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The window sticker on a 2008 Navigator shows a mighty low 12 mpg in the city and only 18 on the highway, so Ford went back to the drawing board to improve on that number for this year. The Blue Oval’s blinged-up luxury sled boasts a fuel friendlier average of 14/20 for 2009, a marginal improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Ford says those numbers are good enough to put the Blue Oval at the head of the luxury SUV space that includes the Cadillac Escalade, Lexus LX570 and Nissan QX56. Ford was able to increase fuel economy by almost 15% on the big SUV by implementing some of the same engineering tricks employed on the 2009 F-150, which itself gets up to 15/21 in SFE trim. Changes were made to the idle speed and the transmission, as well as some fancy software engineering that regulates gas consumption by using aggressive deceleration fuel shut-off.

Ford also made standard several items that were previously only available as options, including a power lift gate, heated and cooled front seats, PowerFold third-row seats, cap-less fuel filler, Rear View Camera, flexible fuel-capable V-8 engine, SYNC and the stunning 14-speaker THX II-Certified audio system. The 2009 Navigator will also be available with Ford’s new and improved navigation system with Travel Link. Ford hasn’t announced any improvements for the Expedition, but we’d expect Ford’s blue collar version of the Navigator will receive similar fuel economy enhancements.

Check it, Europeans — Clarion has just dumped a new duo of PNDs on the market, and they’re both geared up to route you all over your humble lands. It appears that the only major difference between the MAP680 and MAP780 are the actual maps loaded in; the former is available in four regional versions, while the latter features a full 43 European countries. Specs wise, we’re lookin’ at a 4.3-inch widescreen display, text-to-speech, built-in TMC tuner, 3D display of buildings / POIs, lane assistant, Bluetooth (with phone book transfer and audio streaming), a 400MHz CPU, multimedia player and 2GB (MAP780) / 1GB (MAP680) of internal memory. No word on a price or any of that good stuff just yet, but feel free to get more acquainted with the pair in the gallery below.

[Via NaviGadget]

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