Detroit ? In the 1990s, sales of hot new sport utility vehicles propelled metro Detroit into a sort of economic paradise – a Golden Era when workers took home thousands of dollars in bonuses and drove around in big Ford Explorers, Jeep Grand Cherokees and Chevy Suburbans to load up on the spoils of their success.

But with gas prices topping $3 a gallon recently, and big SUVs increasingly out of vogue, the outlook for Detroit has seemed bleak. Production cuts, layoffs and belt-tightening have been the order of the day.

But Ford Motor Co. and crosstown rivals General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG quietly have been cornering a new segment of the auto market that may soon bring better days to Detroit.

Detroit is now king of the crossover – controlling 47.6 percent of the market – and local automakers are well-poised to dominate the fast-growing market in the next few years with new vehicles such as the new Chevy HHR, Lincoln Aviator and Jeep Compass.

Crossover utility vehicles, or CUVs as they are sometimes called, look like SUVs and offer the same kind of cargo space in the back. But while SUVs are built like big trucks, the architecture of a CUV is more like that of a smaller car. That helps make crossovers more fuel-efficient, ride smoother and easier to get in and out of.

The 2005 Ford Freestyle, whose interior is shown above, is one of 35 crossover utility vehicles sold in the United States.

Crossover sales are up 42.3 percent at Ford, 31.3 percent at GM and 26.8 percent at DaimlerChrysler through August, compared with the same period a year ago, according to Autodata Corp., a research firm in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. No Asian or European automakers are making such impressive gains.

“This could very well be the segment that saves them,” Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore., said of the crossover market’s significance to Detroit-area automakers.

The Ford Escape is the most popular CUV on the market. That market also includes vehicles like the Honda CR-V, Toyota Highlander, Chevy Equinox and Chrysler PT Cruiser.

Most consumers can’t tell the difference between an SUV and CUV, but they are increasingly attracted to the special package of crossover attributes. The improved fuel efficiency, in particular, may be accelerating the popularity of the crossover, Spinella said.

About 1.4 million crossovers were sold through August. That’s an 18 percent gain over the same period last year. CUV sales are now growing four times as fast as overall auto sales.

SUV sales, meanwhile, are down 4.9 percent for the year through August, with about 1.8 million vehicles sold.

So while crossovers make up only 11.7 percent of overall auto sales right now, they are expected to surpass SUV sales as soon as next year – far sooner than experts had anticipated.

“The CUV is the new SUV,” John Casesa, an auto analyst with the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, declared earlier this year.

Foreign automakers essentially created the crossover segment when they rushed to catch up with the SUV craze. Without a lineup of trucks to use as the architectural basis for their new SUVs, the automakers started building SUV tops on car bottoms, creating crossover vehicles such as Toyota RAV-4 and Honda Pilot.