2019 RAV4s are pretty spiffy.
RAV4s hit their stride* with the 3rd gen, 2006ish. Offered with a V6 in that timeframe. The newest models, like the latest CRV make me sad.
*stride being irrationally defined as a nifty SUV that you could take off-road without much worry.
Pretty much an infinitesimal portion of SUV buyers go off road, but a vastly larger portion want their vehicle to look like it could. So, add some plastic cladding, maybe jack it up a bit, and voila, you have the appearance of rugged outdoors ready without any impact on the day to day suburban crawl.
It’s like the people who bought first-gen Hummers, which were pretty much military spec off-road capable, and only drove them as boulevard cruisers.
I know I’m in the infinitesimal minority. Yelling at the car industry on the internet keeps me from yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
Weren’t they considerably smaller back then?
I mean, the answer to that with regard to American cars and trucks is almost always “yes”, but as for specifics…
The interwebs say the wheelbase was 6 inches shorter, and they’ve also moved the spare from the tailgate to being under slung.
Well, I sold Toyotas for a little while…maybe a year or two before that (so presumably the prior gen). RAV4 was a cute little SUV. Nothing little about them now.
I was looking at a chart showing average weights of different classes of vehicles by year, I think it may have been off of some EPA website or something, can’t recall. Anyhow, up until the eighties or so, the average weight of American passenger vehicles, including I believe light trucks, was like 4000 pounds or so. Then it plummeted, to below like 3000, but has been since the 2000s creeping up again and is now getting up to where it was forty years ago. The culprit, of course, is all those SUVs, plus the ginormification of pickups.
Weight doesn’t evessarily mean huge. My A4 was roughly 4400 pounds, iirc. In mid 90s.
Fun fact: the rear end of my 1980 Subaru wagon was light enough that it could be picked up by a few scrawny (and ungrateful) fellow high school cross county runners.
Bonus fun fact: there was enough space under the hood for a full sized spare. Safest car I’ve ever owned. Couldn’t go fast enough to do harm to anyone.
That’s pretty awful. Current A4s are well under 4000 pounds. AWD does add some porkage though, to be sure. My Golf R is mid-3000s.
That new Rav4 looks seriously good… and I wouldn’t doubt it if wife said something along the lines of “eh… too fancy”.
In terms of off-road, I’m mature enough to admit to admit to myself that we would do very little to none, at best (no negativity on those that do so!). We do snowy trips to the ski-hill or snow-shoe trail, and some rutted roads to the backcountry campsite. 99% of which a FWD car can do, but a AWD SUV can do a bit more safely. So it’s probably worth the cash to us anyways.
I liked it, actually. It felt so solid. And yes, it was AWD.
AWD is usually under $2000 to add to a vehicle as an option these days (assuming it’s available and not already standard). It is WELL worth it as a safety feature, even if you never go off-road. Your insurance company may even give you a small discount for having it.
I live in southwest Ohio, where even though we get snow and ice several times each winter, we seem to be completely incapable of handling it properly. AWD has saved my bacon (and my vehicle) several times over the years just on highway and street driving alone. I will never purchase another vehicle for myself that doesn’t have it.
Agreed. Though I think t is less of an issue these days with the advanced traction control systems, I haven’t bought a car without awd in over 25 years and won’t consider a vehicle without it.
AWD is less important than good winter tires, especially if you have a FWD vehicle, but yes, I do find it reassuring and more capable in severe weather up here. The other big reason for AWD is it’s much better than FWD for getting lots of torque to the pavement. You’ll notice that most performance-focuses vehicles are RWD or AWD, though there are a handful of FWD cars with power and torque outputs that are pretty damn high (Civic Type R, the new Veloster N, for example), in addition to the oddities like Lincoln’s FWD big sedan. People who tune/hotrod FWD cars quickly run into serious issues with traction because the front wheels simply break free on launch.
But, with most SUVs, this would not be an issue (and the ones with tons of power have AWD usually)
I mean, it all comes down to where you live. Up North, AWD is great, especially if you live out on the windy county roads that don’t get plowed. Sure FWD works fine, but when you get 4-5 inches of snow without a plow the AWD (and the ground clearance, more importantly) certainly helps keep things pointed in the right direction.
I think a lot of people assume AWD = free pass for driving in the winter. This is not true, AWD can make your car less likely to lose traction, but also, if you are driving like an idiot, it isn’t going to save you. Heck, not even snow tires, but just good all weather tires with a decent tread help out. I have seen friends ditch their car because they are running on bare-treads. Inspect your tires before each winter, and consider buying snow tires, or even just a new set of all-season tires with good treads.
I personally always am going to buy AWD vehicles, 1 because I am a large man, 2 my parents live out in the sticks and don’t have a paved driveway. Having AWD makes the trek out there in the winter that much less white-knuckled.
People in So-cal with AWD, why? Because you might travel to somewhere there is snow once a year? If you live where snow covers the ground for 3-4 months of the year, it makes a lot more sense to go with AWD.
2019 Forester is looking pretty good, waiting on reviews which should start to happen this fall.
I like Subaru too, the new one looks boxy and capable.
Tulsa, 2/1/2011: A year and a month after setting my clock to Tulsa Time, a blizzard hit the city, dropping 14" of snow. In Montana, this would have been inconvenient. In Oklahoma…
After shoveling a path from my apartment to car, I attempted to drive to work. They had given people the day off due to the storm (if I recall, all of Oklahoma was under a “State of Emergency”), but I had some projects that I wanted to get finished by the weekend, and I had driven in far worse in my CRV.
I wish I had taken pictures. Imagine Mad Max, but with snow replacing sand. Cars abandoned where they faltered (sometimes in the middle of the road), others flailing about trying to get unstuck. Major 6-lane roads that hadn’t seen a plow since the storm had started. The part of my brain responsible for self preservation ordered me to turn around and go home.
Upon my return, I was greeted by one of my neighbors, a lady in her 60s. She asked, “How are the roads? Do you think I can drive to the store?”. I don’t know what compelled me to ask her what she kind of car she drove instead of just telling her flat out “NO!”, but she pointed to a newer model CRV. I asked if it had all-wheel drive… and she shrugged.
I told her to stay home and offered to get whatever she needed.
The tldr: There is a significant population of midwesterners for whom traction is not a consideration when purchasing a vehicle, and it is not a region of the world foreign to snow.