My parents have owned 7 crossovers in the last 10 years, and I hated every one of them. They were, quite simply, too much of everything and not enough of anything. Now, two decades after the Lexus RX changed the way normal people see cars, I’m jumping on board. It’s just after my sixteenth birthday in 1997, and Mom wants to buy herself a new car. She’s had two consecutive Mercury Villager minivans—one a “Nautica Edition”—and neither were purchased with my consent. The last car I helped Mom pick out was a silver-on-red Volvo 740GLE Wagon, which went back to the dealer under lemon law. After that, she stopped asking me for advice; I did not stop giving it. She wants an SUV, something better in the snow than her minivans. I naturally recommend a Hummer H1. She says to stop being silly, so we go to the local Chevrolet store and I walk her around the new Chevy Tahoe. “It drives like a dump truck,” she comments on the test drive, and makes similar remarks the rest of the day about the Explorers, Grand Cherokees, and Blazers she’d also driven. Looking back now, I gotta say, the woman had a point. “I bought a new car, a Lexus RX300. It’s an SUV that drives like a car!” Mom proudly announced two weeks later. I made a face like I had just seen someone shoot my dog. “What? What’s wrong with it?” I went into a lengthy explanation about why SUV’s needed body-on-frame construction, the benefits of a longitudinal engine layout, why all-wheel-drive is stupid if you don’t have a low-range transfer case, and how the RX300 is just an ES300 on big tires, which itself was just a Camry with nice leather and a body kit. By the transitive property, I explained, it is a Camry.

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She looked back at me with a face that now makes total sense. It said, “Why do I care about any of that? I need to take your sister to dance recitals, go to the shops, and sit pleasantly in a quiet leather bubble. Once in a while, I’d like to not crash because it’s snowing. And I don’t want to have to squat to get in the thing. That’s it.” “But, but, this isn’t a real SUV!” I persisted. “And the Lexus dealer is open until midnight, 7 days a week. They have the best service for your father’s LS400, I only want to go there.” Our argument went on, forming the foundation of the YouTube comments section. Eventually, I gave up, and she fawned over her “Jewish Racing Gold” crossover. And that was the beginning of the reign of Lexus crossovers in the Farah family household; five of them, spanning twenty years, two of which we still own, and are now supplemented by a pair of Audi’s: a Q5 and a Q7. And you know what? They may not have been to my taste, but those crossovers fit my parents’ needs perfectly. Buying a crossover is accepting reality—you probably will not ever go off-roading in your off-roader. You may appreciate the tailgate and open cargo compartment more than a well-trunk design of a sedan. With the rising beltlines of today’s sedans, a crossover allows for a bigger greenhouse and better visibility. And in the case of the Lexus RX300, not a single one, out of five my parent owned, ever went to the dealer for anything besides scheduled maintenance, in over a decade. We only still have the two because they are worth more as functional cars than they are on trade-ins, and they never give us any headaches.