There’s been a lot of sturm und drang lately about the fact that people outside the United States don’t buy a lot of American cars. This is one of those concepts that’s just extremely wrong. People in a lot of countries buy American-built cars or cars from American brands. In fact, a huge chunk of the profits for American automakers for about 20 years came from Chinese consumers buying Buicks. That’s changing, and it’s not just the fault of the trade war.
Yes, it’s another day at The Morning Dump talking about tariffs, but I want to take a slight diversion from the usual news and try to give you something useful. I know at least one extremely senior car exec is reading this regularly, and so this practical advice for how to plot a path forward in this crazy world is for him and anyone else who has decision-making power.
Let’s just set the stage a bit. It’s definitely the United States versus China right now. It’s the path that’s been chosen for us, and maybe we’re all better off for it, or maybe we’ll be in much, much worse shape at the end. It could all change tomorrow, but I’m going to have to assume it doesn’t. The answer, I think, is that America needs to build more cars for everyone else in the same way that everyone else builds cars for Americans.
Tesla would be a good starting point. They’ve built cars that the world loves (or used to love), yet they’re falling behind almost everywhere, especially in America. With the Model S and Model X effectively tariffed out of existence in China, this would be good for the company.
If not them, maybe Lucid? The company seems to be going in the opposite direction, having just made an offer for the remains of truckmaker Nikola.
USA On One Side, China On The Other Side, The EU Is Stuck In The Middle With You
I’ve watched a couple of speeches from the President of the United States lately, set against bright red blinking graphics that show negative numbers that seem to grow larger the more he talks about his plans. Then he said he was going to “pause” his tariff initiative, and then, like magic, the numbers all went positive, and the graphics turned green.
The stock market is not real life, nor is the stock market one thing. But it highlights that there’s an improptuness about the President’s approach that is extremely at odds with what China’s leader, Xi Jinping, says. Mostly, Xi doesn’t say as much, but when he speaks, there seems to be a long-term goal that’s easy to understand. The leadership styles are very different, though the goals are not that different.
For all the many things President Trump says that do not sound rooted in any reality that I recognize, it’s when he talks about America’s trade deals that I find myself somewhat uncomfortably agreeing with some of the premises. A trade imbalance, often, just means that we’re so much richer than other countries. We may not ship as many goods to Cambodia as they ship to us, but that’s mostly because our stuff is awesome and they’re too poor to afford it.
This was the way with China for a long time. Over the years, in exchange for cheap goods, the United States and other developed nations helped China create a middle class. This was great for a while. China became a huge source of profits for carmakers, and both Volkswagen and General Motors dominated the car market there. Quickly, that changed, and upstart electric car companies like BYD were taking more and more share.
With developed countries, this sometimes happens. They develop. Some of this development almost certainly came from industrial espionage, but automakers were also happy to teach Chinese companies how to make cars, sure that China would never fully catch up. Chinese carmakers did catch up and, now, Chinese cars are competing in places like South America and Europe. With its “Belt and Road” strategy, the country of China suddenly has little dependencies everywhere.
This uneasy competition with the United States and China was probably always going to come to a head. The United States used to reflexively distrust authoritarian and autocratic regimes. That seems less the case now, but no empire looks kindly upon the ascendant. From the Chinese perspective, as Xi himself said recently, “The West is falling and the East is rising.”
The “why” of this is important, of course, as is the “how.”
Currently, both China and the United States are fighting with increasingly high tariffs. Given how interconnected the countries are, I don’t think this is going to last forever. The two countries will probably find a way to trade with one another.
The premise that we’ve got some bad trade deals with people, which is what President Trump is saying, isn’t entirely wrong. (In fairness to President Obama, he created something called the Trans Pacific Partnership to correct many of the issues listed above, and it was President Trump who walked away from it, claiming it was a bad deal. We’ll see if President Trump gets a better one.) Labor in the United States has suffered from bad trade deals. Even worse, perhaps, the United States has forgotten how to build a lot of things, process a lot of materials, and we’re dependent on China for a lot of that.
Most frightening is the idea that the world will choose sides and they won’t choose the United States. This week, that’s starting to happen.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez went to China, and his argument is that the EU should look to soften its stance toward China as China, more than America, is a reasonable and reliable trading partner. The American Treasury Sec. said this week that doing so would “be cutting your own throat.” According to Bloomberg, some in Europe might be ok with that:
“We need mutually beneficial relations and to promote balanced trade and investments,” Sanchez said in introductory remarks ahead of his meeting with Xi. “Spain is a deeply pro-European country and sees China as a partner of the EU.”
Xi praised Sanchez for his frequent visits to China and said Beijing is willing to build bilateral ties with “more strategic determination and more vitality” amid “changes and chaos in the international situation.”
