Ground Shakers III: Upending the Segment
Your humble author is going to stick with one more of these entries, a sum which he feels is about all his Managing Editor will tolerate before siccing dogs from the offices of Downtown Canada on my doorstep. Still, there is plenty of content on the subject. I’ll try to slide another one in later on down the road.
A reminder of where we are. It doesn’t happen every year but, on occasion, a new vehicle shows up and so completely rewrites the rulebook for its segment that its competition is left talking to itself and scrambling to come up with the Next Big Thing.
Perhaps the vehicle is a wholesale quantum leap over the old one. Or maybe it is something so far ahead of its rivals that it wins buff book comparison tests until the laggards finally come up with something better. Either way, there is a list of these things throughout history - and we’ve been profiling them in posts like this over the last couple of days.
[Images: Lexus, Dodge, BMW]
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1999 Lexus RX
Our list to date has included a host of luminaries. The 1994 Dodge Ram, 1986 Ford Taurus, 1991 Lexus SC occupied our first list while the 1997 Ford F-150, 1991 Ford Explorer, and 1984 Dodge Caravan / Plymouth Voyager showed up on the latter. Each of them took their respective segments to school or invented completely new ones. Today we find the 1999 Lexus RX, a vehicle arguably responsible for the current glut of luxurious compact crossovers which line school drop-off zones and golf course parking lots across the nation.
1999 Lexus RX
Previewed at the 1997 Chicago Auto Show and hitting dealer lots in America later in the next calendar year, this was a vehicle which hit the nail on the head and showed up at exactly the right time. By the late ‘90s, Lexus was seen as a very aspirational brand and the spectre of a unibody vehicle with the trifecta of a Lexus badge, tall ride height, and sumptuous cabin turned into a license to print money. No wonder the model is still around today, nearly 30 model years later.
1993 Dodge Intrepid
As the calendar flipped into the ‘90s, Chrysler was once again staring down a financial burp just as it did barely a decade prior. The K platform, which had saved the company, now underpinned just about everything it made - from compact cars to minivans to large sedans. While the vans were doing gangbuster sales, machines like the upright Dodge Dynasty didn’t exactly keep Honda Accord salesmen up at night.
1993 Dodge Intrepid
That changed when its replacement, the Dodge Intrepid, appeared with its ‘cab forward’ styling and enormous interiors. It’s easy to look back through the lens of time and pillory the LH cars for their various and sundry quality problems - but in 1993 they represented a huge departure from cars like the Dynasty, putting the Taurus on notice and even causing a few Accord/Camry customers to turn their heads.
E30 M3
Nerdy gearheads will natter on about the ‘E30’, an internal chassis code used by BMW to denote its then-new 3 Series range of cars. In particular, the M3, which was released across the pond as a 1986 model, pushed some of its German competitors to tweak their own small sedans to create the type of segment which we enjoy today.
E30 M3
This generation was intended to be a homologation special, satisfying rules for series like Group A and DTM. About 5,300 units were reported to be brought stateside during its run. These days, most luxury brands have an entrant of this type: Cadillac CT4V/CT5V, Audi S3, Mercedes-Benz C 43, and hot variants of the soon-departed Lexus IS.
