Why did it take so long for the crossover to take over the market? And why did it take so long for automobile manufacturers to start offering them? But they can't get too streamlined because, as Brinley put it, "the most efficient space is a box." So, most car companies have converged on the compromise design. The boxy edges of the SUV are also literally rounded off in most crossovers, as their designers strain to optimize the aerodynamics of the vehicle. So, crossovers look kind of like a small SUV, but they drive like a regular car. "It affects handling and weight and maneuverability." Whereas most crossover utility vehicles are monocoque - single body-if you took the body off, the wheels would fall off," said Michael McHale, Subaru's director of corporate communications. " A truck frame, you could lift the body off the car and it would still drive. But when Toyota debuted the first crossover, the RAV 4, it was built on a car body. The original SUVs like the Ford Explorer were built atop the American car companies' truck platforms-they employed truck construction methods and components. In other words, in the car business, the crossover is what monumental, generational change looks like.Ĭrossovers are like SUVs with the rough edges rounded off. But this is an industry that measures change in decades, that requires new factories to build different kinds of cars, and that has been selling something that someone born in 1890 could understand. In comparison with the rise of Android, say, or WhatsApp, this change may not look impressive. Now halfway through the year, "it seems like that might be case," Libby's colleague Brinley said, though obviously there's still some time left in the year. "If the trend we have witnessed in the first two months of 2014 continues for the remainder of 2014," Libby wrote, "it would mark the first time in recent memory-if not ever-that a car segment did not lead the industry." It's tough to compare apples to apples, but in April, IHS Automotive analyst Tom Libby noted that small crossovers were the single best selling segment of any type of vehicle, including midsize sedans, which are the staple crop of the automotive industry. Last year, roughly speaking, two crossovers were purchased for every three cars. Even SUVs in their Clintonian fin-de-siècle glory days cannot touch the growth of the crossover. These days, three times as many crossovers are sold as SUVs and minivans combined. Was it just my imagination or were they really everywhere now? Nope, they're really everywhere. So I called up Stephanie Brinley, a senior analyst at IHS Automotive, to put numbers to the rise of the crossover. Moms and dads can flail and fight it, but we might as well acquiesce: They're easy to get kids in/out of, they're great for the carpool, they hold lots of stuff.īut all this was just a feeling, or an even less coherent feels. I am also now part of a demographic category called young families with kids, and being part of this demo means feeling the cold, clammy hand of the market forcing us towards these vehicles. For the car business, the crossover is what monumental, generational change looks like. There were 24 parking spaces-and slotted into each and every one was a crossover. What does that change look like? Recently, I pulled into a hotel parking lot in Colorado. People call them crossovers, and they've grown from an interesting experiment by Toyota, Honda, and Subaru in the mid-1990s into the biggest thing in the car business since the sedan, which most people know simply as "the car." It's part SUV, part car, part minivan: a mutt of a vehicle. A new style of vehicle is taking over the supermarket parking lots, rural highways, and city streets. Something extraordinary is happening in the American automobile market.
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