He also called for a joint effort to oppose “isolationism, unilateralism and decoupling,” taking what appeared to be a veiled swipe at the US. A stable development of China-Spain relations is especially important given the turbulence sweeping the world, Xi said.
So this is the world we’re in, where countries might feel the need to choose one country or another as a main partner. The problem with picking the United States, from an automotive standpoint, is that we don’t necessarily make the cars everyone wants.
America Should Make Small Cars
Why are American streets filled with cars from Europe and Japan but their streets are empty of American cars? Even as we provide defense and security for both?
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) April 6, 2025
Above is a very not true thing that Presidential advisor Stephen Miller said about American cars. Has he never been to the UK, where the best-selling car wears a Ford badge? What about all the Jeeps? Japan is a tougher market, but many cars sold there are actually built in America.
This is like the time I was in Krakow and got a mug of something called Sour Fish Soup. Imagine if Poland’s president complained that they bought a lot of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, but we barely buy any Sour Fish Soup. The problem isn’t a trade imbalance, it’s that Americans don’t want something called Sour Fish Soup (I do, I love it).
He’s not entirely wrong, though, because we don’t sell a ton of cars there that we also sell here. The Ford Puma is Britain’s best-selling car, and you can’t even buy it in America because we don’t build the kinds of small cars people want.
There’s the Ford Puma ST I drove in Europe. I loved the thing. Hell, Ford CEO Jim Farley himself wishes we had it here:
Wish this came to NA and other markets! https://t.co/QpcXk2zokN
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) February 16, 2021
It’s like, bruh, you run the company! The idea, though, is that Americans don’t want small cars. This is a fundamentally wrong idea, and Ford even acknowledged it with the Skunkworks project that should produce three small cars.
I love big cars. I love F-250s and Rams and all the like. I do. Would I want to drive an F-150 in Lisbon? Hell no. I mean, I’d like to once, but not as a DD. The idea that the world doesn’t buy American cars is false. In a terrible year, GM still sold 1.8 million cars in China last year. The difference is, of course, those are cars like the Wuling Mini EV that we don’t get here. There are a whole bunch of popular cars with American brands sold abroad that you probably can’t buy.
While I don’t think Mini EVs are probably the next big thing on American highways, it’s the cheaper cars that are doing well right now. Sales are increasing for products like the Buick Envista, Chevy Trax, Honda HR-V, and Nissan Sentra. We need more of that. If we want to compete across the globe, we need to give people cars they can use. It doesn’t matter if you have a strong trade policy that makes your goods cheap to import if people don’t want what you’re selling.
Tesla Stops Selling The Model X And Model S In China
The Tesla Model S and Model X are only made in the United States, which makes the two cars a tangible victim of this trade war.
Again, from Bloomberg:
The electric-car maker was offering the option to order the two models as of the end of March, according to a screenshot of its China website archived by Wayback Machine. Although that had been removed as of Friday, existing inventory of cars, such as a white Model S listed for 759,900 yuan ($103,800), is still available.
China announced Friday it will raise tariffs on all US goods to 125% starting April 12, after President Donald Trump imposed an equivalent charge designed to counter America’s trade deficit and punish Beijing for retaliating against US import taxes.
This isn’t great for Tesla as it comes at a time when sales in the United States are also falling. Maybe Musk should finally get that cheap Tesla out the door, hmm? Maybe fewer robots?
Lucid Wins Nikola Bankruptcy
Sometimes, when a surprising news story pops up, I sagely scratch my chin and nod while murmuring to myself, “Yes, yes, yes… just as I thought.” Not today! I had no idea that EV automaker Lucid was even thinking about buying the guts of EV truckmaker Nikola.
Sean O’Kane at TechCrunch, who has been making all the rest of us look bad this week with his many scoops, is once again on the story first:
EV startup Lucid Motors has emerged as a surprise winner in the bankruptcy auction for electric trucking company Nikola’s Arizona factory and other assets, according a late Thursday night court filing.
Lucid committed around $30 million in cash and non-cash considerations in exchange for the factory, Nikola’s lease on its Phoenix headquarters, and “certain machinery, equipment and inventory,” according to the filing.
As part of the deal, Lucid is planning to make offers to around 300 former Nikola employees, the company told TechCrunch. Those offers will go to both salaried and hourly employees across manufacturing engineering, software, assembly, vehicle testing, and warehouse support, Lucid said in a press release.
“As we continue our production ramp of Lucid Gravity and prepare for our upcoming midsize platform vehicles, acquiring these assets is an opportunity to strategically expand our manufacturing, warehousing, testing, and development facilities while supporting our local Arizona community,” Marc Winterhoff, Lucid’s interim CEO, said in a statement.
