Really though, a wagon checks all of the boxes an SUV does other than the need to be bigger and higher
Room for the kids, the cargo, and the dog. Decent interior. Good ride quality.
I have been needing to tow an excavator for the past few months. Renting a truck to haul the excavator back and forth gets extremely expensive, like $200 per day for just the truck, not counting the trailer or the excavator itself.
Making tools, like a vehicle that can haul, more expensive just hurts middle class DIYers. This entire thread is basically people saying "other people don't need to own big nice things, only rich people should be allowed to do that".
Edit: I've seen exactly zero SUVs pulling trailers in my life though. Mini vans, yes. Trucks, yes (wish they were cheaper). SUVs, somehow I'm not seeing them. Everybody I know with an SUV considers it a car.
Towing though, sometimes I wonder if we're just too cautious. It doesn't take a Ford F-teen-thousand to pull a little something.
Before SUVs were everywhere, cars could tow. Admittedly, old trucks weren't near as capable as new trucks, and some of those old cars were just different bodies on truck frames.
A Jetta with a trailer is pretty standard around the Irish country side, I'm told. I've seen people pull 1000s of pounds behind a 2000 VW Jetta, which is a pretty small car. I'm not saying it'd pull that excavator, but I've seen a dump trailer on one.
I tried to find some towing capacity numbers for my 2013 diesel Golf Sportwagen. Some places say 3500lbs for a braked load. I found a lot of "not recommended for towing" in North America.
Did they build the Euro version better? Some safety standard that holds back the US? Maybe it is lawyers?
These terms are not fixed and not mutually exclusive.
I’ve always considered wagons to be based on sedans and with the same length as the sedan but with the trunk expanded into an open cargo area with a hatch/door.
A hatchback is similar but typically, the cargo area is shorter than the sedan and often the hatch is less vertical and contains less space.
An SUV was originally designed like a wagon but built on a truck platform and typically given 4WD.
A CUV is generally a tall wagon build on a sedan/hatchback chassis.
A crossover is more vaguely defined but is built on a sedan chassis with expanded cargo space but less boxy than a wagon and typically only slightly taller than a sedan. A lot a vehicles that are sometimes called SUVs would really fall into the crossover category (Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ionic 5)
