How We Can Kill the Crossover and Make Cars Cool Again

From Road & Track

You want to hear a depressing fact about the modern auto industry? No? Too late, I'm going to tell you anyway. The modern auto industry isn't really an auto industry. It's a truck-and-crossover industry. In fact, almost six out of ten "cars" sold so far this year aren't cars at all; they are non-cars ranging from monstrous crew-cab 4x4 pickup trucks to anodyne blobs like the Buick Encore and Honda HR-V.

Unless something unexpected happens to change the way Americans buy automobiles, the market share of non-cars is going to continue to increase. Eventually, we will reach a tipping point where it simply isn't worth an automaker's time to engineer and market a traditionally-proportioned vehicle in most segments.

Perhaps we're already there. The conventional station wagon was the first kind of car to disappear from our showrooms, between ten and twenty years ago; it was replaced by an orcish horde of lifted pseudo-wagons that weighed half a ton more than the cars they replaced and offered only a simulacrum of additional utility. The two-door coupe is not long for this world, either. Today, most of the "coupes" being sold are four-door hatchbacks that precisely mimic the form factor of the 1980 Chevrolet Citation, right down to the little curve in the rear quarter-windows, but which have been burdened with an extra two or three inches of unnecessary ride height. BMW will sell you an X6 "coupe" which, properly speaking, should be called the X6-11 because it looks exactly like a Citation X-11 with the nose from a Pontiac Grand Am welded on as an afterthought.

I'm at a loss to explain exactly how all of this happened. The last time we had this kind of major change in the auto business, it was driven by a series of fuel crises and exasperation with domestic-automaker quality issues both real and perceived. In retrospect, it's fairly obvious why somebody would trade in a '79 Granada for an '84 Accord: You got twice the gas mileage and more than twice the longevity at virtually no cost in usable interior room. That's a practical, sensible decision.

It's not nearly as easy to understand why someone would trade a 2011 Accord for a 2016 Pilot or CR-V. There's a substantial price penalty to be paid for the "upgrade" to a crossover or SUV. Fuel economy suffers. Tires and brakes wear out quicker and cost more to replace. The handling of any lifted vehicle is always much, much worse than that of the car from which it's derived. Look at it this way: If you knew with absolute certainty that your morning commute tomorrow would feature a flatbed losing its cargo on the road ahead of you, scattering cars and trucks in every which direction while you tried to steer and brake your way to safety, would you rather be driving a Camry or a Highlander? A BMW 530i or a BMW X5? A Porsche Cayman, or a Cayenne?

To choose a crossover instead of a car is to willingly give back virtually all of the advances that American buyers gained when they went from Granadas to Accords. And what do you get in return? It can't be that customers demand all-wheel-drive; that was offered in everything from the Camry to the Tempo back in the Nineties and very few people stepped up to pay the extra money. Most of the "SUVs" I see on the freeway nowadays have an empty hole where the (optional) rear differential would go anyway.

Could it be the utility you get with a CUV body style? Hell to the naw. Were that the case, we'd all buy either station wagons or traditional minivans, and you don't need to be an industry analyst to see that both of those vehicle types suffer from extreme consumer disinterest in 2016. If people just wanted cargo space, the Accord Wagon would render the Pilot irrelevant, when in fact precisely the opposite has occurred. Don't even get me started on the Explorer versus the Flex.

No, it's not about bad-weather capability, cargo capacity, or ease of loading groceries. So what is it? Only this, I think: The idea, and the appeal, of sitting up high. The perceived security of a high seating position sold a lot of Wagoneers, Broncos, and even Range Rovers in the Eighties and Nineties, but it wasn't until the Explorer and Grand Cherokee made the SUV both socially acceptable and reasonably affordable that more and more buyers started to really get used to the idea of being able to see over traffic.

This led almost immediately to what was basically an arms race to get a higher seating position. A few manufacturers, like Ford, even got into the act with their full-sized cars, raising the hip point for no reason other than to make a car feel more like an SUV to the driver. Toyota further democratized the narrow-and-tall form factor with the original RAV4, and the rest is history.

In 2016, of course, owning a crossover or SUV no longer confers any advantage in traffic, because everybody around you also has a crossover or SUV. It's not unlike what your humble author discovered about opioid-based pain medication after my last motorcycle crash; after a while, what used to get you high just gets you by. If you want to lord it over traffic nowadays, you'd better find yourself an F-150. Better yet, an F-250. Maybe a Freightliner. If you have a Range Rover nowadays, congratulations! You can sit in traffic and look directly into the eyes of the Enclave, Highlander, Pilot, and RX350 drivers sitting all around you on the road.

No surprise, then, that some drivers are switching from cars to crossovers just to maintain parity, the same way every team in Formula One has to install flexible front wings the minute somebody else gets away with having a flexible front wing. Today, commuting into downtown from a reasonably prosperous suburb in something like an Accord means that you'll be confronted at all times with a wall of orange-peel-painted steel, three hundred and sixty degrees around you, filling every window. I know this because I commute in an Accord. Twenty years ago, I commuted in a Land Rover Discovery and felt very self-satisfied at being able to see over everybody, but what did I know? I was just a kid who liked mountain biking on the weekends. You could say that I'm now receiving my share of karma for doing that.

I'd like to think that the next fuel crisis, when it appears, will send people scurrying back to sensibly-proportioned vehicles, but I suspect that it won't work out that way. Everybody will just get a hybrid version of whatever bland box they're driving now. If things get really bad, they'll just drive an electric version of said bland box, because getting a smaller car that isn't as tall as a double-door Sub-Zero refrigerator would be tantamount to making your Facebook status "i'm so broke and poor lol."

We can't rely on market forces to get people back into cars. We're going to have to do it ourselves. As a grassroots effort. If you have a real car, then consider inviting your CUV-driving friends to go for a ride with you somewhere. Initially they'll be terrified at being a full six inches lower on the road. They may huddle in the footwell and sob quietly, perhaps while trying to get an Uber SUV to pick them up for the rest of the trip. But then you can nonchalantly demonstrate some of the benefits of a traditional automobile. Like being able to make a lane change quickly without head-bobbing all the passengers. Or performing cornering maneuvers that would stand a Santa Fe on its head. You could even try applying the brakes enthusiastically while pointing out that such an action does not result in the vehicle scraping its front bumper on the ground.

It might work. Or it might just make your passenger throw up and subsequently unfollow your Instagram. Perhaps a more subtle, more vicious method is required here. We should all start referring to any unnecessarily lifted vehicle as a "minivan."

"Hey, Mike, I really dig that new minivan you got."

"It's a Macan Turbo S Burgerkingring edition that does 211 miles per hour."

"Yeah, my mom had a Town & Country that looked just like it. Those were the days."

Try to keep a straight face. We can all do it.

"Jill, could I borrow your minivan to haul some trash to the dump?"

"It's not a minivan, it's a crossover."

"Is that what they call minivans now?"

Given enough time and effort on all of our parts, we could make the high hip point uncool. This inexorable momentum of the marketplace towards the bland and blobular could be halted in its tracks. Station wagons and low-slung coupes could make a reappearance. Who knows? If we all had to face our fellow drivers on a more reasonable, dare I say more human level, perhaps we might stop being so mean to each other on the road. It could happen. Will you join me? Do you believe? Yes? Well, then. To hell with the high, the heavy, the hideous. Bring back the sleek, the slim, the simple. Join the chorus, and let us praise the lower.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.