Cars, in case you haven't heard, are dead. More specifically, cars are crossovers now.

Enthusiasts have plenty of reasons for disdain toward the crossover age we now find ourselves in. It feels like a retread of the '90s SUV craze, for one thing. But more to the point, the Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, and their ubiquitous competitors have conquered this vast nation of parking lots in record time, replacing minivans and sedans as America's de facto family haulers to the point of becoming the new basic embodiment of what a car is. Ford will soon kill most of its cars and almost exclusively make crossovers, SUVs, and trucks.

Crossovers have come for our beloved hatchbacks, too. As PM Auto Editor Ezra Dyer put best: "Everyone’s building crossovers, because we want hatchbacks but need to pretend we’re going off-roading." Some of the great performance-plus-practicality hatchbacks—the Ford Focus, for instance—appear not long for this crossover-mad world. In their place: A new slate of quirky small "SUVs" caught halfway between a crossover and a car, subsuming the five-door setup.

High Rider

Toyota

Passersby will comment on the Toyota C-HR, rest assured of that.

One look at the angular front end and aggressive back would suggest this vehicle wasn't cut from the same conservative cloth as typical Toyotas, and that notion would be correct. In the U.S., the C-HR was meant for the company's youth-focused Scion sub-brand. Then Scion died. Now it's a Toyota, trying to find its way in what they're calling the subcompact SUV market.

This weekend we took a 2018 C-HR for a ride down Long Island. While driving the tiny crossover, it was impossible not to think back to our recent test drive of the new 2019 Corolla Hatchback, a Toyota that's similar in size but different in a few ways that are telling about the state of car shapes.

The letters in C-HR stand for Compact High-Rider, which is an apt description. The C-HR is barely more than an inch longer than the new Corolla, but 4 inches taller. That's not enough to make you feel like you're towering above traffic, but enough to satisfy the American urge to ride higher—the impulse that arguably gave birth to crossover madness in the first place. It doesn't seem huge, especially with five people packed inside. It feels exactly like what it is, a halfway point between a short hatchback and a properly spacious crossover.

The C-HR's back opens just like a hatchback, delivering the same kind of easy-access cargo space, though, for all the extra height, it adds only 1.2 cubic feet in the rear compared to the Corolla hatch. And the price for that little bit of room is steep. The C-HR weighs in at 3,300 lbs., a lot for its size and 240 lbs. more than the Corolla. The crossover accelerates more slowly, handles less nimbly, feels more sluggish, and gets more sluggish than its hatchback cousin. Which is no surprise.

The Critical Compromise

Toyota

Toyota's C-HR isn't alone is this weird subcompact SUV space, the entry-level-buyer, future-rental-car corner of the crossover market. Subaru makes the Crosstrek, Mazda the CX-3, Honda the HR-V. U.S News even includes the Mini Countryman in its segment roundup, showing how blurry the line between hatchback and small crossover has become. Cars aren't exactly undergoing a position-less revolution that's come to sports, but the distances between categories is getting murkier.

Still, we are losing something here. As their name implies, crossovers try to bring drivers the best of both worlds, the ride height and room of a true SUV with the softer, friendlier ride of a car platform (they're really just tall cars, if you want to get right down to it). Of course, the negative is also true—a compromise can be the worst of both worlds. Crossovers aren't true off-roaders, and their awkward height means they don't handle like lower-riding cars. A quirky subcompact crossover will never drive like a GTI.

Car People have always looked a little sideways toward the vehicles Americans buy, like craft beer snobs looking at the cold statistical reality of crappy beer consumption. The default attitude used to be bewilderment that, in a world of superior driving machines, staid sedans like the Toyota Camry topped the best-seller list. Now it's pushback against the inherent sameness, blandness, and driving compromises of the crossover.

Car love lives on, and the old hot hatch favorites aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The enthusiasts' love of the true hot hatch will keep those cars in production while car companies still experiment with new entries, and projects like the Corolla show there's still room for a pleasant surprise.



In a weird way, the crossover age is the time of the fifth door's triumph—a triumph that happens to be taking place on the backs of weird little Toyotas and soccer parent rides. Let's just hope the car itself, and what made it great, isn't lost to time.



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