The second thing to note is that Honda has kept the CR-V in this style for a long, long time. The CR-V on sale at this moment is the fifth generation of CR-V, which debuted back in late 2016 in Detroit but not at the city’s annual auto show. I think the reason for the sideshow fanfare was that the new CR-V looked pretty much identical to the one before it, the fourth-gen.
Photo: Honda
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In turn, the fourth-gen only looked like a revised version of the third-gen CR-V, the one that had the false roofline and an underbite. That CR-V went on sale in 2006, so we’re nearly a decade and a half into the history of the CR-V looking plain bad.