Crossover CUVs were just beginning to gain widespread appeal.
That's not
really true though. That's been the oft-quoted axiom behind its failure, but crossover SUVs were coming from all across the world and everyone knew it except maybe Mercedes (who did a half-assed job just like they did with everything else in the 90s) by the time the Aztek came out. Certainly the
domestic manufacturers were asleep at the wheel for it, still perfectly content with putting out either obviously rounded off versions of designs from the 1980s (Ford, GM) or actual literal designs from the 1980s (Chrysler); but Honda and Toyota had already shifted a solid million of the things between the CR-V, Rav4 and RX300 by the time the Aztek came out. The Highlander came out the same year as the Aztek and outsold the latter's entire production run in 18 months. The Forester was a bit of a mid-grade step, but still one that Subaru knew the market wanted and had been on sale for 4 years by that point to great reviews and sales. It's twin the Rendezvous achieved the sales numbers that were expected of the Aztek despite much more modest predictions. This is more like what GM did in a decade prior with their minivans, where they misjudged what the market actually wanted but through their own arrogance thought they could outstyle the rest of the market and people wouldn't care if the product was worse than what they could buy elsewhere; just blowing up in their face even more spectacularly than the Lumina/Trans Sport/Silhouette did.
It should also be noted that while the Aztek is in some ways significantly less uglier now that so many cars on the road have similar random assortment of styling details and complete lack of care with how they integrate into the overall shape (the Bangle 6 series might as well have been a copy of it in coupe form and that came out only a couple years later; and the modern BMW range is even more of an incohesive mess in that regard than anything 90s Pontiac came up with even if you ignore that cartoonish thing at the top of the page), the Aztek
does still have obviously terrible late 90s GM build quality even in PR glamour shots like the one above, a complete lack of prioritizing style over efficiency in regards to things like body panel lines vs styling elements, and distinctly terrible proportions that stick out probably even more now than they did then. If Pontiac had leaned harder into it being car-like by lowering the damn thing or leaned harder into the proto-overlander market that Subaru and the XTerra had already been tapping into they might have gotten away with it anyway (
the original production concept suggests they thought hard about the latter) but as it was just removing most of the black plastic cladding wasn't nearly enough.
For example, Jeep didn't have to do a lot at all to make the current Cherokee look fine compared to the stupid looking thing that came out in 2013. No amount of conventional front end restyling or body cladding removal would fix how slab sided and narrow the Aztek looked even though it wasn't really small.
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