A car is a big decision. For most consumers, it’s the second-most expensive one they’ll ever make, after a house. The choice was once a stark and personal one, a matter of individual expression and taste. Now, the car market, and car culture, is so homogeneous that we mostly choose between different branding appeals rather than truly different cars. That fact of automotive life is a poor report on the broader culture. The roads show the flattening results of ill-conceived policies that were intended to serve environmental and safety concerns but failed, and sucked the fun out of the open road.
Today, almost any car you get into drives just about the same at road speeds. But cars were at one time extremely different from one another. Fifty years ago, the standard car shape in the American market stood only about as tall as your chest. It had a hood, a cabin, and then a deck or trunk. A sports car, meanwhile, was an open two-seater with maybe a bit of a cloth top that only sort of kept the elements out. It was for sporty driving, and it took a level of technique and attention a normal car simply did not. You could know how to drive and still not know how to drive a sports car. And it used to be that an SUV was truck-like, and you’d buy one to do truck things: either heavy hauling or off-roading. An old Land Rover Defender, for example, is grunty, and, in many, the steering doesn’t automatically correct back to the center position when you let go. That also takes a special technique and attention of a different sort.
If you optioned a big, powerful engine in a standard car such as a coupe or sedan, beginning in the ’60s, you got a “muscle car.” The smaller, slightly muscular coupes, starting with the Ford Mustang, were called pony cars. Maybe you needed more space for children or stuff, so your sedan’s roof would extend all the way to the back, making it a wagon (or a “saloon” or ”estate” as they call them across the Atlantic, where our words sound like hillbilly patois). Or, if you wanted a tiny car, it’d be really tiny and weird, such as the original Mini or Fiat 500. You could buy what we now know as a Jeep Wrangler, more or less an unchanged design since it moved Allied Forces along muddy roads in World War II. Ferrari dealers were selling what were still close to being road-legal race cars. Citroen made a plastic beach car called the Mehari with no sides and a tent for a top. You could find all kinds of weird stuff in a ’60s or ’70s parking lot.
Whatever decision you made, you then had to pick a color, and it was more likely to be a bright, simple one you learned about in preschool, such as red or yellow, rather than the drab offerings currently dominating the roadscape. I once owned a 1970 Dodge in “plum crazy purple,” which Fiat Chrysler brought back recently as a retro gimmick to capitalize on nostalgia. But white and black are the most popular colors now, and when consumers opt for a hue rather than a shade, it’s most often some taupe, earthy, champagne-type affair.
The point is that cars as a huge part of our market and culture once admitted of variety. Today, not so much. Homogeneity reigns. None of the segments I mentioned has died out, but they have been eclipsed by the all-consuming market dominance of the so-called “crossover.”
The crossover, or CUV, is a vehicular chimera made of a tall body like a small SUV built on the underpinnings of a regular, old, lowdown, sedan-type car. You see it with the Honda CR-V, the Mazda CX-5, the BMW X-whatever, and many others. They now dominate the market, outselling any other segment by far. And as they take over product lines and sell in the millions, they are supplanting or destroying many of the autos with real character, rendering the roads uniform and drab.
Take the iconic Mustang, which created the idea of the cheap, fun, sexy sports coupe and heralded an era defined by the primacy of youth consumer culture. Its latest version is called the Mach-E, a $40,000-plus, electric, four-door crossover that debuted at the recent LA Auto Show. It looks like what would happen if a Mustang mated with a generic SUV and a bee stung the progeny on the nose. What of Aston Martin, the car brand with more genuine sex appeal than any other? It also announced a crossover blobmobile at the same show, the DBX. Lamborghini offers one, the Urus, which looks like an overpriced sneaker, and Rolls Royce sells its variant, the Cullinan, for $325,000 to the rich and, presumably, blind. Ferrari has one in the works. Downmarket, the venerable Jeep Wrangler has succumbed to the same pressures to become the same general shape, introducing the four-door “unlimited” version, which is essentially just a Wrangler take on the same idea. The Cadillac one has origami-like creases to remind you of the styling cues of other Caddies; the Dodge one is bulging like The Rock’s biceps, et cetera.
In short, if there’s a model or make with some loyalty or nostalgia to exploit, it’s being exploited to sell crossovers by taking that basic, four-doored egg shape and adding whatever brand-familiar trim to it.
