When Wheels Collide

It is the year of the crossover, a new style of vehicle that industry mavens tell us will marry the best of the sedan and the sport-utility vehicle in an eye-catching package we’ll be proud to park in our driveways.

Most of the vehicles in this category, which started with the Subaru Legacy Outback and Lexus RX 300, are still generally listed in the “things to come” column: concept vehicles that represent designers’ ideas of what should be. The Pontiac Aztek, due out later this year, is one of the rare exceptions, already set for production as a 2001 model.

Still, the crossover is here and isn’t going away. Too much time and money have been invested in developing and designing such vehicles, which aim to give consumers the utility and up-above-it-all seating that have made pickups, minivans and SUVs so popular, along with the softer ride and creature comforts that keep half the auto-buying public coming back for traditional passenger cars.

“We’re going to be seeing lots of them,” says Jeffrey W. Schuster, chief auto industry forecaster for J.D. Power & Associates, the Agoura Hills-based market research firm. “The individualistic approach is coming on strong.”

It will take a few years, but soon enough the crossover will be a third major segment of the auto market, predicts William Chergosky, a designer at DaimlerChrysler Pacifica, the German-American car maker’s advanced styling studio in Carlsbad, near San Diego.

Chergosky was lead designer on the Jeep Varsity, one of nearly a dozen crossover concepts unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week. Like many other crossovers, the three-door hatchback, a car with lines that are unmistakably Jeep, is aimed at the upwardly mobile family “that doesn’t want an SUV or a minivan but still doesn’t want to give up a no-strings-attached lifestyle,” Chergosky says.

Analysts such as Schuster and industry executives such as General Motors Corp. President G. Richard Wagoner Jr. predict that crossovers--”blends” might be a better term--could soon account for as much as one-third of a market that is now about equally divided between conventional cars and light trucks.

Schuster’s boss, automotive marketing guru J. David Power, said in an interview that he is warning auto makers to slow the rush to produce more SUVs--there are about 40 models on the market today, with more than 20 new models due out by 2005.

” . . . By the time all those new models are up and running, the market will turn,” Power says. “When companies like Porsche and Volkswagen come out with theirs, there will be an oversupply and we will see companies forced to use rebates to sell all their SUVs.”

Buyers, especially of the top-end luxury sport-utilities, will be turning their interest to the new crossovers “and to entry-level luxury cars,” Power says.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of sedans and coupes--sport, luxury and even economy--at the Detroit show, and plenty more on view at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show, which continues through Sunday.

Both events, arguably the most important car shows in the U.S. these days, also give auto fanciers an overdose of the light-truck triumvirate of pickups, minivans and SUVs.

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GM and the American unit of DaimlerChrysler are trying to wow consumers at the two shows with dramatic exercises in styling; Each introduced four futuristic concepts in Detroit after launching concepts in Los Angeles last week.

Common themes--meaning features that may arrive in showrooms soon--included lots of covered and concealed storage space; power points front and rear for plugging in accessories, entertainment and communication devices; bed extenders and molded-in picnic tabletops on anything with a tailgate; and the elimination of the central, or “B,” pillar separating front and rear doors.

The pillar-less concept vehicles, ranging from Buick’s swoopy LaCrosse sports sedan-cum-pickup (in the same vein as the car-styled Chevy El Caminos and Ford Rancheros of the ‘60s and ‘70s) to a sporty pickup concept by Volkswagen called the AAC (for Advanced Activity Concept), use double doors that either pop out of their frames and slide apart or are hinged to open from the center, like double doors in a home.

For its part, Ford Motor Co. waltzed into Detroit and woke everyone up by taking a byte from a different slice of the pie.

After a showing in Los Angeles notable principally for several variations of its best-selling SUVs and the Southern California debut of its 2001 Thunderbird, Ford in Detroit offered up a trio of like-’em or hate-’em boxes on wheels whose primary purpose is to provide an envelope for an interactive, interconnected, automotive Internet environment.

Henry Ford put the world on wheels nearly a century ago, and the aim of today’s Ford, said Chief Executive Jac Nasser, is to “put the Internet on wheels.”

The Asian and European car companies aren’t ignoring the U.S. market either.

Toyota showed its Sequoia full-size SUV in Detroit, and Ford-controlled Mazda used Los Angeles to unveil a production model of its forthcoming Tribute SUV, which is based on the Mazda 626 sedan platform to be shared with the Ford Escape SUV displayed in Detroit.

Two of the luxury importers--Volkswagen’s Audi unit and Honda’s Acura--showed crossover sport-utility-type vehicles. VW itself unveiled a concept four-door pickup truck that gives clues as to the look of an SUV the German giant is developing jointly with Porsche.

Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz all showed concepts in either L.A. or Detroit.

So did Honda. The company, often criticized for stylistic stodginess, showed that it does too know what design is all about with the unveiling in Los Angeles of a wildly styled crossover sport convertible-pickup called the Spocket. It was designed at Honda’s styling studio in Torrance. Honda also displayed its FCX fuel-cell car concept, a small sedan that a company insider said also serves as a styling cue for future Honda sedans. It takes Chrysler’s cab-forward design to the limit, nearly eliminating the hood and putting the driver almost directly behind the front wheels.

