🚙 Sport Utility Vehicle

Emoji Meaning

A blue or green Sport Utility Vehicle or station wagon, often with a spare tire on the back. Commonly used as a generic blue or green car.

Sport Utility Vehicle or SUV is an emoji whose meaning was likely lost in translation as it moved from Japanese phone carriers to the Unicode Standard in 2010.

This emoji goes back to the late 1990s when it was included in Docomo's emoji set. In 2009, it appeared on a proposal as one of many symbols available on Japanese phones recommended to be encoded into the Unicode Standard. In that proposal, the symbol was referred to as a "recreational vehicle" or RV. The original Japanese emojis look more like station wagons or SUVs than RVs.

At various points, platforms including Google and Samsung showed this emoji as an RV, but ultimately the designs across platforms converged to a car that looks more like an SUV or station wagon. At a small scale this emoji is barely distinguishable from 🚗 Automobile on some platforms.

Sport Utility Vehicle was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name “Recreational Vehicle” and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.