Crossover America

The Crossover reigns supreme!

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.

Last year, roughly speaking, two crossovers were purchased for every three cars. 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.

“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.”

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.

It’s not often that I read about some big thing that has taken over the market that I actually got a couple of years ago, but we got our Forester in 2011. My Escort was running out of steam. In addition to wanting something with AWD, we wanted something that worked reliably in cold weather, which the Escort didn’t and which was a problem in Arapaho.. We were also looking towards having kids and an Escort was a two-door.

The crossover was almost perfect for our short-term needs. In fact, I looked at the crossovers and the full-size sedans and really struggled to think of a good reason to get the latter. The price was competitive and the mileage was similar.

After much investigation and deliberation, we went with the Subaru Forester. Subaru, it turns out, is really banking it on the crossover revolution:

When minivans were popular, Subaru built crossovers. When SUVs were popular, Subaru built crossovers. Now, finally, crossovers are popular. And so are Subarus. {…}

Subarus are not as quirky as they once were, but when I recently climbed behind the wheel of a 2014 XV Crosstrek Hybrid, the immediate impression was of familiarity – this little wagon was a kindred spirit to the ’82 that I learned to drive on. Same slightly butch ride height, same raspy four-cylinder gurgle, same invincibility in the snow. And I did have occasion to try it in the snow, as I found myself driving the Crosstrek during a rare North Carolina blizzard.

Notably, The Atlantic’s article mentions how similar all of the crossovers have become but Subarus resist that trend somewhat. Had we lived in a different part of the country, I would have more seriously considered a Mitsubishi Outlander, which also looks a bit different. But Mitsubishi lacked dealerships in Arapaho and Subarus are common. Sufficiently so to be a social marker next to the also-popular Jeeps.

The environmental repercussions are mixed. A lot of the market-gain from crossovers has come at the expense of vans and SUVs, which is a gain. But cars’ share of the market has also been declining, and that may not be such a good thing.

What’s been most helpful to us has been the extra cargo space. Sedans have themselves become much better with the storage space in recent times, but having the open space with the back seats down has been priceless.

In a way it’s frustrating, of course, because most of the time we would be perfectly fine with my wife’s sedan that gets better mileage. It could be advantageous to both us and the environment to have a “cargo and family trips” vehicle and two sedans for the rest of our driving. Unfortunately, our system of auto insurance penalizes such things, and so we end up with more vehicle than we need most of the time.

Our next vehicle will probably be a larger one, exacerbating the issue. The ironic thing is that as the appeal of the crossover becomes wider, I have been wondering if we should have gone straight to the larger vehicle. When child #2 comes (hopefully sometime next year), two parents and two kids with two car seats and a dog will be kind of tight.