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| As multipurpose vehicles become more car-like, customers keep up the demand for crossovers and SUV. |
LOS ANGELES — At this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show, crossovers and sport-utility vehicles dominated, with almost a dozen world debuts of both production and concept vehicles. You don’t have to travel to an international auto show, however, to know that crossovers and SUVs are taking over the automotive world. Just drop in at your local new car dealer.
More than just a trend, crossovers and SUVs are well on their way to replacing the traditional three-box sedan as the vehicle of choice for most Canadian new car buyers.
In Canada last month, October’s overall new car and truck sales surged on a year-to-year basis by an impressive 5.1 percent (according to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants), as the industry moves toward another record sales year; however, crossover and SUV sales grew by roughly four times that rate, to an even more impressive 21 percent.
Since the introduction of smaller SUVs like the “downsized” 1984 Jeep Cherokee and original 1990 Ford Explorer, the idea of owning an SUV as daily transportation has become embedded into our driving culture. And with the proliferation of more efficient car-based crossovers, buyers no longer have to sacrifice a comfortable ride or good fuel economy (suffered in older truck-based SUVs) to get the added room and practicality these utility-oriented vehicles can offer.
As crossovers and SUVs have become more like the sedans they replace in so many Canadian driveways, their appeal has become universal. Aging baby-boomer buyers like the extra visibility of riding tall in the saddle, the ease of entry and exit, and – especially handy for a Canadian winter, and an option many sedans can’t offer – all-wheel drive. As well, many boomer offspring, the millennials, were driven to hockey or ballet practices as children in the back of a crossover or SUV, and now see these utility vehicles as “family” cars.
And much of the appeal of crossovers and SUVs is due to their car-like styling. No longer merely pickup trucks with enclosed beds, the new crossover and SUV debuts at the L.A. Auto Show demonstrate how the segment is taking the lead on innovative automotive design. From the boutique Range Rover Evoque Convertible to the sports wagon-like Mazda CX-9 to the not-quite-sure-what-it-is Volkswagen Beetle Dune, crossovers and SUVs now come in virtually any body configuration and size for a variety of driving lifestyles.
One of this year’s L.A. debuts that points the way to the future trends in crossover and SUV design is Kia’s new fourth-generation 2017 Sportage compact crossover.
Penned under the direction of Gregory Guillaume, Chief Designer at Kia’s European Design Centre in Frankfurt, Germany, the 2017 Sportage’s exterior body crosses the boundaries between SUV and sports sedan. According to Guillaume (who was also responsible for this year’s sophisticated Kia Sportspace Concept), that result was intentional.
The last-generation Sportage was extremely successful for Kia, what Guillaume calls a “game changer.” So when it came time to design the new-generation Kia compact crossover, his design team spent a lot of time analyzing what they should keep and what they should create.
“We compared the Sportage to an athlete that has won a gold medal at the Olympics,” explains Guillaume. “You were an outsider the first time, and when you come back four years later, everyone is waiting for you – you’re no longer the new kid on the block, you’re the one everyone wants to beat.”
From that perspective, Guillaume wanted to keep the 2017 Sportage’s distinctive silhouette, with its strong window graphic, C-pillar, swept-back roofline and sharp shoulder line that goes from the front to the rear of the vehicle. His designers were more adventurous when it came to the new Sportage’s front and rear design, and it ends up as a good example of how crossovers and SUVs are becoming more sedan-like in their looks.
Unlike the first crossovers and SUVs from the 1990s, today’s models don’t have to advertise their off-road capabilities. Gone are older styling cues like two-tone fender flares, fake push-bars or large, Baja 500-ready auxiliary lights. Instead, utility vehicles are being designed more like European sports cars.
“We wanted to position the Sportage’s headlamps on the top of the hood, a feature you associate with very sporty vehicles, a sports car, really,” said Guillaume, noting a trend we are seeing with other sporty crossovers like the new Porsche Macan.
The other trend the 2017 Sportage illustrates is where crossovers and SUVs are actually being driven: on pavement. So while utility vehicles in the past were engineered to be driven off-road, today’s vehicles are being designed to compete with sports sedans on-road.
Don’t worry, the new Sportage can still be had with traction at all four wheels, and features a 50/50 locking centre differential. But Kia also spent a lot of engineering time reducing noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) through the application of a quad-bushing setup in the rear suspension to isolate road noise, and additional sound-absorbent materials throughout the Sportage’s wheel arches.
Steering – a quality almost absent in older crossovers and SUVs – was another area of targeted improvement on the 2017 Sportage, as engineers mounted its steering box farther forward on the axle for better weight distribution. And with 25 percent less friction than the previous unit, the new Sportage offers smoother and more precise steering inputs and better feel, according to Kia.
If all that sounds like a press release from a German automaker announcing its latest sports sedan, that’s also another indicator of how the 2017 Sportage portends toward the future of crossover and SUV design.
“In the end, what we really wanted [with the new Sportage] was an Autobahn stormer,” Guillaume admits.
