Honda Crossroad: Ridiculous Rebadge

Imagine a Land Rover with Honda reliability.  That would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?  Each morning, wealthy trophy wives could drive their children to private school then go directly to Pilates without making their daily stop at the Land Rover dealership to check for rust.  Or replace a differential.

Now imagine the exact opposite: coupling Honda’s image for bland, mass-produced cars with Land Rover engineering, which annually leads the JD Power surveys if you read them upside down.  If you’re anything like me – and you aren’t, because you don’t write a car blog from your parents’ basement – that’s enough to earn the prize distinction of being the very first Ridiculous Rebadge.

The vehicle pictured is a Series I Land Rover Discovery, which is a highly-capable off-roader that can be found pretty much anywhere there are highway shoulders, flatbed tow trucks, or junkyards.  But wait!  Check the badging again.  It may look like a Land Rover, but it’s actually a Honda Crossroad, which was sold in Japan (and maybe some other unlucky markets) beginning in 1994.

The Crossroad was the result of a completely inexplicable joint venture between Honda and Rover, a British automaker known for financial insolvency and manufacturing vehicles out of compressed rust.  There were a lot of crappy rebadges born from this meeting of the minds – most notably the first-generation Acura Legend, the US-bound Sterling, and a bunch of Honda Civics with Rover emblems – but the Crossroad was probably the ultimate insult to consumer intelligence.  Honda didn’t even bother to change the engine from Rover’s 3.9-liter V8, which has a reputation not for torque or horsepower, but rather for sending sons and daughters of Land Rover mechanics to college.

If you’re one of the unlucky few with a Crossroad in your garage, don’t let the Honda badge fool you.  You’ll still have to check for rust before heading to Pilates.