Honda has announced plans to deep-six the offbeat Crosstour crossover at the end of the current model year.
Née Accord Crosstour, Honda’s segment-defying crossover was introduced in late 2009 as a 2010 model. It was considerably more expensive than the Accord that it shared its basic platform with and its styling was a love-it-or-hate-it affair, which quickly put a damper on sales.
About two years into the production run, Honda gave the crossover a facelift, added a more efficient 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine to the lineup, reduced the MSRP by about $500 and called it simply Crosstour in a bid to differentiate it from the Accord once and for all. However, the updates were too little, too late, and the Crosstour never lived up to Honda’s expectations.
Slow sales are only part of the story. Honda openly admits that retiring the Crosstour will free up much-needed production capacity in its East Liberty, Ohio, factory. Additionally, production of the Accord Hybrid will shift from the Marysville Auto Plant to Sayama, Japan, in the near future.
With the Crosstour out of the picture, the East Liberty plant will focus on building lucrative crossovers like the hot-selling CR-V, the Acura RDX and, starting in early 2017, the MDX. Meanwhile, the Marysville Auto Plant will exclusively assemble popular cars like both the two- and the four-door versions of the Accord as well as Acura’s TLX and ILX.
It goes without saying that Honda is not planning on launching a successor to the Crosstour in the near future.
The end of the Crosstour’s production run does not come as a surprise. The Acura ZDX – essentially a re-badged Crosstour – was axed at the end of the 2013 model year, and rival Toyota recently came to a similar conclusion about the half-wagon, half-crossover segment when it announced that it would stop selling the Venza in the United States next June.
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