newworldafro
DeeperThanRapBiggerThanHH
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...-conquered-americas-automobile-market/374061/
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. MADRIGALJUL 10 2014, 1:08 PM ET
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.
Libby wrote, "it would mark the first time in recent memory—if not ever—that a car segment did not lead the industry."
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.
In comparison with the rise of Android, say, or WhatsApp, this change may not look impressive. 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 other words, in the car business, the crossover is what monumental, generational change looks like.
* * *
The 2014 Toyota RAV4 (Toyota)
Crossovers are like SUVs with the rough edges rounded off. The original SUVs like the Ford Explorer were built atop the American car companies' truck platforms—they employed truck construction methods and components. But when Toyota debuted the first crossover, the RAV 4, it was built on a car body.
"A truck frame, you could lift the body off the car and it would still drive. 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. "It affects handling and weight and maneuverability."
So, crossovers look kind of like a small SUV, but they drive like a regular car.
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. 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 year's hottest new crossover, the Jeep Cherokee (not the Grand Cherokee SUV), is rounded and smoother with the classic crossover design.
Crossovers also represent a fascinating size compromise. Americans still like big cars, but they also like being able to park easily. So, crossovers give the illusion of raw size.
"The size impression is completely due to the vertical. It’s the height of the car," Lang said. "This is one of the things that drives and is going to continue to drive the small crossovers. The cars are very manageable in terms of parking in an urban environment. They have more comfort in terms of seating environment because of the height. Your legs are down, rather than out. They have a good eye point on the road. But they are quite compact, in terms of footprint."
In fact, to hear car people tell it, the rise of the crossover seems downright inevitable. All the best parts of a car plus all the best parts of an SUV! It's the best of all worlds! It's great for families! It's great for single people! It's great for empty nesters! And many families that would have chosen minivans and station wagons are now opting for crossovers.
In other words: Crossovers are eating the world!
But if that's true, 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?
To answer these questions, we're going to have to talk about SUVs.
The SUV is almost a mistake. As chronicled in books like Keith Bradsher's High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV chart, car makers started producing SUVs like the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Ford Explorer because they were classified as light trucks, rather than cars. And that let them create a far more profitable vehicle. "Getting minivans and SUVs certified as light trucks allowed Chrysler and American Motors to crank out huge numbers of them without fear of violating fuel-economy, safety, or pollution rules," Bradsher wrote. And it wasn't just Chrysler and American Motors that benefitted. As SUV sales boomed during the 1990s, Ford and its Explorer SUV cashed in, too.
The regulations—and the lack of innovation in Detroit—made it difficult to come up with fuel-efficient, reasonably priced big cars, but Americans still wanted big vehicles. So, as Chrysler engineer Francois Castaing puts it in Bradsher's book, "We could not sell big cars, so we turned it into a truck."
The SUV wasn’t only a phenomenon because of regulatory loopholes (even if those loopholes were so big you could drive a truck through them). The product matched the times.
In mid-1990s SUV advertisements, SUVs are shown as the ultimate town and country vehicle. The 1995 specimen above shows a family hopping into a car on a San Francisco street and effortlessly cruising into the wilderness. The video is even intercut so that the transitions from rural to urban are seamless, almost like a dream. It was a glorious appeal to urban baby boomers who could dimly recall the flowering fields of their youth.
argued that SUVs were "for an excessive person who wants to be perceived as only excessively practical," and he went on to decry their gasoline usage (and attendant foreign oil import increases), extreme profitability, ability to inflict damage on others, and noted that his wife thought they seemed "Republican in character."
"Forget the tension between liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites—even men and women," a 1997 New York Times article begins. "A new schism has formed, which has divided suburban residents as surely as the yellow line that splits the road: there are those who drive sport utility vehicles and those who drive passenger cars."
Yes, it was that important. One was an SUV person or one was not.
And the problem for SUV makers became that more and more car buyers were not SUV people. The price of fuel started to rise in the 2000s. The economy was in the tank. We were at war. The optimism of the '90s gave way to pessimism and musky fear. Who would want to bet on gas prices coming down? Or keeping one's job long enough to pay for the SUV and the gas it needed to commute from ever-more distant exurbs to urban centers?
anti-immigration protests there, too.
But as sorted and divided as our country is, in a political and cultural environment nearly always described as polarized, there is this little nub of American hope that says: the center will eventually hold. We will find the sweet spot in the middle by mashing ourselves together as we have always done.
Maybe it is strange to find succor in the rise of a segment of the automotive market, but the crossover is the perfect vehicle for the purple state America of our dreams.