Winterhoff, pictured above, strikes again!
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Pavement’s third album, “Wowee Zowee” is 30 years old today, which means that I’m older than 30. This album took some crap for being a bit sloppy, but that’s what makes it a Pavement album. It’s like complaining about getting messy at a crawfish boil. “Father To A Sister Of Thought” is a strange choice for a single, which is why it’s perfect. Angel of Corpus Christi, you’re so misty, tell me what I wanna hear.
The Big Question
Which American-branded car not sold in America would you want in America? New or old.
Top photo: Stellantis
American-branded? Hm…
I do know that I would strongly consider buying the Skoda Fabia rental I just had, or a Toyota Corolla Wagon.
When I worked at Ford I always had to explain why I drove a Honda vs a Ford. They quit making the Focus ST or RS for the US Market was the easy answer. If they still sold it here, I would have ordered a 2022 Focus ST with the Track Pack in that awesome Green instead of my 2022 Civic Si. Previous to that car I would have shopped for the VW GTI Clubsport or TCR vs my MK7 GTI. This go around I would have still probably would have landed in the same Civic Type R, unless Ford offered a diesel Ranger Crew cab here since that could tow my NA Miata and still carry the kiddos.
I love the idea of cross shopping a Civic Type R with a diesel Ranger Crew Cab. Hmmm…this one’s fast, but that one could haul some mulch…hmmm.
Exactly. Working for GM and I bought a Subaru WRX. Took flack from the Mothership transfers to the “Innovation Centers”. Was told I should have bought a Cruze or Malibu because they were almost the same. Or better yet a Cadillac.
No, the Cruze and Malibu aren’t close to the WRX and after a spec sheet review they grudgingly agreed. My reply to the higher up that said I should have gotten a Cadillac ATS for like $8 grand more. “Easy for you to say since the company supplies you with your CTS.” In the end, he said that I just didn’t want the right vehicle. Hell, if they would have offered me a faster version of the ATS for the same price as the WRX, I’d have taken them up on the offer.
Is ford like Chrysler/Ram/Jeep and did you have to park in a distant parking lot because you drove a different brand?
For a while I worked for an OEM who had company product parking facing the road, so anyone passing by could only see the company’s cars.
However that meant you had the longest walk to the offices. So the policy just died after a couple of years.
Easy: the Ford Everest.
It’s basically a Ford 4Runner, shrinking down the Explorer a bit, making the bodywork boxy and muscular, and throwing all the Bronco off-road capabilities into it.
It directly competes against the 4Runner (Hilux Surf or Fortuner in other markets), and you see tons of them around Thailand, where trucks are VERY popular owing to the jungle terrain outside of the major cities. In Thailand, you can get the Everest with the same 2.3L Ecoboost sold in the US, plus single and twin-turbo I4 diesels, and a Power Stroke diesel turbo V6.
If they sold those here, we’d have one in our driveway.
My wife and I rented a Fiat Panda Cross in Iceland several years ago and if they imported them to the US I am sure they would sell dozens and one of them would be to me.
It was a silly fun little 4×4 with a huge plastic skid plate under the front bumper but it was a manual transmission and was surprisingly capable going up over a couple mountain passes on their F roads. We didn’t do any river crossings or technical off-roading but it was fun, useful, affordable, and durable enough we got our full deposit back!
Ram 700 pickup.
You can tell by my screen name where my priorities lie…. 🙂
But, a new Cooper S JCW is over $40K! A regular Cooper S can get there easily too….
Maybe I’m still stuck in the past (I AM old, so maybe some of that is allowed) but I would love a small 2 dr car with nice stuff inside – so the only option is a $40K MINI?
Nope – can’t do that.
Ford Puma. I’ve probably noted this before, but last two times we were in Europe, we had a Puma as our rental. They had very basic interior but they were also the hybrid version w/ 1.0 ecoboost, averaging mid 40s mpg and drive fine. Think based on Fiesta platform, but definitely wasn’t like the ‘ecosport’ we had in US. It is very similar in size to wife’s Crosstrek. All three of our kids prefer smaller cars (2-mazda 3s and 1-older focus).
Take this for what it’s worth, but I studied International Business in the late 90s, went over to Europe a couple times, and have been over 5-6 additional times since then (including the past 3 years). I’ve driven entirely European cars until I switched over to an Odyssey several years ago, which is almost the polar opposite.
The ONLY 3 things, in my opinion, that could force small cars on the US would be
There are other possible factors, like we all wake up one day and say “I really want something nimble!” but that’s not likely to happen.
Every single time Trump says “They don’t want our cars” I have to shake my head. Yeah, they do — once we repackage the Mustang into a slightly smaller vehicle with a turbo 4 option, it temporarily became the best-selling sports car in Europe.
