I may not be all that old, but I am very nearly as old as the first minivan, which came out in 1983. Prior to this time, your choice in vehicle type consisted basically of sedans, coupes, SUVs, full sized vans and pick-up trucks. There were a few wagons and hatchbacks here and there for the quirky folks and AMC was the real pioneer in thinking differently for cars, but buyers were almost exclusively restricted to the three box design; front clip, passenger compartment and trunk. We got some great versions of these types of cars and almost everyone’s needs were met, but perhaps not their wants.
To satisfy the different wants of consumers, we saw the rapid growth of badge engineering; making the same vehicle, but putting a different car company’s name and logo on it, and selling it with a slightly different feature set. You couldn’t endlessly customize cars back then and the manufacturing process made it difficult to break out of the traditional 3-box mold. This led to an expansion of brands and trim levels, but still kept the same type of car models.
It wasn’t just the technology that limited carmakers though. They argued that it wasn’t economically feasible to make a station wagon with 500 horsepower, or an all-wheel drive muscle car because there simply wouldn’t be enough buyers to warrant the research and development, engineering and production modifications necessary to facilitate such a car’s construction. Instead, they said, please try out this Cadillac Cimarron. Sure, it’s the same basic car as the Chevrolet Cavalier, Buick Skyhawk, Oldsmobile Firenza, and Pontiac Sunbird, but it’s a Caddy, so you know it’s good. People were not fooled.
Like everything else though, times change, technology changes and consumers change. As virtual design and drafting replaced the traditional methods, development costs came down. Some alpha testing could be performed virtually, which took a lot of the guesswork out of design and we started seeing shorter development cycles for cars. 3-D printing allowed manufacturers the freedom to create designs previously thought to be impossible. Car companies began conceding that, okay, there might be a market for a 500 horsepower wagon or all-wheel drive muscle car, so we got the CTS-V and the Dodge Challenger GT.
Badge engineering has, for the most part, fallen by the wayside. Although the United States will see some Buicks and Chevys that may be Opels or Holdens in other countries, we don’t see five cars that are essentially the same, from the same manufacturer, competing with one another for sales in the same country anymore. Technical partnerships and platform sharing mean cars like the Infiniti QX30 and Mercedes GLA are essentially the same car, but they maintain enough functional and stylistic differences to be mostly distinct.
All of this has resulted in a generation of cars that provides the greatest ever variety of options to prospective buyers. Some brands, like BMW, have something for almost literally everyone, short of those requiring a pick-up, gargantuan SUV or back-hoe. They have the 3 series sedan, and the 4 series, which is a coupe version of the 3 series, or you can get the 4 series Grand Coupe, which is a sedan version of the coupe version of the 3 series. You can also get the slightly larger 5 series sedan, or the 5 series sedan GT, which is not actually a Grand Tourer, but a 5 series merged with an X5 for a slightly higher ride height and more cargo space in an ugly looking package. If a 5 series merged with an X5 isn’t your thing, you can always get the X6, which is an X5 merged with a 6 series. It took the ride height of the X5 and combined it with the impracticality of a large 4 door coupe to end up with something truly frankensteinian.
What did BMW get from this? Well they sold 7,117 X6 models to folks in the US in 2016, which is about one quarter of the number of Nissan Rogue sales just for February of this year. Every time I see an X6, I think “what type of person buys that car?,” yet there are clearly more than 7 thousand of those types of people just last year, so it’s not the case the BMW is making a car for nobody. It’s giving people what they want because they can make money doing so and because people can afford to buy them.
I’ll be honest that I don’t like the X6, or the Mercedes GLC or any number of the cars mixed with SUVs, or cars mixed with other cars mixed with other cars that are for sale out there, because I think they’re irrational image machines. If you want an SUV that handles like a sports car, tough luck. SUVs are not sports cars, that’s why they make both of them. Any car that tries to combine two will undoubtedly wind up with compromises that make it worse than either an SUV or a sports car. Crossovers fall into this category too. You want a crossover or compact SUV for the ride height and to look like you’re capable of going off-road and being rugged, but to handle like a family sedan. Tough luck, there’s a reason Toyota Camrys and Jeep Wranglers look different – they were designed for fundamentally different things, and no, your Accord Crosstour cannot tackle Moab on the weekends.
But just because I don’t like them doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist, and honestly, I’m glad they do. These crossovers and strange car mashups will never be the best at what they do because they’re designed to try to do too much and, due to things like cost control, aesthetics and, sometimes, raw physics, they will fall short of vehicles designed for a more specific purpose. But they do provide people the freedom of choice and the opportunity to buy a car that, while it may not be perfect, may be perfect for them. In a generation of selfies and facebook profiles, where individuality and personalization is king, at last we have a generation of cars that fits us perfectly.
Authored by
Devlin Riggs
This originally appeared as the Deep Dive segment in the AllWaysDrive Podcast Episode 9.
