How the crossover utility vehicle made us comfortable with SUVs – Vox
In the aughts, there was a backlash against the SUV. Then came the crossover vehicle.
Marina BolotnikovaMar 11, 2020
As a kid, I was furious about SUVs with a passion that now seems embarrassing, telling all the suburban adults I knew that their ugly, gas-guzzling tanks were going to end life on Earth. I didn’t come up with this idea myself: Anti-SUV discourse was everywhere. Mainstream organizations like the Sierra Club — which famously renamed the huge Ford Excursion “Ford Valdez” after the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill — helped create a cultural backlash against these hulking cars. A TV ad campaign run by the Evangelical Environmental Network — “What Would Jesus Drive?” — urged Midwesterners to rethink their addiction to big cars. New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher’s 2002 polemic High and Mighty sneered at the rise of “behemoths that guzzle gas, spew pollution, and endanger their occupants and other motorists.”
