#701 Ambi-Valent

So I saw this ad recently and it struck me as a little odd. I like to think I’m up on new products and product categories but I admit, this one kind of snuck up on me like a Prius on a blind man. It’s a new car type. Not car—type of car.
Used to be you could pretty much count on a sedan, a coupe, or a station wagon. Then vans came along. Then mini-vans for smaller people.
Mini-vans, with all their luxuriant touches, were the gilded and gelded version of the shag carpet-enriched “If this van is rockin don’t bother knockin” vans of the 70s.
After that, everyone decided they wanted to look like they could drive off-road and the SUV took hold of America’s automotive awareness. Even though the sad truth was the most “off road” any of them got was when suburban housewives accidentally took a shortcut through the neighbor’s landscaping after drinking one too many Long Island Iced Teas at a bunco gathering.
The ad that finally shook my brain up enough to notice this new category was for a Buick Enclave. Enclave, as in, I guess, a closed society. Right there you got a cliquish snob appeal thing going. But then the tag line said it was “...the finest luxury crossover ever.”
And that’s the new category. A crossover.
Now set aside for a moment that the word crossover, a practical functional type of word, clashes with the word luxury, which pretty much sums up unpractical and non-functional.
Luxury crossover sounds a little oxymoronic. Like camouflaged high-heeled pumps.
But the word “crossover” itself... It’s like some metro-sexual description; maybe someone who recently decided on dressing like the other gender or perhaps making the whole thing surgically permanent.
At the very least, it implies a little bit of traitorism. Oh yeah, he’s counting on the crossover vote to get his bill passed. Ohio delivered the crossover voters for the republicans.
Or it’s like the new I-can’t-decide-what-sport-I-want-to-do shoes—cross trainers.
Metro-sexual? Ambivalent? Or just indecisive, hesitant and vacillating?
Finally, a car category most everyone can more or less sort of think about. The crossover.
America, ya gotta love it.