Random: The Honda CR-V Is 30 Years Old

Welcome to Random, a series at Car Throttle where we bring you the stories nobody looks for, but turn out to be oddly interesting

You probably don’t think about the Honda CR-V much. Even if you’ve got one. It’s a car that’s designed to be just that – a car – especially since it’s gradually morphed from a boxy, semi-capable ‘soft-roader’ into one of the scores of cookie-cutter hybrid crossovers inhabiting the roads today.

All that means you probably haven’t noticed that the CR-V has now been on sale for 30 years, making it the same age as Post Malone, Dua Lipa and the Schengen Agreement. Thanks, Wikipedia.

So, to celebrate this, erm, historic milestone, here are a couple of things you might not know about the CR-V. For instance, did you know that its name stands for ‘Comfort Runabout Vehicle’? We didn’t, but now we do, and our lives feel slightly richer for knowing it.

In the 30 years it’s been on sale, Honda has sold over 15 million CR-Vs, which works out at about half a million a year. We worked that out without a calculator. In all seriousness, though, it's a pretty impressive sales run.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come from this rather subdued birthday bash is that Honda’s been digging through its archives and has pulled out some early design sketches for each generation of CR-V. Winding the clock back to the first generation, we can see it had some fairly interesting design ideas floating around, including one with a slightly Jeep-ish front grille and another with a strange, bulbous wraparound rear windscreen.

Anyway, now in its sixth generation and sold in around 150 countries globally, the CR-V’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Long may we continue to not really notice them when we see them in the street.