We want it all.
Now that SUVs and crossovers have conquered America’s roads and driveways (and mall parking lots, and Starbucks drive-thru lines, and everywhere else), we’re expecting them to handle as well as the cars they’ve vanquished, too.
Can they? No. And precisely for the reasons you’re liking them. That great bird’s-eye view that comes from an elevated driver’s perch—raising the center of gravity—is arsenic for handling. Nevertheless, car engineers are optimistic, never-give-up types. They’ve been beavering away to mitigate these negatives. Last year, we broached the question of whether an SUV can handle as well as a sedan in a deep-dive comparison of a representative classical sedan and its new crossover alternative, starring the outgoing Chevrolet Malibu and the incoming Blazer.
After measuring the bejeezus out of these two at the Honda Proving Center test facility near Mojave, the Blazer came within spitting distance of the Malibu’s measured handling. I was honestly surprised. But with a big caveat: The Malibu that arrived at the track was in its vanilla LT trim, while the Blazer was donned in sportier RS garb.
An early lesson for us, then: If you’re after handling from your crossover, do not buy the bread-and-butter version. Scrape together the extra scratch and step up to a trim that has letters like S or GT glued on the back. Or perhaps letters like … MACAN or CAYENNE or BMW, but we’ll get to that. The most obvious response to “What are the best-handling crossovers?” would be to just list the ones with the highest lateral acceleration (cornering grip) captured from our figure-eight testing. OK, let’s do that.
Sorting our database for model years 2018 to now, only 14 out of 231 SUVs we’ve tested are capable of cornering at 0.90 g’s or more (0.6 percent). Fourteen SUVs that can corner as well as our Car of the Year-winning Genesis G70 2.0T sedan. That speaks to how grip-challenged crossovers are. In fact, only one—the Lamborghini Urus—cracks 1.00 g (1.01), and three of the 13 remainders are Porsches (a Macan S and both the Cayenne and a Cayenne Turbo).
On the list below, we might further yellow-highlight the Lambo and the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio as two SUVs that were further honored by being nominated into our annual Best Driver’s Car competition, where they’ve faced the opinion of driving Zen Master Randy Pobst on the big, bright stage called WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
So there’s your list if your zip code is in Newport Beach and your alarm is usually set for 5 a.m. to watch the European rounds of Formula 1.
Well, sort of.
Sort of, because sheer grip and driving-gloves handling aren’t the same things. Virtually all lateral-g numbers produced by crossovers are misleading because their stability control systems artificially limit cornering grip to well below what their tires are capable of—masking how they feel at their limits.
The severity of stability control’s fun-killing software varies quite a bit. And it’s only possible to semi-defeat them (if at all). Indeed, there are very few instances where an SUV’s limit cornering resembles our classical expectation of “great handling.” But there are a couple of exceptions: Every time I finish figure-eighting a Porsche Cayenne or a Macan, it’s a tradition to walk over to road test teammates Chris Walton and Erick Ayapana and repeat these words: “Now that’s how an SUV should handle. Every other car maker in the world should stop wasting time and just copy these things.” I no longer even have to say it. I just raise my eyebrows, and they nod.
That the vast majority of crossovers are paralyzed in the figure eight’s corners—some seeming to slow so much that I feel like I could get out and run next to them—happens for a very good reason. Stability control saves a whole lot of lives. I’ve been luridly sliding around handling courses for 40 years; it’s a freak job that rarely raises my heartrate. But 99.9 percent of folks out on the road, those who are regularly backing into shopping carts, aren’t interested in understeer or oversteer. They want it to just steer—safely, predictably, and accurately, without drawing attention to itself—from home to work and back, every day. As dull and simplistic as that sounds, that’s probably the most fundamental filter for “good handling.”
Which leads me to another, very different list from a very different test, which I think is a more meaningful.
For the past few years, we’ve been quietly running all our car, SUV, and truck candidates through a double-lane-change maneuver. The list of the swerved and slewed is now a couple of hundred vehicles long (and my right arm still twinges a little with tennis elbow from twirling the steering wheels of this year’s duallie trucks).
Unlike with the figure eight, stability control is left on, just like when you back out of your driveway and into your chaotic daily life. The test is what it sounds like: The cone-marked lane is 12 feet wide, and you have 50 feet to suddenly swerve left into another lane, then, 50 feet later, veer back again into the original one within another 50 feet. Think of a avoiding a dropped ladder (or a kid chasing a wayward football) in your lane, then having to scurry back because of oncoming traffic. Adding the entry and exit shoots makes this a 250-foot course that I usually approach at 50-55 mph in cars and 45-50 in SUV/crossovers. Do narrower cars benefit from these dimensions? Yes. Just as they do in the real world.
And isn’t the element of surprise lost by knowing what’s coming? Well, I did just set up the cones, but how quick I am through this (I’m a constant) absolutely represents the car’s athleticism. Last year, I was reminded of stability control’s importance in an actual emergency when I jinked a Toyota Corolla into the first lane change—with the stability control system accidentally switched off—and immediately lost control. While spinning, I was thinking, “Wow, just a few lines of software code is literally saving people’s lives.” Don’t turn off stability control.
After each vehicle’s initial swerve, stability control leaps into action by backing off the throttle to slow the car and strategically caresses individual brakes to prevent the car from rotating too much. You’d need the reactions of The Flash to do all this adjusting manually.
Not all vehicles’ systems behave the same way. Some intervene too feebly to coerce a heavy or under-tired crossover to return to the original lane without sending our barrier cones flying. That means a slower speed is necessary to avoid a collision. Others slam on the brakes or pulse them so violently that it’s distracting (and probably alarming to most drivers who are suddenly scared by this, too). And there’s some that slow the car too much, too soon, leaving you a sitting duck, exposed in the opposite-traffic lane.
The best systems decelerate and brake subtly, keeping the crossover just shy enough of its grip limit to retain steering authority, letting you follow the path accurately. (The analysis of the GPS-tracked path has a tight limit on how far off the prescribed path you can be.)
So here’s Version 2 of our list of Best-Handling Crossovers, sampled from this year’s SUV of the Year contestants. The results are in seconds—the average of multiple runs—lowest obviously being best. Note that none of the vehicles on the list above has been subjected to this lane-change test, so while they’d probably also rank high on this list, we can’t say for certain. We’ll soon take a look at a complete chronological list once more SUVs have taken this test; think of this as a preview of coming attractions.
There’s a BMW at the top, a heavy electric crossover that’s amusingly second, and a Cayenne further down. Curiously, a series of Fords are at the bottom, but Lincolns are near the top. And note that this time, there are some more affordable choices higher on this list.
So what’s our verdict here? Think of the first list as the best “fun” handling crossovers, the second one as the safest handling. Me? I’d pick one that scores well in both (or just buy a Cayenne if I could). Because you never know when evasive action might be more of a priority than carving a corner.
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