So many European (and Asian) vehicle can scale up just fine for our roads; the reverse is rarely true.
I agree with all of this except your #1. There is a benefit to shrinking roads and prioritizing bikers, pedestrians, and mass transit. Cars take up an enormous amount of space in our world via roads and parking lots. There is a huge benefit to reclaiming some of that space.
I am not suggesting we narrow our streets to the level of old European cities. But just … some squishing of the space cars take would be nice.
This. Pining for small cars in the US is pointless. Relatively speaking, NOBODY wants them. They sold because they were cheap, but NO cars are cheap anymore, modern expectations and regulatory requirements ensure that. And now that CAFE is footprint based, there is simply no reason for Ford to lose their shirt selling Fiestas and Foci so they can make big money on Explorers and F-150s without paying huge fines. Any mandate is only going to last until the political pendulum swings back the other way, and politics in this country swing as regularly as a metronome.
Sure, small cars are selling “better” currently – but going from almost none to more than almost none is still not a lot of cars in a country where ludicrously sized pickup trucks sell millions per year at huge profit margins.
And I say this as someone who have bought two new Golfs, a new Fiat 500 Abarth, and a new Fiat Spider, and the new BMWs (before they bloated) and Saabs I bought were not that much bigger. I *like* nice small cars (I have no use for vehicular hairshirts), but I very much get why the average American who buys cars by the pound does not. if anything, because small cars need to be clever to be good, they are disproportionately more expensive than something big, fat, and dumb.
It is kinda annoying that virtually all small cars (except sports cars like those made by Lotus), seem to be considered low-end, entry-level cars by their brands – I want the same sound insulation, advanced features, performance (this you can sometimes get) and creature comforts in my small car as I could get in the bigger cars I usually end up driving. My latest purchase was a class bigger than I really wanted for the cars’s mission because the next size down had less room in the front seats and was significantly noisier. 20 years ago the difference in the European brands was less than it is today, which is disappointing.
Fully agree, but that is caused by the reality of the typical American mentality who buys cars by the pound.
LOL Farley has Toyota on his resume but learned NOTHING from them.
Ford sabotaged their small cars in the US with the PowerShit transmissions on the Focus and Fiesta. As soon as they stopped selling them here with the new gens, they went back to a regular automatic, and even the ST models were available with automatic (as well as manual).
We need to sign on to the UNECE standards, or perhaps accept both UNECE and current US standards. Mexico accepts both, for example.
Detroit never took small cars seriously.
As the competition went poof, prices of the Mirage went up (almost doubled over the past 5 years or so).
They left a hole wide open at the bottom of the market for China to come in and take over.
Eh, Farley didn’t discontinue the Honda Fit or other small cars that went poof in the US.
Detroit can’t take small cars seriously – Americans won’t pay enough for them.
The Ford Focus and Chevy Cruze were selling in high numbers at some point, but instead of improving them, they just let them die. If they brought back the Cruze starting around $19k with the base version using the engine from the Trax, same dashboard layout but with a sedan shape, built in Korea too, they will be selling.
A couple of friends have or had a Cruze and never heard a single complaint (Second generation).
Those vehicles margins could be lower but you attract a whole new customer base for your brands. The Cruze customer at some point will be looking for an Equinox and so on. Young people and retired people don’t want to spend a lot of money. I don’t want to buy a SUV as first car for my kids.
Ford sabotaged the Focus with the PowerShit DCT. They KNEW it was a piece of shit but refused to just go back to the regular automatic until they stopped selling them here.
The Mk4 Focus and Mk7 Fiesta we didn’t get went back to a regular automatic.
Detroit never took small cars seriously, just saw them as an afterthought, whereas others see them as a core part of the lineup for the reasons you mention.
At ~$21k the Trax already undercuts most small cars in price, and GM is selling every one of them they can make, seemingly with fewer incentives too. Is there really any benefit for them to producing an entirely extra model line rather than just…making more of the Trax? $19k would put it a grand below an automatic Versa, but the Versa is not the best-selling vehicle in Nissan’s lineup by a long shot.
Those fell victim to the “CUV ALL THR THINGS!!!1!” mentality. GM also did a typical GM move with the second gen Cruze. They had the design ready to go and sat on it for a year to milk sales out of the old model. In that year the Transformers Civic came out. When the 2nd gen Cruze finally came out it looked like a copycat. GM stole Honda’s lunch in 2011 with the first gen, forcing Honda to do an emergency redesign of the Civic. They had the chance again and whiffed it.
Big ?: The Chevy Montana out of Brazil is the first one to come to mind. Sadly, GM do Brasil does not make that awesome little 2-door variant anymore.