And Subaru, the Japanese brand whose all-wheel-drive vehicles are most often associated with Colorado ski bums and aging hippies living on apple orchards in upstate New York, scored a hit with its ST/X concept, a sporty all-wheel-drive extended-cab short-bed pickup with a patented disappearing rear bulkhead that allows the bed to extend into the rear-seat area.

Insiders say it is likely to be a production model for the U.S. in a year or two, and GM, which owns a 20% share of Subaru parent Fuji Heavy Industries, says it wants to produce a version of the ST/X for the South American market.

GM’s Chevrolet division will be ready sooner than that with the arrival in 2001 of the Avalanche, a full-size blend of pickup and SUV with a rear bulkhead that folds away--a system similar to but not as nifty as Subaru’s--to eliminate the back-seat area and create a full 8-foot cargo bed.

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The Ford concepts, introduced by Nasser and design chief J Mays, are part of what Nasser calls the continuing transformation of the world’s second-largest auto maker.

Ford’s aim, declared by Nasser last year, is to stop being an auto maker and to become a consumer services leader whose product happens to be the automobile.

What consumers want now, he says, is more information and more control over its use.

And Ford says it will give them the ability to use their vehicles to get it: Within three years, all the company’s vehicles worldwide will come equipped--at no extra cost to the consumer--with a “telematics” package that will make it easy to connect such high-tech products and services as voice-controlled entertainment systems and cell phones; satellite-linked navigation systems; and safety packages that automatically pinpoint a vehicle’s location and relay it to an emergency service center in the event of a breakdown or accident.

The entire package was shown Sunday in three concept vehicles that Ford calls the 24.7 line--the numerals indicating either that the vehicles are ready to go all day, every day, or that they are for people who are.

Exterior styling appears to have been borrowed from the children’s building-block school of design, but Ford says the purpose of the concepts is to show what can be done with electronics in the car, not to promote eye appeal.

“We’ve entered a world where we measure speed in gigabytes and pipeline bursts, and not in horsepower,” Mays says.

Nasser said all 2001 Lincoln LS models will have a voice-activated communications system as standard equipment. The system will be an option on the Ford Focus 2001 models in Europe and one 2002 model in North America. Monthly fees for use of the systems, depending on the services ordered, would range from $10 to $30.

The “wired” vehicles, whether packaged as conventional cars and trucks or as Ford’s futuristic and Cubist 24.7 models, “represent the future of personal transportation,” Mays says.

“It is no longer true that the auto is the icon for the age. The icon now probably is the computer,” he says. “The technology that sets [the 24.7 concept] apart has nothing to do with transportation” and everything to do with making the personal vehicle an interactive part of life instead of an isolation chamber.

Despite Mays’ voyage into the future, Ford’s combined brand displays on the main showroom floors in Los Angeles and Detroit are crammed with horsepower, from the company’s high-end Aston Martins to its forest-green “Bullitt” edition Mustang concept that pays homage to the 1968 Mustang 2+2 driven by Steve McQueen in the 1968 movie.

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Among the many intriguing concepts shown in L.A. and Detroit, several stand out from the pack:

* The nose almost disappears on Honda’s FCX concept, a lightweight electric vehicle that doesn’t need recharging because it produces electricity on board from a methanol-fed fuel cell. Its truncated hood is possible because most of the powertrain is beneath the cabin. The design permitted Honda to put a roomy five-passenger cabin on a fairly small car.

* The Oldsmobile Profile concept is a crossover sports sedan with folding rear seats, sliding rear doors and a rear lift gate that give it the cargo-hauling capacity of a minivan. Features include all-wheel drive, steering wheel-mounted transmission shifter and a supercharged, 250-horsepower V-6 engine.

* Another crossover, the production model 2001 Pontiac Aztek, is billed as a “sport-activity vehicle.” Features include a slide-out, dual-compartment storage and equipment tray in the rear, a removable cooler in the center console and a flexible seating system. GM says the bubble-shaped Aztek is due out this summer.

* The muscular slab sides and squared-off lines of the concept Mountaineer characterize the new look that Ford has assigned to its Mercury division. The concept, which insiders say is almost identical to the production version due this fall, is built on the new Ford Explorer-Mountaineer platform. Longer, wider and taller than current models, it provides a good idea of where Ford is going with the two vehicles as it prepares to hit the market this year with its two car-based small SUVs: the Ford Escape and Mazda Tribute.

* Trucks make up such a big share of the auto market, and the Dodge MAXXcab concept gives a glimpse of where they are headed. Dodge designer Michael Castiglione says his job was to consider the passenger first and cargo second in shaping the vehicle at DaimlerChrysler’s advanced styling studio in Carlsbad.

* Chrysler’s 300 Hemi C concept car is likely to see production within two years. The company won’t say so out loud, but design and product planning chief Tom Gale was already discussing pricing at the Detroit show. The convertible would have rear-wheel drive and V-8 power. The concept version uses a new 353-horsepower engine with hemispherical cylinder heads (thus “hemi”) and a system that automatically shuts down four of the cylinders, for fuel economy and cleaner emissions, at cruising speeds and during deceleration.

* Although only a concept, Volkswagen’s four-door pickup, the Advanced Activity Concept, is a precursor to the SUV being jointly developed by VW and Porsche. The AAC features a V-10 diesel engine, all-wheel drive and a wide-open cabin achieved by removing the “B” pillar and having the doors swing open from the middle.

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Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.