> 10 years ago you would have bought a family van.
Fellow European here, we don't have kids but we were thinking at maybe getting a second dog, which made me look for a possible car replacement (we now have a 15+ year-old small hatchback). After some searching and calculating I found out that the "usefulness" of cars for my purported task (to transport two dogs in the back) can be summarized like this (in decreasing order): vans -> station wagons/estates -> SUVs/CUVs.
Unfortunately vans are on their out, I can't really understand the reason why (the VW Sharan will cease production this year, Ford C-Max ceased production back in 2019 etc), station wagons are also not feeling good, almost every car company is betting the house on SUVs/CUVs, which is a trend I don't like at all, because you get to pay more money for less utility.
I don’t know what kind of van you have in mind but there are plenty of vans in the US that are actually more powerful and heavy than a SUV. A Chrysler Voyager has 100 more hp and weighs about 900 lbs more than a Forester.
The vans don't pretend to be built for off-road, so they have better steering and lower gas mileage (both due to lower suspention and to lower weight).
Is this true? The van mentioned, the Chrysler Voyager, gets about 22mpg. The Subaru Forester (mentioned elsewhere as an example SUV) gets about 28mpg. The Forrester is about 3600 pounds, vs. 4300 pounds for the Voyager.
The vans made by US companies for US markets are gas guzzlers, but the ones made for other markets are better. For example, Ford S-Max sold in Poland gets 37 mpg, and is larger than the Forester.
Looked into this a bit. S-Max is a hybrid minivan, so gas mileage won't compare with Forester, but otherwise, they seem oddly identical.
S-Max vs. Forester
Curb weight: 3626 lbs vs. 3620
Mileage: 44 mpg vs. 30 mpg
Cargo: 77.69 cubic feet vs. 74.2 cubic feet
So about 6 pounds heavier and 4 cubic feet more space than the Forester. It would be interesting if we had a hybrid Forester to compare with, but that doesn't seem to exist (yet).
Also looked into U.S. vans being gas guzzlers. A comparable vehicle in the U.S. is the Toyota Sienna, since it's a hybrid minivan. It's 4700 pounds, gets 36 mpg (vs. 44 for S-Max), but has 101 cubic feet of cargo space, which is 1/3 more than the S-Max. Seems to correlate well with weight, which makes sense.
Based on this, my (current) take is that mid-size SUVs in the U.S. are equivalent to these smaller minivans elsewhere, and U.S. minivans are a bit larger and heavier than that.