Oh yes, there are lots of cool cars GM offers in other markets, like the Montana (nice competitor to the Maverick and Santa Cruz), the Tornado minivan, the Aveo, Onix, and Cavalier; the Groove small SUV; the S10 Max pickup and Express Max too.
Check out chevrolet.com.mx for more info
I love small cars, I love not buying more than you need. With that being said, it’s very obvious in the US culture that when someone is presented with the opportunity to spend $70k on a car, they buy a large pickup not an E-Class. Bigger sells easier and is easier to justify the cost.
With no incentive to buy a smaller car given by any US administration in any capacity, we’ll keep buying big cars and trucks.
Any agreement with the current administration’s philosophy on trade can only occur if the person completely misunderstands the subject at every level.
If people want to sell you product “A” for $10 and it would have taken you $20 worth of time/resources to create, you should buy it. OR If you could create product “A” for a matching $10 but could use that time/resources to create something worth $50, buy the $10 product and create the $50 product.
A “trade deficit” with the person making the $10 is immaterial. What you should worry about is continuing to increase the value of your product/service by continually investing in your capabilities.
Tariffs are simply regressive taxes that are designed to impoverish people to the point that their labor is cheap enough to compete with other impoverished places so the oligarchs can make more money.
Ding, ding, ding! Neo feudalism is the ultimate goal.
Let’s see… Chevy Chevette. Ford EXP (then followed up with the disastrous dry double clutch transmission). All of the small K-car derivatives. Smart ForTwo (that requires premium gas)…
“Yep, America doesn’t want small cars.”
Meanwhile, let’s ban all these Kei deathtraps mindless idiots want to import…
I had a Ranger for a while. Great little truck, except it got about 15 mpg.
Maybe if the product planners at the Big 3 would pull their heads out of their rectal cavities long enough to ask people what they want a small car to be, they could figure out a product Americans would actually buy. Ford did it once with the Escort, but they lost their way. (I had a ’98 sedan – decent commuter, but by far the most boring car I’ve ever owned. Huge regret the I didn’t get a Corolla or Civic instead – I’d probably still own it.)
I like small cars (as my Miata and soon to be resurrected Fit can attest), but I think the last good one we made here was the Vibe, and Toyota had a major hand in that one.
I loved my Neons, Saturn’s and other small cars that sold in huge numbers back then.
Sell they did, but the manufacturers screwed them up as time went on, and sales fell off. I don’t know why they insist on making each new generation bigger than the last (the only notable exception I can think of being the ND Miata).
Also, those aren’t exactly known as exemplars of longevity. I don’t see many Neons or Saturns on the road anymore, but I do spot Civics and Corollas of that vintage with some regularity.
They sold in somewhat large numbers because they were sold on the cheap. For zero profit to a loss per unit sold. Because each of those sales offset the sale of a large, profitable, gas guzzler due to the CAFE rules of the time. When that went away, so did cheap small cars with only a handful of exceptions. The other factor is simply that there is no such thing as a cheap, simple car anymore. Government regulations and consumer expectations ensure that.
Daughter had a Vibe – about the only thing GM engineered was the badging on it. It got T-boned last week and is a writeoff. We have an older (’07) Corolla in the fleet and probably will keep it forever. I don’t like driving it more than an hour or so at a time and it’s buzzy over 75 mph, but dead reliable.
Untrue! They also had different HVACs. Vibes have a bullshit actuator to open the fresh air vent that is prone to fail and then click incessantly. The dashboard must be removed to replace it.
Matrices used a cable.
I wish I didn’t know this.
In Eindhoven, NL as I type. Day 2. Vacation
LOTS of Teslas, lots.
Saw my first BYD today.
Driving a Skoda Kamiq, and it’s absolutely horrible. Specifically, the transmission. I can’t make sense of it, it’s horrible. It’s an auto, as that is all that fit us with luggage in that size and availability.
I was here 20 years ago, and wow, has it changed. Amazing what a generation will do. It really is pretty awesome here. The whole city is designed for bikes. Driving has been a small nightmare. We plan on renting bikes, maybe tomorrow. This is exactly how you design a city. If you can, visit.
For the big question, how about the Jeep Avenger pictured at the top of the article? It would be quite nice to have an option of a small but practical, simple EV with a wee bit of offroad ability, instead of the expensive, heavy behemoths currently offered.
We do get the Ford Kuga in the US, it just wears the Escape Badge. Now the Escape even uses some of the same trim level designations as the Kuga. However it is not the best selling car in Brittan, that is the Puma and is what you drove and reviewed in the linked article.
Ugh, every time I wrote “Kuga” I meant “Puma.” Fixed, thanks!
Must be a Friday!