Why is everything going CUV? The promise of the crossover is that it can do it all. That promise is a false one. They seem like they can off-road, but they can’t. They seem like they will drive well on the road, but they don’t. They seem like they’ll have lots of cargo space; after all, they’re so big. But if you measure them, they have no more storage space by volume than their sedan counterparts, and less than wagons. The one true advantage of a tall, gangly sedan is the high seating position that is easy to get into and allows you to see over traffic. (This has always seemed like opting to watch a movie from a stool rather than a chair to me.)
For actual hauling or actual good driving, the cars that have taken over the market because they can do a bit of everything cannot really do much of anything excellently, and they can’t be styled to truly look good. The best they can muster in the looks department is to remind you of some other car that legitimately distinguishes itself in some way. That’s what the Mach-E does: It has Mustang-ish parts glued onto the familiar ovate, five-seater, family grocery-getter shape in the hopes you’ll fool yourself into feeling part of the Mustang legend based on some badges and its cool, retro taillights, in lieu of reserving the Mustang name for actual sports coupes.
And why shouldn’t Ford? The false promise of the crossover sells. Branding and nostalgia via ornamentation are most of what distinguish the overpriced transport modules we call cars now anyway. The only reasons not to prostitute the Mustang legend to the john of crossoverdom would be integrity and long-term vision. (“Zero compromise” was how Bill Ford, company chairman, described the overpriced electric family CUV emblazoned with the Mustang name before his PR underlings gave a long presentation using the latest augmented reality conference tech about the myth of electric battery “range anxiety” and the car’s exciting capacity for cloud-based software updates.)
There are invisible hands molding all these cars into this same shape, but they are not of the market. The real story behind the rise of CUVs is that they are a side effect of regulations. Specifically, they are a function of the “corporate average fuel economy” regulations that have routinely been under push-pull renegotiation by automakers and the government for four decades.
CAFE standards haven’t just dictated that an automaker has to produce models with a specific total average fuel economy. There’s a whole Byzantine, shifting formula. There are different standards for “cars,” meaning sedans and coupes and such, and “trucks,” meaning SUVs and pickups and such, plus more complications based on two-wheel drive vs. four-wheel. CUVs cost what cars cost to make, but for regulatory purposes, they are classified as light trucks.
What ended up happening was that automakers figured out they could produce models that were regulated like trucks without the expense of being built like trucks (see, for example, the pioneering Toyota RAV4). And consumers, it turned out, would actually pay more for the feeling of size. Automakers could cash in on both ends.
So, they invested heavily. Meanwhile, add to that an increasing number of restrictions from the federal government and the state of California (America’s largest car market and therefore a de facto national regulator, the same way Texas educational standards set priorities for many textbook publishers). Carmakers, then, each have to produce cars that accord with restrictions concerning, for example, how many inches above the ground rear brake lights have to be, how flat and soft the front impact surface of the car has to be, emissions standards that are different in Europe, 49 U.S. states, and California, and so on. You can start to see why they might all start producing fundamentally the same few cars in big numbers. You can start to see why the pressure to conform is so strong that it shapes such once-different ideas as a Mustang or a Honda family car or a Land Rover into the same uninspiring meh.
Go outside and look at the road. Rolling down the pavement, in physical form, is the law of unintended consequences. It’s a shame that regulatory and social forces are gradually turning every vehicle into something so soulless. Crossovers are for people who don’t distinguish between driving and transportation. But it’s not a surprise. Common denominators are not known for being inspiring.
That’s why the ubiquity of the taupe blobmobile on the American road says something sad about our car culture, as well as our culture at large. Cars were once known for being inspiring, for quickening the pulse, for making statements, for being dangerous and different, and, yes, if you were boring, even for being boring! They were known for lots of different things. They said something about us, each, individually.
I don’t mean to declare gloomily the death of car culture or the fast car or anything like that. Far from it. Among other things, the profits from CUVs fund all kinds of fun and interesting automotive engineering. Car enthusiasts have plenty to enjoy still. But the divide between normal cars and enthusiasts’ cars has never been so wide. It’d be a less dreary America if every car were something for someone to enthuse over.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
