Who Gives a Crap About the Line Between Cars and Trucks? We Do (Except When We Don't)

From the November 2017 issue

“As one judge said to another: ‘Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.’” That’s the late junk maven William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch, a book every disaffected teenager started reading 20 times but failed to finish even once. What I remember most from my aborted attempts: multiple uses of the word “spectral” and the original definition of “Steely Dan.” Anyway, it’s a great line. I don’t recall the context. Surely he was referring to the heat closing in on him or the tyranny of something or other. He was almost certainly not speaking about light trucks.

Yet, the sentiment nicely encapsulates the thinking at play when defining what is and what is not an SUV or other light truck. You might say, as I often do, who cares? There no longer exists a clear line between cars and trucks. Instead, personal-use vehicles slot somewhere on a spectrum book-ended by the Smart Fortwo Electric Drive and the Ford F-series Super Duty, its center obscured by a cloud of small and mid-size crossovers. But, again, who cares? Would people think differently of a Volkswagen Tiguan if it were described as a wagon instead of as an SUV? That’s a rhetorical question.

At C/D, we sidestep the cars-versus-SUVs issue. In our spec charts, we refer to any vehicle that has four doors and a hatchback as a four-door hatchback.

But regulators can’t so easily let themselves off the hook. They can’t have manufacturers just making stuff up willy-nilly. There has to be a regulatory framework that keeps Smart from slapping an “Alpha Dog SUV, Unusually Large Horn Edition” badge on its Fortwo and benefiting from less restrictive fuel-economy standards afforded to vehicles capable of doing more than just embarrassing their passengers. The truck standards were created for vehicles capable of towing boats and getting stuck deep in the woods.

And so it falls to entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create rules—many, many rules—governing the differences between cars and trucks that will seem ridiculous and unfair to the least number of interested parties. Get it wrong, and the PT Cruiser is classified as a truck, which it was per NHTSA, though it clearly wasn’t, per reality.

Enter Title 49, Part 523, Sections 4 and 5 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The complexity of that little ditty forced us to run the following passage in our first-drive story on the 2018 VW Tiguan:

"All front-wheel-drive Tiguans come with seven seats, but the third row is a $500 option on all-wheel-drive models. (Blame the feds for that weird anomaly: Front-drive models need the third row in order to be classified as a light truck; all-wheel-drive versions don’t.)"

What? Clearly our writer was wrong, right? Wrong, our writer was right.

Section 523.4 defines what a “passenger automobile” is. It’s pretty straightforward. A car is a vehicle that isn’t what’s described in Section 523.5. Oh, and the definition mentions parenthetically that a passenger vehicle not be one that is “capable of off-­highway operation.” My personal experience, though, indicates that any car is capable of “off-highway operation.” It’s just a matter of for how long it is capable of it.

Section 523.5 is where things get weirdly specific. To be considered a “non-passenger automobile” (i.e., light truck), a vehicle must satisfy either Paragraph (a) or (b) of what follows. Paragraph (a) concerns cargo capabilities. If a vehicle can carry more than 10 persons; can serve as temporary housing; can carry cargo on an open bed; devotes more space to cargo than to passengers; or has at least three rows of seats, one or more of which can be folded or removed “with simple tools” to create a flat load floor—bingo!—you’ve got a truck.

Paragraph (b) concerns “off-highway” vehicles, which are also deemed light trucks by virtue of their perceived badassery. To satisfy the first part of the off-road provision, a vehicle must have “4-wheel drive or [be] rated at more than 6000 pounds gross vehicle weight.” To qualify for off-roadiness, a vehicle must also satisfy at least four of the following: approach angle of not less than 28 degrees, breakover angle of not less than 14 degrees, departure angle of not less than 20 degrees, running clearance of not less than 20 centimeters (7.9 inches), front and rear axle clearances of not less than 18 centimeters (7.1 inches) each. Why 7.1 inches? Or 7.9? Or 28 degrees? And how is there no description of what varieties of four-wheel drive count as “4-wheel drive”?

But who are we to complain about arbitrary parameters? Years ago, then editor-in-chief Csaba Csere, who shares nothing in common with Burroughs except a body mass index score, decreed that to be considered an SUV, a vehicle must (in addition to a few other attributes) be as tall as or taller than a Subaru Forester. So what we had was an easily applied, airtight rule but one that teetered on a single arbitrary decision.

This is just from one judge to another.