Name game can make your head spin

Do vehicle categories make your head spin? Do you know what constitutes a sport utility vehicle? How about a crossover?

Good grief.

A crossover is defined by the Wikipedia user-driven online encyclopedia as "an automobile with a sport utility vehicle appearance that is built upon a more economical and fuel-efficient unibody construction."

Clear as mud?

Essentially, it's a wagon that's constructed on a car chassis that offers more cargo room and passenger space than a typical four-door sedan. I'll add that they usually offer all-wheel-drive.

By that definition, doesn't the difference, really, between a sport utility vehicle and a crossover vehicle come down to the choice of words?

Initially, the new crossover category might have appeared to be a good idea to group together vehicles that didn't perfectly fit into other categories. But now that the category appears to have evolved into wagons with all-wheel-drive capability -- a modified version of the traditional sport utility vehicle -- do we really need another category that's tough to define?

I mean, whenever someone tells me that a new vehicle coming out is a crossover, I have no mental picture of what it looks like, not like a car or a truck or a minivan. I still need to see the vehicle. Makes you wonder why we need categories at all.

My thought, however, is that the crossover category is really a creative attempt by the automotive manufacturers to get buyers excited about new products and to get their minds off sport utility vehicles, which have a bit of a stigma attached to them (boxy, heavy and hard on fuel).

By developing and promoting a category full of vehicles that are more practical and economical and easier on the environment than traditional full-size, truck-based sport utility vehicles, the manufacturers and advertisers create a buzz and get people interested while generating brand awareness.

But by the Wikipedia definition, manufacturers have actually been building crossover vehicles for years: Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, Hyundai Santa Fe, et al.

Why don't we just label emerging crossovers as small sport utility vehicles like we always have? We do often refer to them as compact SUVs, but we attach the word crossover to this newly invented category as well. If we continue to call them compact SUVs, wouldn't it be obvious that a more compact ride brings with it improved fuel economy and lower gas costs and fuel emissions, while providing slightly less passenger and cargo room than the mid- or fullsize SUVs?

Wikipedia specifies that crossovers resemble sport utes. Well, doesn't that make them sport utes?

But hang on. Like crossovers, traditional station wagons are also built on passenger-car frames and they have more interior and trunk space for carrying passengers and cargo. So how then is a crossover any different from the traditional wagon? Was this entirely new category of automobiles developed only because the crossover is viewed as a taller wagon? Talk about fuzzy logic.

The trouble is that marketers know we like trends. We're excited by new concepts and the latest toys and gadgets. And brands will do almost anything to get our attention and promote spending. It makes sense in a weird sort of way that if there is only a slight difference between vehicle types and that marketers would want to stir up the pot and put them in a trendy new category.

That, of course, doesn't mean that it makes any sense to us once we begin to take a good look at the differences. It all depends on how it's spun.

Confused? Perhaps without any hard-and-fast definition, we should be; but how can there be a hard-and-fast definition when the crossover category is a catch-all for vehicles that don't really fit into other categories?

The crossover handle shouldn't be used to describe a vehicle, but rather the trend itself. My definition? Crossover is the trend of gradually blending the traditional wagon and sport utility categories. There. Print it.

Maybe the crossover category was derived because people would rather not call their ride a wagon. They're thinking about mom's grocery getter from 1983. And maybe large sport utility vehicles are frowned upon because they're seen as wasteful. Well, I say we should call all these vehicles what they really are -- wagons. It's a category that has stood the test of time and style. They're obviously more popular than ever.

Rhonda Wheeler is a journalist with Wheelbase Media, a worldwide supplier of automotive news, features and reviews. You can email her by logging on to www.wheelbasemedia.com and clicking the contact link.