You're probably thinking of the Element. There were a lot of reasons it ended up with a rabid fan-base: Honda reliability, available manual transmission, available all-wheel drive. It was overall a really practical vehicle for those who wanted something with a good amount of interior space who didn't care about frills or luxury. Amusingly the Element was targeted at then-millennial young buyers looking for "adventure," but ended up being more popular amongst older people looking for a practical daily driver.

The Aztek had some similar positive properties, but was from one of the particularly bad eras of GM malaise and was highly unreliable. It's had a tiny bit of a cult resurgence recently, but it was never popular in the way the Element was.