Why Crossovers Conquered the American Highway
The crossover is a mutt that combines elements of cars, SUVs, and minivans.
And this new type of vehicle just may become the most popular vehicle in America.
Alexis C. Madrigal
The Atlantic
Something extraordinary is happening in the American automobile market. A new style of vehicle is taking over the supermarket parking lots, rural highways, and city streets. It's part SUV, part car, part minivan: a mutt of a vehicle.
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."
What does that change look like? Recently, I pulled into a hotel parking lot in Colorado. There were 24 parking spaces—and slotted into each and every one was a crossover.
For the car business, the crossover is what monumental, generational change looks like.
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. 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.
But all this was just a feeling, or an even less coherent feels. So I called up Stephanie Brinley, a senior analyst at IHS Automotive, to put numbers to the rise of the crossover. Was it just my imagination or were they really everywhere now? Nope, they're really everywhere.
These days, three times as many crossovers are sold as SUVs and minivans combined. Even SUVs in their Clintonian fin-de-siècle glory days cannot touch the growth of the crossover. Just take in these numbers.
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