rather well.

Like You’re Stuck In A Rental Car Forever

Man, I hate to say it, but I’d forgotten how cheap-looking the early Explorer interiors were. You can see from some of these for-sale examples that they were also not exactly hard-wearing. Saleen could add either real wood or carbon fiber trim, but beyond Saleen gauge faces and floor mats, there weren’t any other changes to the somewhat disappointing cabin. A floor shift on the console might have been nice.

This is a very high-mileage example in these pics, so you can at least forgive a bit of the driver’s seat wear.

The standard flat-as-a-pancake rear seat and cargo area remained essentially stock, so none of the practicality of the Explorer was lost to silly roll cages or other such street racer nonsense:

If you had another $3950 to spend, a pair of much better Saleen/RECARO front seats and matching rear bench covers could be had.

None of these modifications were cheap; the XP8 started at $37,990, or around $18,000 more than the base price of a 2WD V8 XLT Explorer. The supercharged model would set you back a whopping $52,000. That’s $95,322 in today’s money, but you were getting a bespoke creation by a noted, factory-backed tuner (essentially, no two XP8s were specified the same). That’s obviously a serious chunk of change, but no different than today’s performance SUV world, where you could get two base-model Porsche Cayennes for the price of one ultra-exclusive faster edition.

If Saleen’s XP8 is an odd and elusive bird, there’s apparently an even stranger one out there. Details are sketchy, but it’s reported that one of the batches of V8-powered Explorers that Ford sent to Steve Saleen’s facility inexplicably included a few six-cylinder-powered cars. Instead of sending them back to the factory, the same non-engine-related modifications of the XP8 were performed on these smaller-motor examples. Dubbed the XP6, very few records exist on these builds; I’m really not sure who would have wanted one. An economy-minded downhill-only canyon-racer? With fewer than ten built, these are extremely rare.

Actually, any XP8 is rare. As with many of these kinds of specials, actual production numbers are hard to pin down, but the commonly agreed-upon number is 125 units from 1998 to 2001, when Steve stopped building them, likely when brands were starting to get in on the hyper-SUV game themselves. Despite the scarcity, the ones that come up for sale don’t go for much. Two on Bring A Trailer stalled at mid-$17,000s, while the white one with 161,000 miles you see in this post, in nice condition, sold for only $22,000 on Cars & Bids. That’s less than half the price of the XP8 as a new car in 1998 dollars. Even if you discount that it’s a super-rare factory-backed tuner machine, it’s a rather smoking deal on a tire-smoking great deal of SUV. What’s even better is that we’re talking about a 302-powered Explorer; you could literally put a rod through the block and fix it for less than most minor repairs on an AMG G-Wagen.

And Thus Began The Trend Of 600 Horsepower Family Haulers

As much as I scratched my head at Steve Saleen’s XP8 when I first heard of it decades ago, it’s obvious now that the man was pioneering a performance variation of something that would eventually make sedans and station wagons a distant memory. Just like with Mustangs, he proved that simple, affordable motor vehicles could be modified into rather fearsome machines. He also arguably beat the likes of X5Ms and AMG MLs before BMW and Mercedes were even building mainstream SUVs or crossovers in any form at all.

Go ahead and laugh at tread-separating “Exploders” all you want; this Ford SUV connected with late nineties and early 2000s buyers in a way that neither GM nor even Chrysler’s Jeep could ever match. You can take them for granted and crush all of the Explorers you want, but you’ll never take away the Ford SUV’s place in automotive history. Thankfully, Steve Saleen saw its potential.

Top graphic image: Cars & Bids