2010 Honda Accord Crosstour EX-L AWD

The new Honda Accord Crosstour looks weird. Its nose is too long, its roofline a little too low, and the back-end comes from outer space, with no known automotive predecessor. If an elephant sat on an SUV, you might end up with something like the Crosstour. But weird is not necessarily bad.

The 2010 Crosstour is undeniably functional, the rear hatch having inserts that lets it be either a large cargo space or a traditional closed trunk. And once in the driver's seat, the car feels like a Honda Accord, until you look in the rear view mirror. With its horizontally bisected rear glass, the view out the back looks the same as in a Prius or Insight.

The Crosstour that we reviewed was in EX-L trim, with the surprising addition of all-wheel drive. As we drove it up a rocky embankment to position it for a photo shoot, it began to feel like a capable off-road vehicle, high enough from the ground not to bottom out on a ridge. With the Crosstour, Honda is stepping into Subaru's market, offering a car-like all-wheel driver with enough cabin room for weekend ski trips.

An Acura interface
In EX-L trim, the cabin features wood trim, leather seats, and generally soft plastics covering every surface. The effect falls a little short of luxury, but it is nicely done overall. Familiar to us from many drives in Acuras was the large knob in the center of the stack, below the navigation LCD. This knob works as a joystick and dial to make selections onscreen. The Crosstour dashboard and steering wheel also suffer from button overload, a disease caught from Acura as well.

Those would be, Honda speculated, folks beginning a family or folks whose kids have flown. Crosstour is intended to be their new best friend.

You're forgiven if you can't quite place the type of vehicle. Is it a coupe-ish, utility-ish, what-ish ... ?

No. It's a hatchback. Period.

It sits 2 inches higher off the ground than the Accord sedan on which it's based, for foul-weather and bad-road ground clearance, and it offers very basic all-wheel drive as an option.

It is what in the European market is called a five-door – a four-door sedan with a hatch making the fifth door. You can say the same about the BMW X6 or Honda's Acura ZDX. Remarkable, really, that after years of hatch rejection, the industry's inching back toward what's always been the best, most practical way to configure a sedan.

Besides the obvious – a sharply sloping roofline – Crosstour differs from the Accord sedan several ways: beefier grille, nifty blue instrument pointer lighting, 299 to 487 more pounds than similar Accord sedans, 2 inches wider than the sedan outside (though, strangely, an inch or so less inside). And it's the only Accord to offer AWD, though a more primitive type than, say, the Subaru Legacy provides.

The sloping rear roof makes the 2010 Accord Crosstour distinctive, unlike, say, the flat-roofed Toyota Venza based on the Camry sedan. But the styling is color-dependent. A white test car looked as if it had been eating bonbons on the couch all day. A dark gray tester looked trimmer.

The hatch is handier than a trunk, and space behind Crosstour's back seat is twice that of an Accord sedan trunk.

Honda's brought its best cargo-consciousness to the stowage area. Under-floor bins ape the feature in the Honda Ridgeline pickup. A big removable and washable center bin is flanked by two smaller ones. The covers of all three tubs can be reversed, offering carpet or a durable hard-plastic surface.

But there's no stash site for the covers if you overfill the bins. You have to leave them loose in the car or in your garage.

The all-wheel drive, which Honda calls Real Time, is like that on its Element and CR-V small SUVs. Mainly a front-drive system, it transfers some power to the back wheels when, and only when, the fronts slip, Honda says.