SUVS now account for more than half of all new-car registrations in Europe. That should hardly come as a shock – simply look out your window, and you can be fairly sure the next vehicle to drive past has a bit of extra ride height going on, and quite possibly some plastic cladding around the wheelarches.
As for how this has happened, you might point the finger at the Qashqai (see Icon Drives #11, issue 1,775) – a car that blew away even Nissan’s own sales projections, spawned countless imitators and put us on track for the SUV-filled roads of today. But while the Qashqai undoubtedly popularised the idea of a ‘soft-roader’, such cars had already been kicking around for some time. And the first of them was the Toyota RAV4.
To understand what the RAV did so differently, you merely have to look
