Remember the Saturn Vue? It’s back, baby, and more cannibalistic than ever. Starting in 2011, the refreshed Chevrolet Captiva will be undercutting Opel’s Antara, itself a rebadge of the same Daewoo Winstorm. Because what Opel needs right now is to prove that sometimes it’s worth paying a little extra for a German brand on your rebadged Korean Crossover. That’s what you call giving a brand a sense of purpose. Meanwhile, does anyone out there actually miss the Vue?

Because car enthusiasts tend to be more interested in cars themselves than the industry that creates them, critics and commentators tend to praise engineers while vilifying accountants, marketers and the countless other professions required to bring a new car to production. The assumption seems to be that engineers develop great cars which are then cheapened, blandified and otherwise screwed up by everyone else. Obviously this is an oversimplified perspective, but in certain cases it’s downright undeniable. Rarely has it been more true than with the Nissan Juke.
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I recently attended a fancy-pants dinner held by Chrysler PR for some Houston-area bloggers. We were wined, dined and introduced to the 2011 Grand Cherokee. While free food and journalistic integrity are a tough combo to swallow, I found something entertaining and inherently blog worthy: the castrated 2011 Ford Explorer is in the new Grand Cherokee’s gunsight. Why? One of the SUV’s most famous nameplates is now a crossover, while another is still an SUV. But neither of them like being called names.

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We’ve got a tight fight for the top spot again this month in the Mid/Large CUV segment. Traverse, Pilot, Edge, Outback and Sorento are all running between 9k and 10k monthly units, and between 50k and 65k YTD sales. All of these top-selling nameplates improved over their July 2009 numbers, but the flagging Highlander and Venza both fell back year-on-year, as did the Flex. Can Edge ride a mid-cycle refresh to the 2010 Mid/large CUV sales title? That could just depend on whether or not Chevrolet opens up more production capacity for its Traverse. Meanwhile, Ford’s Explorer and Jeep’s Grand Cherokee should start eating into this segment… which begs the question: should these two nameplates be migrated out of SUVs and into the burgeoning segment? While you ponder the answer, we’ll be preparing an July SUV sales chart for tomorrow.

Many cars look and drive much like any number of other cars. They’re simply not special in any way. You might as well toss a coin to choose among them. The EX35 is not one of these cars. Infiniti’s compact crossover is unlike anything else in the U.S. market. And you’re either going to love it or, more likely, hate it.

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Not so long ago Volvo attempted to poach some customers from BMW by offering high-performance R variants of the S60 sedan and V70 wagon. Then it decided these weren’t selling well enough to justify the expense of developing them. So now we’re offered “R-Design” variants instead. These involve larger wheels, a mildly stiffened suspension, and a slew of styling tweaks. Not part of the recipe: additional horsepower. Halfway through the 2010 model year the XC60 gained such a variant. All sizzle, or is there some steak here as well?

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Conventional SUVs are all but dead, yet interest in sedans has not been surging. Instead, car-based SUVs with some promise of respectable fuel economy are currently hot. So a redesigned, four-cylinder-only Hyundai Tucson could not arrive at a better time. But it’s a crowded field. Why buy this one?

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Mercedes has released official images of its hinted-at R-Class facelift, which brings the unloved crossover’s looks closer to the brand’s better-selling SUVs. But will it improve the model’s moribund sales? Probably not. Status-seeking family-haulers in the US will keep buying GLs, and sniggering softly when they drive past folks in their Pacifica-like Rs. Sometimes it’s a good day to die, and sometimes it’s a good day to get a facelift. For the Mercedes R-Class, today is the former kind of day.

A few years ago Ford decided that its survival depended on making bold moves. They decided to stop simply doing what they’d always done. Well, at least some of the time. One bold move: replace their minivan with the world’s largest Scion xB. Another: instead of offering a V8, twin-turbocharge and direct inject a V6. Then combine the two to offer a 355-horsepower family hauler that really hauls. Intriguing. But does the Ford Flex EcoBoost make sense?
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When Hyundai introduced its first Tucson in 2004, the term crossover still hadn’t crossed over from the world of marketing into the public imagination. At the time, the term SUV still carried enough equity to convince even the ute-lets built on compact car platforms to emphasize their rugged inspiration with upright, boxy styling and spartan utility. These car-based “cute-utes” were, according to the logic of the time, for consumers who wanted in on the SUVs alleged lifestyle enhancements without the profit-swelling sticker shock and ruinous fuel bills. Today, the crossover has properly crossed over, leaving behind the pretensions of the SUV-weaning generation to assume its own identity in the automotive market. For better or for worse, the new Hyundai exemplifies this new state of the crossover, and it makes the case for itself without reference to its previous status as a cheap substitute for an SUV.
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The Mazda6 Wagon, long the only “real” station wagon in an American market that’s crossing over from SUVs to CUVs, has been updated… but not for the US.

What is the purpose of the Crosstour? I asked as I waited for my test car to be readied. Pause. Finally an answer, The Crosstour is now the high-end Accord. It is designed to compete with the Toyota Venza. Ah, I get it: monkey see monkey do. What better way to give the marque a kick in the shorts than to pinch an idea from the market leader. And so they did. Almost. Partly. Sort of.

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Mercedes sold only 2,825 R Class “Grand Sport Tourer” models in the US last year, confirming once and for all that the eigenwillig CUV is a bonafide flop in this country. So much so that a GL-inspired restyling is already under development, possibly with a GL-inspired name as well: GLR.

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Nissan stumbles into Scion territory with this teaser image of its new compact crossover, the Juke, to be built in Britain starting this year. The Juke is supposed to bridge the gap between the Qashqai (Rogue) soft-roader and the Note compact MPV. Because someone, somewhere wants a compact crossover with less capability than a Rogue and less rear visibility than a Note. The hunt for that confused consumer is now officially on.