Once again we turn to you, the most learned and dare we say attractive readers of the interwebs, for your answers to a piping-hot question fresh from the collective pizza oven of of our minds. As you know (but here’s a hyperlink if you don’t), GM just killed the Chevy Bolt. Yes, the Bolt arrived with some teething pains, but The General got the affordable EV sorted and it’s been a popular choice for budget-conscious buyers looking to electric power. So obviously, it had to die. Other vehicles that were more deserving of the Bolt’s fate quickly came to mind when we heard the news, which brought us to today’s question:
Which current car model would you sacrifice so a previously-offed car could live again–and which defunct model would you bring back?
We’ll see you in the comments! And now, let’s take a look at trends and choice replies from last week’s Autopian Asks, which asked for your opinions on optimal infotainment screen size and configration:
Most of you focused on screen size, and a common refrain was that bigger is not better. About eight inches seemed to be the sweet spot for screen size, and more than a few of you wished for double-DIN standardization. Eggsalad says he’s fine with a mere 20 x 60mm (0.8 x 2.4″) screen. Yours truly remembers when having a digital clock in the dash seemed like futuristic stuff, so I get it.
Hugh Crawford (we’re giving you capital letters, Hugh) definitely makes a solid point about the frustrating screen-darkening effect polarized lenses have on infotainment visuals, and we bet a bunch of you are also in the take-off-your-sunglasses-to-see-the-backup-camera-view club. Very annoying. But not as annoying as a too-bright, un-dimmable screen at night, as DDRDAN experienced in a Mercedes C-class. As someone who chooses dark-mode for every app that supports it, I would find a vivid white screen to be intolerable. Thankfully, I’m approximately all of the dollars away from owning a C-class, so it’s all good.
Now get to commenting, and tell us which meh cars must die so good ones gone to soon may live again!
Images: Exited guy: khosrork/stock.adobe.com; Chevy Bolt: GM; BMW XM: BMW
Kill: Silverado
Bring back: any minivan/mpv of your choice.
You don’t even have to kill ALL the Silverados, just ONE would provide enough raw material for two entire model years.
I will personally murder the Tiguan, atlas and id.4 to have VW keep producing a golf sportwagon (with three pedals and awd). It would be nice if it had a 3.6 or a hybrid diesel but I know I’m fully in dream land asking for all that.
Kill the Camaro, resurrect the solstice(put it under Chevy if that matters)
Kill the Hyundai Venue; resurrect the Veloster.
Kill the Jaguar E-Pace; resurrect the XK.
Kill the Kia K5; keep the Stinger alive (they haven’t ended production just yet)
Kill the Alfa Romeo Tonale (but keep the Dodge Hornet); resurrect the Brera.
Kill the Ford Edge; give the Evos to North America.
Kill the Toyota CH-R; bring back the Scion tC (as a Toyota, I guess)
I drive a Hyundai Venue (2020, manual transmission), and I feel I should put in a good word for it here. It’s small, handles well, gets excellent mileage, has ample interior space for people and cargo, and has physical buttons and switches for all of its entertainment and HVAC. It’s a good, cheap hatchback, and I think it gets a bad rap.
That being said, I don’t want the Veloster to go, either. Scrap the Tuscon, instead.
Also agree about the Scion tC, and any other models we can get resurrected.
Kill:
Jeep Compass
Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross
Nissan Rogue Sport
Infiniti QX30
Hyundai Santa Cruz
Resurrect:
Subaru Baja
Honda Element
Land Rover Freelander
Ford Flex
ALL OF SAAB
I’d kill anything to get back Saab
Kill any CUV, bring back the FD RX-7
kill the latest Defender, bring back the original Land Rover 90 and 110
Kill every Ford pickup and bring back the 300-I6.
kill off the whatever they still make; bring back the evo
But just not the Mirage please.
I came across one yesterday, and I more and more love its almost comically anachronistic, completely out of place, cheerful presence.
Honda can dump the HRV and bring back the Element. And the S2000 – we can use a few more of those!
Three quarters of SUVs can go away – there are way too many of them. Bring back the Volvo V70 and similar practical, fun-to-drive manual wagons. CUVs – the same thing. Bring back 3-door hatchbacks, and price ’em so people who need a good, fun, economical new car can afford them.
This one is too easy. Pick a random midsize CUV. Replace it with that same manufacturer’s sporty 2 door coupe from the past.
