“Compared to how crazy the stuff is that’s happening in the tech world of cars, it’s bizarre how much they all look the same,” said Doug DeMuro, who hosts an excellent car review YouTube channel.

The sameness may be a product of a trend that has roiled the industry since the 1990s: the steady sales growth in SUVs and crossovers, the smaller cousins of SUVs that are built more like cars than trucks, and the decline of passenger vehicles, including sedans, hatchbacks and wagons.

Today the majority of vehicles sold in America are crossovers or SUVs, and pickups have also long been popular. Aesthetically, the pickups are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Even Ford’s new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the longtime best-selling vehicle in America, looks pretty much like every other pickup on the road.

The SUVs, and crossovers, meanwhile, come in two basic shapes: boxes and bubbles. The boxes are the SUVs, which range from huge (Jeep Grand Cherokee, Ford Explorer) to really huge (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition). The bubbles are the crossovers, whose sales have shot up over the past couple of decades.

Until a few years ago, the Toyota Camry sedan was the best-selling passenger car in the United States, a position it had held for nearly two decades. The Camry has since been dethroned by a bubble.

As of October, Toyota’s RAV-4 crossover was America’s best-selling nontruck passenger vehicle of the year. Honda’s similar-looking CR-V is just behind it. Automakers have been backing away from sedans. In 2018, Ford said it would stop making sedans for the US market.

Collectively, SUVs and crossovers will account for nearly 55 per cent of vehicles sold in America in 2021, according to Stephanie Brinley, an automotive analyst at the market research firm IHS Markit. Pickups are projected to make up an additional 18.4 per cent of the market. In other words, almost 3 out of every 4 passenger vehicles sold this year were trucks, crossovers or SUVs.

Same same but different

There are many forces pushing for sameness. Constraints imposed by safety regulations and aerodynamics have left car companies little room for experimental designs. The bigger constraint is what customers want — vehicles with roomy interiors that ride high, with the feel of a living room, or perhaps a throne.

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Brinley and others in the car industry expect consumer preferences to stick even as everything else about cars changes. A very popular Tesla vehicle is the Model Y, a pretty traditional-looking crossover.

When Ford decided to put up a strong rival to Tesla, it, too, went with a crossover: the new Mustang Mach-E, which looks much like the Model Y and nothing like any Mustang that Ford ever made before.

By 2025, Brinley predicts, SUVs and crossovers will account for 59 per cent of sales, and pickups almost 20 per cent — meaning that 4 out of every 5 cars sold will be pickups, bubbles or boxes.

I have written often of my love-hate relationship with cars. I love cars as products; I hate them as infrastructure. I love watching the car industry for its dynamism, its technological innovation and the way it has anticipated and altered the public’s aesthetic preferences; I hate the industry for the way it has dominated politics and urban planning, for the way it has billed its products as a necessary part of modern life.

But every year the product side of cars offers less to love. The industry’s biggest innovations are now driven by Silicon Valley — by advances in batteries, cameras, networks and artificial intelligence.

Cars are growing brains, and I’m glad for it. I just wish they weren’t also losing heart, soul and personality.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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