Keep On Truckin’ (Everybody Else Is)

From the July/August 2022 issue of Car and Driver.

It crept up on us slowly, almost escaping notice, but all cars are trucks now. Sure, there are a few holdouts for the real die-hards, your Camrys and Camaros, but even those will probably end up with a two-inch lift and plastic fender flares before the decade is out. No vehicle is immune from the everything-an-SUV ­aesthetic. Toyota makes a lifted minivan, the Sienna Woodland Special Edition. Porsche is supposedly working on a high-riding 911.

The Subaru WRX has a normal ride height, but its plastic fender cladding tells me the Sport Utility Sedan version is only a matter of time. Everybody wants a truck, and so everything is getting the truck treatment.

The 2022 Volvo V90 is a case in point, since the standard Volvo V90 as we knew it no longer exists. For a few years, Volvo ran a noble experiment wherein it produced its stately wagon in both unadorned car form and as a jacked-up, fender-­flared Cross Country version with an extra 2.3 inches of ground clearance. Everyone bought the truckified model, to the extent that Volvo gave up on the ­standard-height V90. To find out what Volvo’s designers thought about this, I bothered Robin Page, head of design, and T. Jon Mayer, head of exterior design, who were in Sweden and probably doing important design things before I interrupted to ask them why all cars are trucks now.

First, they pointed out that in the case of the V90 CC, its lifted suspension and fender flares are more than an affectation. “We don’t do styling for styling’s sake,” Mayer says. “It’s a more capable chassis, with more wheel travel. Form follows function.” Which in turn follows a particular use case for a high-riding wagon, and it’s an appealing tableau. The V90 CC “is a very popular car in certain regions,” Page says. “Here in Sweden, people might be going to summer houses where there’s a stony track, and having some extra height is nice. We look at it as a need for a slightly taller car with that capability, not about making it look a certain way.” What an image! I’d love to drive a V90 CC to my Swedish summer cabin via a moderately unkempt road, scampering lightly over lichen-covered granite as mottled sunlight beams down betwixt the interstices of tight-knit pines. But how many people are really doing that? If a couple of extra inches of ground clearance affects your lifestyle, you have some very specific habits.

I suggest to Page and Mayer that you don’t need to own a remote forest getaway so much as hope you might. And thus trucks and SUVs, and ever-so-slightly taller-than-normal cars and crossovers, are an expression of optimism: I will have an adventure. I will not let pavement constrain me. I’m going to drive up an unplowed mountainside in Vermont in the middle of a blizzard and then make s’mores in my cozy, rugged cabin while feeling sorry for the less rugged types stranded down below in their conventional sedans. “A lot of it is aspirational,” Mayer says. “You may never take it out of the suburbs, but you could if you wanted to.”

After some further noodling on the notion of capability, we get around to what feels like an essential truth: People buy tall cars because people buy tall cars. It’s a feedback loop that goes only one way; you might trade your Honda Civic for a CR-V, but probably not the other way around. “The high seating position, the commanding view—that would be hard to give up,” Mayer says. “Once you go in that direction, it’s hard to go backward.”

But if I’m buying a wagon to get to my forested vacation home, I’m going for a standard 2021 V90, an R-Design model with the lower, stiffer suspension. Because the driveway to my imaginary cabin is long and paved and has FIA-approved corner curbing. Sure, I’ll probably never slay those corners. But it’s nice to know I could.

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