L.A.'s Status SUV Battle

6:00 AM PDT 3/13/2012 by Gary Baum

At school drop-off, image-obsessed moms and dads are flocking to the same five crossovers as Bentley and Maserati enter the family car wars: "Cayenne is really flashy"; "Mercedes says 'older money' "

It's 7:45 a.m. on a recent Thursday at Harvard-Westlake Middle School in Bel-Air, and preteens surge out of a lineup of cars that represent all the major luxury automakers, from BMW to Bentley. An Escalade with blacked-out windows zooms up, followed by a boxy Land Rover and two Mercedes-Benz E-class sedans. A Cadillac CTS sedan swings around smoothly, followed by a Range Rover and a new Volvo XC70 wagon.