These Are The Cars That Defined The 2010s

Photo: Tesla

We couldn’t have known what awaited us at the end of the previous decade, when the COVID-19 pandemic upended our way of life. All we knew was that we were awash in crossovers. At least, that’s what our readers recount when we asked what cars defined the 2010s.

Rather than voting for cars powered by monstrous V8s, which were the lever I would have said Americans pulled to release the pressure from the high gasoline costs of the aughts, readers went entirely the other way. It was not V8s, but EVs that best represented the teens, according to the Jalopnik community.

And not just any EVs, but namely one EV that combined the attributes of the most common body type with the most common BEV brand in the U.S. at the time — the Tesla Model X, a fully-electric crossover, of course. In a sense, the teens were sort of an inflection point, a decade that, in retrospect, looks like a crossover period for the past and future. Here are the cars that our readers say best defined this in-between time, the 2010s: