The minivan dilemma: It is the least cool vehicle ever designed, yet the most useful. Offering the best value for the most function to a plurality of American drivers, a minivan can cart seven passengers or more in comfort if not style, haul more cargo than many larger trucks, and do so for a sticker price roughly a quarter cheaper than competing options. Even so, minivan sales have been falling steadily since their peak in 2000, when about 1.3 million were sold in the United States. As of last year, that figure is down by about 80 percent. Once sold in models from more than a dozen manufacturers, the minivan market now amounts to four, one each from Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and Kia.
On account of the dilemma, a minivan is typically purchased under duress. If you live in a driving city, and especially if you have a family, a minivan conversation will eventually take place. Your older, cooler car—perhaps your Mini Cooper or your spouse’s Honda CR-V—will prove unfit for present purposes. Costco cargo, loads of mulch, sports equipment, and holiday loot all need a place to go. The same is true of car seats, which now are recommended for children as old as 7. And so, before too long: “Maybe we should get a minivan.”
This phrase is uttered with an air of resignation. The minivan was popular, but it was never cool, not even in its youth, during the 1980s. Now it’s middle-aged: The first of its type came out in ’83, which makes the minivan an elder Millennial, and it’s no more attuned than your average 41-year-old to recent trends. But why, exactly, has it earned so much derision through the years? And why was the minivan replaced, almost altogether, by the SUV?
The minivan arrived, way back when, as a savior. When Chrysler, under the former Ford chief Lee Iacocca’s direction, first conceived of the design in the late 1970s, Americans who wanted room to cart more kids and goods had only a couple of options. One was the land-yacht-style station wagon, perhaps in avocado green with faux-wood paneling. Lots of kids could pile onto its bench and jump seats, while the rear storage, accessible by hatch, allowed for easy loading. These cars were somewhat functional, but they didn’t seem that safe. The suburban family’s other choice was the full-size van—a big, boxy transport or utility vehicle. The gas for these was also pricey, and their aesthetic felt unsuited to domesticity. By cultural consensus, vans were made for plumbers, kidnappers, or ex–Special Forces domestic mercenaries.
Chrysler’s minivan would steer clear of those two dead ends, and carry American families onto the open roads toward, well, youth soccer and mall commerce. It really did bring innovation: ample seating organized in rows with easy access, the ability to stow those seats in favor of a large cargo bay, a set of sliding doors, and smaller features that had not been seen before, such as the modern cupholder. And it offered all that at an affordable price with decent fuel economy.
Pickup was quick. In the first year after introducing them, Chrysler sold 210,000 Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers, its initial two models. Overall minivan sales reached 700,000 by the end of the decade, as the station wagon all but disappeared. But the new design also generated stigma: As the child of the station wagon and the service van, the minivan quickly came to represent the family you love but must support, and also transport. In a nation where cars stood in for power and freedom, the minivan would mean the opposite. As a vehicle, it symbolized the burdens of domestic life.
That stigma only grew with time. In 1996, Automobile magazine called this backlash “somewhat understandable,” given that the members of my generation, who were at that point young adults, had “spent their childhoods strapped into the backseat of one.” Perhaps it was childhood itself that seemed uncool, rather than the car that facilitated it. In any case, minivans would soon be obsolesced by sport utility vehicles. The earliest SUVs were more imposing than they are today: hard-riding trucks with 4×4 capabilities, such as the Chevrolet Suburban and the Jeep Wagoneer. These were as big as or even bigger than the plumber-kidnapper vans of the 1970s, and they got terrible gas mileage, cost a lot of money, and were hard to get in or out of, especially if you were very young or even slightly old. Yet the minivan’s identity had grown toxic, and for suburban parents, the SUV played into the fantasy of being somewhere else, or doing something better.
The SUV’s promise was escape from the very sort of family life that the minivan had facilitated. In 2003, The New York Times’ John Tierney recounted how the new class of vehicles had taken over. “The minivan became so indelibly associated with suburbia that even soccer moms shunned it,” he explained. “Soon image-conscious parents were going to soccer games in vehicles designed to ford Yukon streams and invade Middle Eastern countries.” At the same time, the SUVs themselves were changing. The minivan had been built from parts and designs for a car, not a van. SUV manufacturers followed suit, until their vehicles were no longer burly trucks so much as carlike vehicles that rode higher off the ground and had a station-wagon-style cargo bay. Few even had more seats than a sedan. As the early minivans were to vans, so were these downsized SUVs to the 4x4s that came before them.
Functionally, the minivan is still the better option. It is cheaper to buy and operate, with greater cargo space and more seating and headroom. Still, these benefits are overshadowed by the minivan’s dreary semiotics. Manufacturers have tried to solve that problem. When my family reached the “Maybe we should get a minivan” milestone, I noticed that some models of the Chrysler Pacifica now offered, for a premium, blacked-out chrome grills and rims. But to buy a poseur “sport van,” or whatever I was meant to call this try-hard, cooler version of the uncool minivan, struck me as an even sadder choice.
Beyond such minor mods, the industry hasn’t really done that much to shake away the shame from the minivan’s design. I suspect that any fix would have to be applied at the level of its DNA. The minivan was the offspring of the wagon and the van. To be reborn, another pairing must occur—but with what? Little differentiation is left in the passenger-vehicle market. Nearly all cars have adopted the SUV format, a shoe-shaped body with four swinging doors and a hatch, and true 4x4s have been all but abandoned. Perhaps the minivan could be recrossed with the boxy utility van, which seems ready for its own revival. This year, Volkswagen will begin selling a new electric version of its microbus, one of the few direct precursors to the minivan that managed to retain an association with the counterculture despite taking on domestic functions.
However it evolves, the minivan will still be trammeled by its fundamental purpose. It is useful because it offers benefits for families, and it is uncool because family life is thought to be imprisoning. That logic cannot be overcome by mere design. In the end, the minivan dilemma has more to do with how Americans think than what we drive. Families, or at least vehicles expressly designed for them, turned out to be lamentable. We’d prefer to daydream about fording Yukon streams instead.