2007 BMW X3 vs. 2007 Acura RDX, 2008 Land Rover LR2 - Car and Driver
Eight years ago, at our favorite driving site in southern Ohio's Hocking State Forest, we were greeted by an aural assault halfway between keening and screeching. The racket was emanating from a zillion cicadas that had crawled into the trees and were singing for sex-really, this is true-which is a romantic strategy few of us, even in our most desperate high-school years, ever contemplated. For 20 years, we've been drawn to the Hocking Hills' six parks, each carved out of Black Hand sandstone that has eroded into baroque gargoyles, twisted columns, 200-foot-deep chasms, dank caverns, natural amphitheaters, and British-racing-green... On this trip, however, our Buckeye cicadas were as quiet as, well, dead cicadas, and for good reason. The place was abuzz with cicada-killing wasps, which are as much as two inches long and resemble yellow jackets or MiG-25 Foxbats, depending on how closely they skim your nose. We tell you this because the Hocking Hills are teeming with all sorts of fast-moving fauna, sometimes us. This time, we were drawn to southern Ohio to examine the latest batch of compact luxury SUVs. These are small utes in a small niche, because "compact" becomes "mid-size" as soon as the vehicle's length stretches much beyond 181 inches-the length of the Acura RDX, as a matter of fact. This ruled out a few SUVs we might otherwise have included-the Lincoln MKX and the Lexus RX350 , for example, both with strong V-6s and luxury aplenty. Source: www.caranddriver.com
