The world of more-expensive gasoline is trying its level best to bring about the death of big sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks. These are the mammoth haulers, the vehicles a brawny nation needs (or thinks it needs). Truth be told, when you load half a ton of stuff into a big wagon that already weighs nearly three tons, then hitch a speedboat to the back, you need a brawny engine to pull it all.
That burns gas. Lots of it. What to do? One thing is to scale back, which is something many of us seem to be doing. Park the Chevy Suburban and take the bus or train to work. Forgo the weekend water-skiing up at the lake because it could set you back more than $150 in fuel alone. But we still need to haul people and things, and that's where the smaller SUVs come in. I prefer to call them wagons, because that's what they are; they're just a bit taller than traditional station wagons.
The small wagons can easily post mid-20s numbers in the miles-per-gallon sweepstakes and still haul more than 70 cubic feet of cargo with the second row of seats down. At least, that's what we found with Honda's 2008 CR-V.
The CR-V has become a class-leading favorite in this pack of smaller haulers, a group populated by some stiff competition -- Edmunds.com lists 26 of them, including the Toyota RAV4, Ford Escape, Hyundai Tucson, Subaru Forester and Suzuki Grand Vitara -- and it's done so in a quiet way, given that it's been around, in various forms, since 1996.
The current incarnation, which emerged in the 2007 model year, is the kind of car where, if you look at it and its predecessors, you say, "They finally got it right." The first-generation CR-V was kind of a gawky-looking, underpowered thing. It was replaced in 2002 with a more substantial CR-V, but it looked as if the product planners redid the whole inside, then realized they still didn't have a place for the spare tire. So they stayed with the earlier design: The spare hangs outside the vehicle, attached to a side-opening tailgate. It wasn't an elegant solution.
Now, the spare tire is underneath the rear cargo platform where it belongs, and the whole redesign makes the CR-V a far better-looking, far smoother car, particularly for a station wagon. (They're high, they're bulky, they're meant to be practical.)
The CR-V comes in three trim levels -- LX, EX and EX-L, the L standing for leather. There's also an EX-L with navigation. You can get all-wheel-drive or front-wheel-drive. The test model I had was the most expensive -- the EX-L with navigation -- and my feeling was that if you're going to have one of these for 10 or 12 years, putting on maybe 150,000 miles, spring for the one with the goodies.
For years, I've thought navigation units were superfluous and too expensive -- you can buy a portable unit for much, much less, and you can move it from car to car.
