In the 2012 Crosstour, Honda attempts to blend the qualities of a car with those of an SUV. What it created is a practical, comfortable wagon that still falls short of SUV versatility.
Honda fell even shorter in its visual design: The Crosstour looks like a boat in search of an ocean.
Exterior
The Crosstour stands out in a crowd, mostly because of its size. "It's a big car" is a phrase more than one person used to describe it. It stands taller than most cars, and it also seems a bit wider and longer than anything around it. If you're not used to a larger car, it might be challenging to park the Crosstour; it's even longer than you think it is. After a week in the car I was still leaving too much of the rear end hanging into the parking aisle.
Speaking of the rear end, the most tasteful way I can describe it is to say it's the Crosstour's ugliest feature. The rear overhang (the distance between the wheels and the bumper) is unbelievably long, and the body has a great deal of height, leading to a roofline that's so high Honda had to use one of those split rear windows.
If Honda were somehow able to trim that area down or sculpt it a bit more, the Crosstour would be a much better-looking vehicle, but I suspect that would cut down on the car's best feature: its usefulness.
Practicality
Some vehicles are large on the outside and surprisingly cramped on the inside. The Crosstour is not one of those cars.
There's a lot of room in the driver's area, and it feels open in there. A lot of cars have high doorsills, narrow windshields or bulky center consoles that make me feel wedged into the car. Not the Crosstour. Backseat room is also quite good: At 6-foot-1, I had plenty of legroom and didn't feel like my knees were thrust up too high. It's important to note, however, that the backseat doesn't adjust forward and back, as some do.
The cargo area is a deep bay. What's odd is that it narrows sharply as it goes back — more so than the cargo area in, say, an SUV. The Crosstour will excel at carrying things like grocery bags, but not wide items.
Further, sticking within the Honda family, you can see that the Crosstour has less overall space than the compact CR-V SUV and much less than the midsize Pilot SUV.
While the cargo area isn't the largest, it's low enough that shorter people won't struggle to lift items into the rear. Neither is it so low that it will be a pain for taller folks.
The Crosstour did a good job of carrying some of our editors' children. Check the photos to see how the Crosstour performed in our Car Seat Check.
A hidden cargo box in the Crosstour's floor is a useful feature. Plenty of cars provide an area under the cargo floor to store things, but Honda took it a step further by adding a box that pops out and has built-in handles. Honda says the box is water-resistant, and I can see it being a handy place to store muddy shoes and other things I eventually have to carry into the house.
Finally, Honda deserves praise for making a backup camera standard for 2012 (though you could also say it deserves scorn for waiting so long to do it). That's because rear visibility in the Crosstour is really poor. That's not just because of the split window; the rear glass is also very narrow. I relied on the camera more than I have in any other car, and I'd go so far as to say it's a necessity here.
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