Cute Utes
Posted by Paul Horrell at 6:00PM on Monday 11 February, 2008 2 Comments
Today Renault issues some photos of the new Koleos. I shudder. A compact crossover soft-road 4x4. One of gazillions new to the market last year, this year, next year. A car the world surely does not need.
Last year we had the - deep breath - Vauxhall Antara, the Nissan X-Trail, the Freelander Mk2, the CR-V Mk3, the Chevrolet thingummyjig... er... Captiva, Jeeps various, the VW Tiguan, the Mk3 RAV-4, the Mazda CX-7, the new X5, the Citroen C-Crosser and the Peugeot 4007.
Now one of my jobs is to drive every new car on the market, because I'm a juror for European Car of the Year. But I have to tell you I did not put in a single mile behind the wheel of any of the above. Nope, I was a 2007 crossover virgin. Only last week did I belatedly pop my cherry by having a go in a VW Tiguan.
And all the VW proved was that I was happy and proud to have been in dereliction of duty with regard to all the others. You don't have to drive these things to know that - as cars - they're horrid. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Newtonian mechanics will tell you why.
They're tall, which means they're inclined to rock and roll. The height and weight gives this rocking motion extra rotational inertia. There are two approaches a manufacturer can take to this. One is to let it be, in which case everyone on board will be sick from the nautical sway. The other is to fit rock-hard non-springs to stop the rolling. The result is extreme discomfort and spinal compression. The second is the approach favoured by VW, as your correspondent painfully discovered last week.
Those are the physical reasons I loathe cute utes. The emotional reasons mostly boil down to the ridiculous falsehood that they represent. (If you tow a trailer in muddy fields or need access to terrain off-limits to a car, exempt yourself from the following. Snow doesn't count: they don't have SUVs in the French Alps, they have winter tyres.)
Generally the people who use them would actually be better off in an MPV, a type of vehicle I've always admired greatly. MPVs are sociable, comfortable, and provide the same high viewpoint as the SUVs while being lighter, faster and more efficient.
But society views the MPV as that extreme pariah, the family car. It indicates to the world that you've got operational sperm. And by an uncanny coincidence an MPV has the silhouette of an egg. So, to preserve the illusion that you're a rugged, outdoorsy kind of unfettered swordsman, you buy an SUV. And never mind the two pink child seats prominently on view in the back.
But aside from all that, surely we're all bored with crossovers now? At the same Geneva Show as the Koleos, there will be the Ford Kuga and the Volvo XC60 and Saab 9-4X. Thumb through the back of your Top Gear and pretty much every manufacturer has one.
And in my book, any new one is one too many.
Advertiser links
2 Comments for "Cute Utes"
POST A COMMENT USING THE FORM BELOW
Comments are now closed for the blog archives.
Why is there even still a market for these? They don't really go off-road very well, they don't go round corners very well, they don't use fuel very well, they rarely have anything extra you couldn't find in a car, or real 4x4, so what's the point in them?
Quite frankly, anyone so clueless or image conscious that they want to buy a car worse in every department than an MPV shouldn't be taken seriously.