So since you have driven the Puma and liked it I have to ask IF it was available in the US would you have considered purchasing it instead of the CR-V? Assume the MPG would be similar or better to take that out of the equation. (Per the Ford UK website the smaller mild hybrid Puma has the same fuel cost as the Kuga full hybrid and in US spec the Escape hybrid beats the CR-V Hybrid.)
Here is a nice size comparo of the external dimensions of both. https://www.carsized.com/en-us/cars/compare/ford-puma-2019-suv-vs-honda-cr-v-2022-suv/
What about price? It is smaller so the expectation would be that it was priced lower, so how much lower would it need to be to sacrifice the space of the CR-V?
I always wanted the 2 door Fiesta, but it wasn’t offered here. Now they don’t even sell the Fiesta in Europe anymore. Grr…
You don’t have to waste your time correcting the lies of a known liar who is very transparent and open about the fact that he’s telling lies.
This obsession with “well actually”-ing Republicans does nothing. They’re all liars, we know they’re liars, and the people who vote for them don’t care if they’re lying. Just put your efforts into building up people who could theoretically defeat them.
At the risk of ruining my Friday by wading into this, whatever anyone’s personal politics are, I definitely do not want automotive websites (that I pay for) to be “building up” political candidates of any party. Please save that kind of advocacy for elsewhere.
I’m not saying that this place should be doing that, it’s more of a general FYI for everyone else.
If there was a candidate who was solely focused on allowing European-style headlight technology and repealing the 25-year import ban it would be a challenge not to support them.
When is Jason running?
He’ll get his chainsaw ready. That really gets people fired up!
Hell yeah!
Very much agree. The comment section is a disaster lately, I want cars not uninformed idiotic political takes (of any stripe).
Blame the fascist in charge of Tesla. He is the one making the automotive and political space inseparable. Sometimes, the real world demands attention to the point it leaks into our hobbies.
I wish the only alternative party would actually do such a thing! Hell, they could start by doing anything at all.
Hey now, they have a whole host of energetic, up-and-coming 75 to 80-year-olds with brand new hips and other ephemera ready to tell us all about things we can’t have because it’d be a lot of work.
It’s unbelievable. A few decades ago, this timeline as a dark comedy would have seemed a bit too exaggerated for the jokes to connect well.
That’s why Idiocracy didn’t do so well at the box office, but became a cult classic sometime around, oh, 2016 or so.
This is treated as gospel by both the authors and commenters and I have yet to hear a compelling case for why I should believe it.
Small car sales that peaked in the early 2010s were dropping for years before they were discontinued. Domestic and import brands were both affected. This isn’t an isolated case of a couple bad apples.
The entire history of car sales in the US for 125 years has been bigger is better, with the exceptions of gas price shocks in 1973-79 and 2008-11, that each drove small car sales for a few years until normalcy returned and people bought the big vehicles they always wanted all along.
What is the case that there is a huge pent-up demand for small cars that isn’t being met by current offerings? Automakers might make a mistake in their product lineups from time to time, but basically all of them have decided that small cars don’t sell well enough to justify keeping them here, and the few that remain have accepted lower sales.
Maybe this tariff crisis is another temporary boost to small car sales. It’s possible that consumers will feel squeezed and run to the perceived low risk of small and cheap cars. But more than a century of history tells me we shouldn’t bet on it being a permanent trend.
More likely, both parties are mistaking what they *wish* Americans would like with what they actually do like. It can never be repeated enough that the things enthusiasts value in cars are not widely valued among people who actually buy new vehicles.
The problem is small cars that cost as much as a large car.
When Auto makers offer an affordable car, they sell like hot cakes.
Unfortunately, for the auto maker, building affordable cars cost as much as building profitable cars
I agree to an extent.
The last couple years this seems to be more true than usual, with higher rates, inflation, etc.
But lets not lose sight of the fact that the average vehicle sold still costs near enough to $50K and that the most popular trucks go well above that.
Cheaper vehicles have their place, but the majority is still looking for something bigger and better, and can afford to do so.
I think both can exist at the same time, but the increasing number of Kei trucks being imported has to mean something. The same for all the Mirages that sold. They’re just not as profitable, so it’s harder to justify building them here.
It means Japan’s taxation of older vehicles makes them very attractive to export to other countries, and thanks in part to this site people are becoming more aware of that.
Also (and this is a genuine question because I don’t have the numbers) is the number of kei trucks being imported significant? It can be increasing and still completely irrelevant in the broader auto market.
I think the type of person importing a kei truck is even more of an outlier to the automotive market than I am, which is saying a lot.
I don’t know how many kei trucks are imported, but I would hazard a guess that many are used in place of SxS and such for working rather than as road-registered, daily driven vehicles.
Sadly, this is correct. It’s estimated that there are maybe 7,500 Kei trucks imported a year. That’s not even enough units to sustain one small car’s production.
