All my life I’ve only ever owned sedans. Now I own a Honda CR-V and while I realize it’s basically an SUV body on a car chassis, I still refer to it as my “car” even though I could probably legitimately call it a “truck.”
So I’m curious. Poll to follow.
When I was working on cars professionally back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, my coworkers would call anything that had a full frame (and wasn’t a Crown Vic or some old land yacht) a truck and anything with a unibody was a car. Your CRV definitely would have been a car. I’ve sort of stuck with the convention, even though now it’s complicated with vehicles like the Honda Ridgeline or the current Pathfinder that are still beefy offroaders but don’t have full frames.
Oh, and my SUV is an old full frame Isuzu, so truck it is.
The Durango. Otherwise, “SUV”.
That’s the family truckster, though. I do call my Jetta the “car”.
Jeep.
Probably not helpful but I just call mine a Jeep, because its a Jeep.
I never liked the name ‘truck’ for SUV’s. Trucks have dedicated cargo beds in my mind and SUV’s do not or at least not any more than cars do. I prefer the term car or SUV.
The biggest dilemma I have very faced with this type of problem was when my grandfather drove an El Camino. He called it a truck. I called bullshit but not for any reason I could put my finger on. I ended up comprising and called it a ‘cruck’.
I still contend that, despite the best efforts of Jeep’s owners over the years, you call your Jeep a jeep because it’s a jeep, not because it’s a Jeep.
A Jeep Wrangler is a jeep. A Jeep Cherokee is not.
“Bob”.
Gertrude
I don’t have one now but when I did I called it a truck.
Both were trackers and I wanted to call the first one a jeep, because it looked like a jeep even though it wasn’t.
I called them trucks because they sat higher than a car, and had 4wd.
I vary between car and truck.
I don’t own an SUV, but to their faces I always call other people’s SUVs trucks. Perhaps that’s from growing up in Texas, where people would get upset if you called their F150 or Suburban a car. So, in order to be polite and not offend, I always refer to that unibody “mini-van in everything but marketing glurge” as a truck. For the same reason, I’ll always call someones mini-van just “van”, unless I’m deliberately teasing.
Despite being nominated as truck of the year, I can’t quite bring myself to call the Mini Countryman a truck. I followed a friend’s lead, and refer to his Countryman as a car, because that’s what he calls it. If he’d called it a truck, I might have mentioned that it was cutest lil’ truck I’d ever seen.
So if it has a bed, regardless of the vehicle size, it’s a truck. If it’s the classic upright SUV shape, from RAV4/CRV to Escalade/G-wagen, it’s still a truck. The crossover car sized things that are really just station wagons or hatch backs such as the Mazda CX-5, Countryman, older model Subaru Foresters, etc. I’m going to call a car.
I voted car, though occassionally I’ll use SUV. I never refer to it as a truck, even though it’s built on a truck chassis.
Suv. One syllable, like luv.
“The Jeep” (it belongs to my wife, and it’s a Grand Cherokee with the awesome, bulletproof 4.0 inline 6).
Never “truck” or “SUV,” maybe “car” occasionally as in “I’ll go get the car and pick you guys up at the door” but almost always “the Jeep.”
Wife has a Grand Jeep. I have a Pathfinder. I think it’s usualy ‘your car’ or ‘my car’.
We usually call it the Element, but generically it’s a car.
I had a LUV truck.
It was my first vehicle, graduation/birthday present.
It cost $2013.
My uncle called it a Tonka toy.
I’m the same way (I have a Cherokee).
