Subaru The 2026 Subaru Crosstrek is, by most accounts, a perfectly good commuter vehicle. It's small enough to feel versatile on the road, big enough to qualify as practical, quite affordable starting at $28,415 (including $1,420 for destination), and its symmetrical Subaru all-wheel drive and slightly lifted nature mean it holds its own on a trail or in the snow. As part of its annual Top Picks program, Consumer Reports went as far as naming it as the best Subcompact SUV this year, citing a notably comfortable ride "even during off-pavement excursions" as well as easy ingress and egress on account of that raised suspension. A new, 36-mpg Hybrid variant was introduced this year, which surely contributed to its Top Pick-worthiness and general consumer appeal. But having driven the Crosstrek and finding it shares little with actual, honest-to-god utility vehicles, some in our newsroom raised the question — can you really call it a "subcompact SUV?" It's a lifted Impreza, actually Subaru Depending on where you look, Subaru's own literature calls the Crosstrek a "compact SUV" or "compact crossover SUV," but we should note that not everything an automaker's marketing department says should be taken as gospel. Ferrari, for example, likes to solve the opposite optics problem by refusing to call the Purosangue an SUV at all. Some may call it a subcompact crossover, others feel compact crossover is more fitting. Those who prefer more honest categorizations when it comes to cars, though, might even call it a lifted hatch –or just a car, essentially. Subaru probably likes that last group the least, but mechanically, they wouldn't be wrong. Despite what its black plastic cladding and rugged-adjacent name might have you believe, the Crosstrek is functionally little more than an Impreza RS with an extra 3.6 inches of ground clearance. Other than that, they have very similar exterior and interior designs, ride on the same platform with the same wheelbase, and use the same 2.5-liter flat-4 making the same 180 horsepower. It's not just Subaru Mazda To be fair to Subaru, the Crosstrek is far from the only compact hatchback with a lift going around calling itself an SUV. Its whole segment of peers in the "subcompact crossover" class basically consists of just that. The Mazda CX-30 is essentially a taller Mazda 3, and the Toyota Corolla Cross is, as its name suggests, a crossover-ized Corolla. Even if you accept the SUV moniker here, there's still the question of subcompact versus compact. The Impreza, Mazda 3, and Corolla on which these things are based are pretty definitively classified as compact cars (the subcompact class below it is practically extinct in America now that the Nissan Versa is discontinued). So why does the size classification suddenly switch to subcompact once they're turned into crossovers? Was it a conscious, calculated choice to compensate for consumers' inflated size expectations once you call something an SUV? Or did one person erroneously call them that one day, it caught on, and now we've collectively been living a lie? Or have we all just quietly agreed that words don't matter and modern car classifications are mostly based on vibes? What say you? What do you call this type of vehicle?