AS ONLY DODGE COULD DO IT

COMPACT CROSSOVERS DON'T SELL ON SPORTINESS, BUT DON'T TRY TO TELL DODGE THAT

- SCOTT EVANS

The easiest mistake for an auto journalist to make is to treat every vehicle like a sports car and review it as such. Minivans aren’t sports cars, and few things irritate readers like a reviewer complaining about steering feel and 0–60 times for a car designed to haul children to soccer practice. A compact SUV isn’t a sports car, either, and shouldn’t be reviewed like one—unless it’s the new Dodge Hornet.

As a rule, reviewers need to put themselves in the shoes of the person who’s going to buy the vehicle in question. If you ask Dodge, it’s the kind of person who cares about having the quickest, most powerful, toughest-looking car in the class—even if that’s the same class as the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Dodge doesn’t talk about those, though. Dodge wants to focus on the Mazda CX-5, the only model with any real sportiness in the segment. Mazda has downplayed its performance heritage in recent years, though, while Dodge plans to scream it from dealership rooftops.

Really, what else was it going to do? Dodge has spent years reinventing itself as a blue-collar, all-American performance brand. Everything else it builds is available with a Hellcat V-8. It’s too late to change direction now, especially when the CEO of parent company Stellantis has given every brand a limited amount of time to justify its existence. Dodge hasn’t had an all-new vehicle since the Dart and hasn’t had an all-new SUV since the Journey. It needs a car that’ll sell in volume, and the compact SUV segment is red-hot. Plus, you know, Alfa Romeo did all the legwork and had some extra capacity on the Tonale’s assembly line.