By any other name

By Mustang Bobby

The New York Times has a review of two new vehicles from General Motors; the GMC Acadia and the Saturn Outlook. (Who comes up with these names? One is a French colonial name for a windswept part of the Canadian maritimes, the other is a Microsoft e-mail program, and neither sounds like something you'd like to spend a lot of time riding around in.) Anyway, the reviewer waxes nearly poetic about how these are light years ahead of GM's previous flirtations with what they call "crossovers."

Like a red-faced college student begging his mother not to show visitors the embarrassing old family photos, General Motors would like you to forget its early attempts at car-based crossover utility vehicles. Imagine the company wincing on the sofa as you chuckle your way through G.M.’s picture albums from the ’90s, filled with snapshots of the Pontiac Aztek and Buick Rendezvous — the vehicular equivalent of acne and braces, velour dickies and the mullet.

But after years of failing grades on the crossover exams — aced by some imports — G.M. retreated to study the segment, do its homework and cram for the biggest test yet. Crossovers are the nation’s fastest-growing class of cars or trucks.

The company has sworn off minivans entirely. It has even begun to ditch some of its old-school truck-based S.U.V.’s, like the Chevrolet TrailBlazer and GMC Envoy, that went from top sellers to bottom dwellers faster than you can say “Fill ’er up.”

With car-based crossovers outselling traditional sport utilities for the first time in 2006, American families have made it clear that the former are their preferred form of transport. Compared with S.U.V.’s, these types of tall wagons give up some towing capacity and some ground clearance for off-road use, but their advantages in handling, ride, gas mileage and refinement seem to outweigh those drawbacks for many people.[Emphasis added.]

There's another name for a "car-based crossover." It's called a station wagon. And while the article hints at it, the auto industry is almost afraid to bring up the term for fear of reminding buyers of the big old family wagons out of the 1950's and '60's with the fake wood grain, the three-acre wayback, the roof rack, and the memories of long, dusty, family trips across the blazing Midwestern summers without air conditioning or any more entertainment than AM radio or kids squabbling in the back seat ("You touched me! Mommmm!").

1958 Edsel Bermuda

Well, I'm one of those people who thinks that there's no shame in calling a station wagon a station wagon. I've owned several, including this one --

1988 Pontiac 6000 Safari LE

-- and I'd like to see any of those new vehicles get as much stuff in the back as I can (at one point I carried several door and window units out to a job site) and last for 239,000 miles. (I drove it to the store today. Runs like a champ. Maybe the fact that it was built in Canada might have something to do with it.)

Last year I saw one of these new cars at the car show out on Miami Beach, and I complimented it as a "nice-looking station wagon." The company representative quickly corrected me; "Oh, no; we don't call them that any more."

"Why not?" I replied.

"Well, it's more than a station wagon."

Yeah, I thought; for $42,000, it better be. "Okay," I said, covering my eyes, "Test me. It's got four doors, right? A tailgate? A roofrack? It's under six feet tall?"

"Well, yes," the rep admitted.

"Okay. It's a station wagon. Slap a little fake wood grain on the sides and you've got a Country Squire."

He went over to talk to a young couple looking at the minivans.

I think the auto industry is slowly recognizing that there's a certain amount of affection for certain types of cars, regardless of what their focus groups or market research tell them. (The Edsel is a fantastic example of an idea that was market-researched to death.) They tried to kill off the convertible in the 1970s, only to see the Europeans make off like bandits with a customer base that doesn't mind the extra little hassles and the expense for the feeling you get from driving an open car. And there are some things that buck the trends, regardless of what the so-called trend-setters say. SUVs may have been all the rage once, but there's not a lot of soul in a gas-guzzling butchmobile that reminds people more of an android or a doorstop than a styled piece of automotive flair, complete with a touch of chrome. (There's a $10 million prize for someone who designs a good-looking SUV. The prize is as yet unclaimed.) I may be a hopelessly unreconstructed romantic, but station wagons are cool, and I know that there are a lot of people who think so, too.

Back in the days when station wagons had real wood components, they used to say, "nothing takes the place of a good woodie." Can't argue with that.