The easiest mistake for an auto journalist to make is to treat every vehicle like a sports car and review it as such. Minivans aren’t sports cars, and few things irritate readers like a reviewer complaining about steering feel and 0–60 times for a car designed to haul children to soccer practice. A compact SUV isn’t a sports car, either, and shouldn’t be reviewed like one—unless it’s the new Dodge Hornet.
As a rule, reviewers need to put themselves in the shoes of the person who’s going to buy the vehicle in question. If you ask Dodge, it’s the kind of person who cares about having the quickest, most powerful, toughest-looking car in the class—even if that’s the same class as the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Dodge doesn’t talk about those, though. Dodge wants to focus on the Mazda CX-5, the only model with any real sportiness in the segment. Mazda has downplayed its performance heritage in recent years, though, while Dodge plans to scream it from
