That’s what Audi, Cupra, Mercedes, Nissan and many more will have you believe, given the range of hopped-up high-riders they offer.
It probably started a couple of years back. Four years after they made their billions kicking off the genre in 2007 with the Qashqai, Nissan teased us with a concept of a Nismo version of the quirky Juke. The production car that followed in 2013 featured a scrappy 200bhp turbocharged engine, a slick-shifting manual and chassis tinkering to choke a grin out of the most stubborn hot hatch traditionalist. In 2015 the Nismo RS update added a limited slip diff to that concoction. A hot Juke was a legitimate tonic, scrabbling its way out of hairpins with some serious new-found hardware.
The Germans have not been blind to the rise of the crossover these past eleven years or so. Their participation in the market was swift and profitable, if somewhat to the detriment of some of their very specific naming structures. Audi and Mercedes teased us as Nissan were coming to market, with concepts of the RS Q3 and GLA45 AMG. As the standard models were basically jacked-up hatches, so too would the hot versions receive similar hand-me-down hot hardware.