I think you’re both correct, technically. I think there is a market for cheap cars, but not necessarily a large market for tiny cars. Basically, if someone made a $15k crossover it would probably sell like hotcakes, while a $15k small car (like a Honda Fit) stopped being hot the moment people could afford gas again.
Sadly, I say that as someone who owns six Smarts and now three Keis. I would love tiny cars to be huge in America, but Americans voted with their wallets.
That’s it. The smaller cars need to sell in higher volumes, but appeal to a smaller number of buyers. It’s not that nobody wants them in a literal sense, just that more people prefer a larger vehicle, which also happens to be more profitable. At a certain point, this is not just on an individual model basis, but a platform one. For instance, a compact is more profitable than a sub, not only because it sells in higher volume (people prefer a larger car even at the lower end) and there’s more profit per unit (minimal extra cost to build, higher sales price), but the platform can also be extended more readily to a greater range of other vehicles. Because of this, compacts are about the best value out there as more money can afford to be spent on them than on subs, but the cost to buy isn’t much higher, which leads to the death of subs and the continued existence of compacts that almost seems to prop up the idea that people want small cars (even if they’re not quite so compact anymore). Even me, I like small cars, but I won’t go below compact due to value/dollar, usability, and contention with all the poorly driven land dreadnoughts I need to share the road with. And it’s not necessarily the better safety of the mildly larger vehicle, but the better visibility in traffic. Of course, people have to actually be looking to see anything in the first place…
You are technically correct—the best kind of correct.
If there are a few thousand or so a year coming in I would be *shocked*. That’s a hobby, not a business.
Ford sells more F150s in a couple days than Mitsubishi sells Mirages a year. That sales increased from “almost none” to 50% more than “almost none” still means they sell almost none of the hateful things.
A cheap car doesn’t need to be a small car either, and vice versa. Ford and GM took a different approach with the Maverick and Trax and both have been highly successful. Throw in too that some brands are consolidating car lines into one offering, it suggests that people don’t always want a small car, just that size and price often went hand in hand – because American preferences equated size with how nice a car is. For the same price, people would usually prefer a lesser equipped larger vehicle vs. a better equipped smaller vehicle. That kept a lot of the nicer versions of global cars off our shores for a time. The 2010s saw that shift some; the rise of smaller crossovers is sort of taking over for it.
The current increase to small car sales is effectively bringing existing model lines back to pre-pandemic levels. It would be more of a correlation if sales of larger utility vehicles were falling, but they aren’t – they just aren’t up with dramatic % changes because they didn’t have as high of sales volumes and/or weren’t as volatile in production over the same period.
Yes. If the article had said “cheap car” in place of “small car” I wouldn’t have taken exception the way I did.
I agree. Small cars are simply more dangerous in the us due to mass and speeds. I have spring around at 30kph or 50kph all day. Its……. Tedious, but there is literally no way to speed here easily due to filters (traffic cameras) and the way the infrastructure is built. I should take a pic of where my car is currently parked and post it on Discord. I’m skinny and barely got out of the car.
That said, I miss my big cars, as they are more comfortable, sorry, but it’s true (for me). But, I do drive a Bolt and love it.
Then Freightliner is missing a bet by not making a car that’s bigger and heavier than every other car on the road. Maybe call it “SafeLiner”. Have some mounting points so that if anyone else gets bigger/heavier you can add concrete counterweights to keep their edge.
Me, I’m fine with small cars, so long as they have good vision and a high seating position (I don’t bend as easy as I used to).
Yeah, it’s a myth that won’t die and I have no idea where it even came from as, historically, beyond a few brief aberrations caused by particular financial environmental conditions, the numbers do not reflect that. Even in other markets, the reason larger vehicles don’t do as well as they do here is down to outside factors, but when given the choice with little penalty (like the conditions in the US), people in general tend to prefer larger vehicles (see: rise of popularity of S/CUVs in other markets). Just because they (and me) want small cars, does not mean the majority do and it’s the majority the OEMs need to sell to, particularly with smaller cars that need to make up lower profit with volume.
At the same time, I can’t imagine driving a car even as big as a Corolla in Milan, Rome, Athens….
And I don’t want to drive *anything* in New York City. I cheerfully drove my M235i all over Rome and Naples.
Well said.
There’s a strange nostalgia for bygone eras here. I get it, I liked a few of the small cars of the past, having owned several.
But woof, there was some garbage and mediocrity flushed onto the road here. For decades. Detroit probably lost more money and trashed more of their reputation on small cars than any other market segment. The last Ford Focus probably destroyed the last vestiges of hope for a successful American branded small car here.
