Deafening silence. Open secret. Jumbo shrimp. Icy hot. All are examples of a particular rhetorical quirk known as the oxymoron. A generation ago, you could have added “sporty SUV” to that list, as the only thing sporty about, say, a Jeep Wrangler was the sunburn you got after a day of creeping along the trails with the roof and doors removed.
Then the world, and Americans in particular, went insane for SUVs. Like any time you can charge more for something that already exists, automakers realized making sporty SUVs and crossovers meant extra dollars in the sum columns. A genre was born, and performance-oriented SUVs are now more popular than ever. So much so, even the Toyota RAV4 Prime gets a sporty variant, the XSE. For today’s comparison test, Toyota’s bestseller takes on the brand-new Dodge Hornet R/T.
What on earth is a Dodge Hornet, you might ask? If you read our first story about the car in our August issue, you might recall how we described the type
