The NY Times notes today that a Cuban American businessman is trying to set up a dealership network in the States to sell a Romanian SUV, the Aro, renamed the Cross Lander.
It appears he's trying to market it as a small-size off-road vehicle (although bigger than compact crossover ones), for people who want something that looks like a older Jeep or Land Rover (i.e., 25 y.o. styling) and has few frills. Price is to be less than $20K.
I took a look at the video on the company website Cross Lander. It looked like the vehicle could go up and down short steep inclines on sandy soil, but the bobbling of the body/chassis as it went over deep ruts gave me the impression that it might be easily subsceptible to roll-over.
So far, I haven't found that many reviews posted on the web. A few brief ones, from a UK site, (going back to '89) have been favorable in terms of it's off-road capability. So maybe it handles better than it looks.
I must confess to being generally ignorant as to how off-road vehicles look as they're driving in the rough. This despite having spent weeks on end riding off-road in a HMMWV (known to consumers as the Hummer).
Meanwhile, the NY Times article ends with remarks by an automotive publication editor:
"I keep thinking the S.U.V. market is too saturated for whimsical new entrants but then something like this Romanian model comes along," said Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, a company in Santa Monica, Calif., that publishes automobile pricing information. "It goes to show that comfort, mileage -- all of that is irrelevant. What matters most is image."
I also ran across another comment about the vehicle in an article I happened to recently read in the July/August 03 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It's an article about the bear preserves or "farms" that were developed in Romania to cater to the hunting whims of dictator, Ceausescu:
"One district competed against another for his visits, offering big bears and rack-heavy stags as easy targets for his expensive imported rifles. For a typical hunt Ceausescu would fly in by helicopter, landing on a pad cleared within the hunting area. From there he'd be taken by rough-terrain vehicle (in earlier years he favored Jeeps; later a Russian make, the Gaz; and still later a rattletrap Romanian imitation, the Aro)..."
Hmmm. This raises some questions.
How far removed from the Gaz is the Cross Lander? (The drive train will be completely different.) What was the reputation of the Gaz? And how does the Aro compare to the Gaz?