There’s sort of a deeper thread I’d like to pull at: auto making and culture of place. The culture of this place lends itself to ‘big’ and it is likely why Detroit always did better at midsized or larger vehicles. Europe and Japan do better with small. That’s fine, and thinking back, most of the better small vehicles I owned were Japanese.
Had Detroit stuck to a target of ‘What we are good at’ and ‘What fits this place’, it probably would have done much better over the last few decades, probably to the country’s benefit.
Yes!
Combine rose tinted glasses for the past with the weirdly annoying tendency to conflate cheapness with virtue, and you basically have the ethos of this site.
Old, cheap cars mostly sucked! It’s far better that we have larger, better equipped, more reliable vehicles that are as efficient as the old econoboxes and still affordable to most buyers.
And even if you can’t afford them new, they are a HELL of a lot better as a 5yo used car than those epic shitheaps of old were new.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen where consumer demand really lies. Until an American brand can produce an inexpensive, reliable and not crap small car we won’t know.
Why would American brand matter?
There’s plenty of Japanese models that meet your criteria, and their sales have mostly been down for years. In many cases they are built in this country.
I haven’t met someone who would only buy American branded (as opposed to American manufactured) in many years.
American Branded is the question asked.
Saturn was the closest we came to that idea, and it cost General Motors billions of dollars.
To me, the fundamental failure of Detroit to produce a good small car profitably speaks to something deeper. If all decades and untold billions of dollars worth of trying does is result in a range of results from mediocre to disastrous, perhaps it is a fundamental incompatibility with the culture of these companies, at least in North America.
I can hardly think of a domestic small car that was memorable, other than in a bad way. Midsized Detroit cars? Far more successful. Had Detroit just not tried, the stain of untold seized-engine Vegas, X-bodies, blown Neon head gaskets, and fragged Ford Focus DCT transmissions would not have ruined perceptions today.
Sadly, had Detroit had not flushed untold billions into doing they continually sucked at, it might have done better at the things it was good at.
It’s tough to separate failures due to build/design quality issues from the failures caused by the utter lack of maintenance and care given by the owners of the cars that you mentioned. As far as the neon goes: the head gasket issue (when it eventually happened) was an oil leak, with which the car could be driven quite a while as long as the oil level was checked and topped up periodically. The redesigned, MLS head gasket was introduced midway through the 1998 model year. It was the bulletproof fix for the 1995-early 98 cars as long as it was installed correctly. My impression at that time was that many Chrysler customers either couldn’t be bothered to maintain the car correctly, or were simply too impoverished to do so.
I think the argument about “the world doesn’t buy American cars” is that they don’t buy cars made here. But for the same reasons that we don’t get the Kuga. If Americans don’t want to buy them, why on earth would any company that has production elsewhere (in and industry burdened by overcapacity) tool up to make small cars in the US simply to ship them all elsewhere? The only way that makes any sense is to have a flexible line that you can make a larger and a smaller car on at the same time– and I’m quite sure that Americans would look favorably on a larger/taller but simpler, decontented vehicle as a daily driver or second car.
I’ll combine my answer to this and Jason’s cold start saying I would like the Opel manta Elektromod. Opel was gm at one time, sorta.
On the topic of ford’s skunk works, what’s going on with that? I’m hearing we’ll see cars by next year but not seen any teases. Unlike scout that’s 3 years away and having rattley test drives with Jay Leno (which I think is way too early)
Tesla is cooked without a major upheaval. Even ignoring the political issues, the product pipeline is dry and they have brain drain issues at the top. Musk has to go, but if he does, the stock craters because it’s really a meme stock tied to him personally.
I don’t know what Lucid is doing with Nikola; I was under the impression Nikola’s tech simply didn’t work? From the outside Lucid seems to be pretty competently engineered and managed.
It might be cheaper to buy and retrofit the factory than to start another factory from scratch?
Ding ding
Bankruptcy pricing FTW.
They paid $30M for a factory. They really don’t need to worry about the value of what’s in it.
You weren’t supposed to tell anyone I read articles here!
Australia has the American-branded cars I want. I’ll take a Barra powered RWD anything, really.
You can always go with the Ameri-Barra, and get a RWD old trailblazer (or other of the 7 variants). An MA5 out of a Colorado will bolt straight to it (they are both Atlas engines), and you can drop that in anything you like! Nivlac57 on youtube has quite a bit of time messing with those engines.
I’ll take a Barra-powered Aero ‘Bird or Mk VII (83-88) with a manual transmission.
I just had an image of Mary Barra trying to push a Silverado from a standstill Flintstone style.
Article: America wants small cars!
Me: *thinking about American branded cars sold exclusively overseas* I kind of want an Aussie Ford Falcon. I know the Holden Commodore made it here (in a very small way), so I’ll tentatively select that as my second choice.