Still The King Of SUVs

The new Honda CR-V might not get everyone’s pulse racing, but neither will it send your blood pressure through the roof by dropping you in the dwang. It’s this reliability that’s made the CR-V one of the most popular SUVs ever.

- Pierre Steyn

After the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, a self-pitying President John F. Kennedy declared: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”. At the other end of the success-spectrum, people queue up to claim that they are the inventor of something spectacular… like the internet. Even a guy like Al Gore, who nearly became American president, boldly claimed that he was the father of the World Wide Web.

The same goes for car manufacturers that seemingly take turns to claim that it was their company that put the first SUV on the market 20 or 30 years ago. This parental possessiveness boils down to the success of the SUV segment, the only one that seems to be growing in a struggling economy.

These days every manufacturer has an SUV, even ultra-luxury brands such as Lamborghini and Bentley have built one. It surely doesn’t matter if you were the first to sell an SUV in 1989, 1991 or 1995; what matters now is how many you can sell.

And it’s here where the fourth-generation Honda CR-V has been crowned as the world’s most popular SUV, selling 9 million cars in 150 countries in little more than four years.

It’s not a flashy car, but it’s a reliable all-rounder that’s safe, cheap to run, built to last, and has good resale value. Now there’s a brand new fifth generation in the market. We chose a wet day in the Western Cape to find out if Honda was silly to mess with a winning concept. The short answer is no, they didn’t – and here’s why

On the outside