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• Celebrities
  Being Bill Murray
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  An Interview With Carlos Toraño
• Good Life Guide
  Model Trains
• Good Life Guide
  2005 Corvette
• Good Life Guide
  The Pocket Watch
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The Land Rover Comes Over

With its new LR3, the venerable British marque joins the ranks of posh off-roaders. It's not the only change in an SUV market segment that's seeing more flux than it has in a decade

Paul A. Eisenstein
From the Print Edition:
Bill Murray, Nov/Dec 2004

The Cadillac SRX shares the same platform as Caddy's new STS sedan. A unibody design, rather than the body-on-frame of the division's big Escalade, allows the crossover to deliver some of the best of both worlds. The SRX boasts an SUV's rugged looks, command seating and all-wheel-drive. Yet it's lighter and more fuel-efficient than a comparable truck-based ute.

Also known as soft-roaders, crossovers may sacrifice some of their off-road abilities, but they're usually better on the highway, and less expensive as well. When it comes to affordability, "the soft-roader is the only way to go," says Chrysler Group's design director, Trevor Creed. That's why, Creed allows, "you can make the assumption" that Jeep will be adding a crossover to its lineup "within the next couple years."

Don't write off the conventional sport-utility vehicle. Despite rising oil prices and the best efforts of Greenpeace, it's not going to go away. Jeep just launched a new version of its big Grand Cherokee and will soon add the three-row Commander to its fleet. But in the future, the Chrysler division is likely to cover all the bases, with truck-based "Trail Rated" SUVs, as well as new soft-roaders. Toyota and its high-line Lexus division almost evenly split their offerings between the two types of SUVs, while Ford and General Motors are scaling up a new crop of crossovers to balance out their more traditional SUV entries.

Both Land Rover and Hummer will continue to target the seriously hard-core off-roader, though as the Range Rover and new LR3 underscore, there's no longer any reason to sacrifice creature comforts when you head for the hills.

The rain dies down and a brilliant summer sun begins to poke through the clouds as we reach the end of the long highlands pass. That fire is beginning to sound especially attractive right about now, though for the moment, we'll have to settle for seat heaters. We slip a disc into the CD changer and crank the audio up loud enough to rattle the LR3's windows. Why rush? We've got all the creature comforts we could ask for, and access to anywhere we might possibly want to go.

Paul A. Eisenstein publishes an automobile magazine on the Internet at www.TheCarConnection.com.

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