A lot of people who would never buy a full-size SUV have bought these crossovers, otherwise they’d probably be in sedans.”Īmerican carmakers are all but divesting from sedan production (with some exceptions) and going all in on light trucks, a class that includes big cars like SUVs, crossovers, pickups, and vans. “I think crossovers are definitely not as bad as full-size SUVs, and people get that. “Car companies kind of neutralized the critique of SUVs when they introduced crossovers,” says Angie Schmitt, a former reporter for transit publication Streetsblog who is writing a book about the pedestrian safety crisis. “Car companies kind of neutralized the critique of SUVs when they introduced crossovers.” At the end of 2019, while Australia was ablaze, Honda closed its best year ever for its CR-V crossover, now its top-selling car in the US. Sedan sales have plummeted over the same period: Where passenger cars represented half of car sales just a decade ago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, they fell to less than a third by the end of 2018. Their better gas mileage compared to earlier SUVs combined with car industry greenwashing and the widely held perception that big cars are safer - even as they’ve made the streets more dangerous for pedestrians - have helped make crossovers America’s biggest car segment, displacing sedans as the default choice for many drivers.Īlso known as crossover utility vehicles or CUVs, crossovers were barely on the scene at the turn of the century, but they now make up more than 40 percent of the American market for new cars. The crossover, a generally smaller, more modern kind of SUV, has exploded in popularity since the Great Recession. Twenty years on, international alarm about climate change may be higher than ever, but the SUVs have won. New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher’s 2002 polemic High and Mighty sneered at the rise of “behemoths that guzzle gas, spew pollution, and endanger their occupants and other motorists.”
CROSSOVER DEFINITION MARKETING TV
A TV ad campaign run by the Evangelical Environmental Network - “What Would Jesus Drive?” - urged Midwesterners to rethink their addiction to big cars. Mainstream organizations like the Sierra Club - which famously renamed the huge Ford Excursion “Ford Valdez” after the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill - helped create a cultural backlash against these hulking cars. I didn’t come up with this idea myself: Anti-SUV discourse was everywhere. As a kid, I was furious about SUVs with a passion that now seems embarrassing, telling all the suburban adults I knew that their ugly, gas-guzzling tanks were going to end life on Earth.
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