Usually of the same name! At least in the UK.
Mitsubishi Eclipse became the Eclipse Cross.
The Ford Cougar became the Ford Kuga. Meanwhile Ford also made the Puma into an SUV, and are rumoured to also be planning a Capri SUV too!
I’d also suggest killing the Mustang Mach-E and replacing it with an electric Mustang in the correct body style.
I would kill off the Silverado EV to keep the Bolt, with the caveat that there be an Express EV as well. Small city cars and multi-stop delivery vans are the ideal early use cases for electrification, not overweight midsize crossovers and even-more overweight lifestyle pickups. It’s just too damn bad they’re the most profitable.
Kill any SUV and bring back the wagon that came before it.
I’m not trying to play the “every SUV is bad for existing” card, well, I kind of am, but only because of the unjust death of the wagon because of them.
With the explosion in sales of fancy pickup trucks and full size SUVs, have we not established and reestablished and re-reestablished that Americans prefer large rear wheel drive vehicles? Why will no one but Chrysler and Dodge sell us one in actual automobile form? Are you going to tell me that people wouldn’t prefer, for example, to parallel park something roughly the size of a 1980s Chevy Caprice rather than a full size crew cab pickup truck?
Kill the current blazer and build a truck chassis version like they should of.
Don’t care what you kill just bring back 80s style Monte Carlos and a seriously mean SS.
I absolutely miss “personal luxury coupes”…big-ish boulevard cruisers with a dash of purposeful style and a big trunk.
And not just the domestics…the Acura Legend coupes are just ageless.
Agree! Bring back the Legend and the Integra, similar to their original concepts. And bring back car names, too – the heck with numbers and letters! There are still lots of good words left in the dictionary.
The “1983” in my username refers to my Thunderbird, so I’m right there with you!
Nah… We want / need the early Seventies Pontiac Grand Prix.
Kill:
Mercedes GLE.
Not because I hate it the most, but because it’s the most pointless car I can think of.
Who needs SUVs? Just lift another body style.
Who needs luxury SUVs? It’s just a noisier, worse handling way to have the same off-road prowess as an Allroad.
Who needs German luxury SUVs? Get something actually sporty, actually classy, or actually imposing instead of a doomed effort to combine all three.
Who needs a GLE? You don’t need the extra size over the GLC and if you want to flaunt cash there’s the GLS.
Resurrect:
Honda Element.
Again, not because I love it the most, but because it’s the most useful car I can think of. Hell, its owners just hold onto them because they can’t find anything else like it!
In a Golf’s footprint, it’s spacious enough for most 20ft SUV buyers, capable (on and off-road!) enough for most people buying 8 liter trucks “because they need them”, cheap, reliable, decent-handling, and full of personality!
Just make it electric (e-lement?) and bam! Even flatter load floor and a frunk to store your cabbage away from your sheep! (Or perhaps, since we’re resurrecting vehicles, the electric Motocompo Honda’s been teasing for decades at this point)
Hell, make the front seat swivel and the steering wheel fold upwards, and you’ve got a little living room! Add the folding table and have a square meal in a square car! Amazing!
Kill off the CTVQRXLDS and bring back the deVille, Fleetwood, and Eldorado.
Also, across all brands:
Kill: Alpha Numeric Naming
Bring Back: Actual Names
Why not get rid of cars that were made after rules and regulations were introduced and resurrect Model T? Make the marketplace a free for all, much like the Internet these days.
Kill any Stellantis offering (especially Chrysler or Dodge) and bring back the Honda Element, maybe this time as a hybrid. The only thing I didn’t like about mine was the fuel economy.
Kill off the Purosangue and bring back the Dino.
Kill off the Equinox EV and bring back a new, profitable Bolt. (Too soon?)
Kill off Buick, bring back Holden.
Only way they will bring back to Bolt is probably bring in a Made in China model.. much like what Tesla is rumoured to do with exporting the RWD Model Y from China to CAnada.
Does it seem a bit strange to anyone else that they would call their car the “Pureblood”?
It means “thoroughbred” in Italian. Which is the breed of horse pictured on Ferrari’s logo.
Congratulations, you now know more than a certain writer for a certain lighting website did (or bothered to learn) before unleashing an unhinged rant about racism and whatnot, and getting really upset when commenters pointed out ludicrous she was being.
Eh, I missed it, but I’ll defend where that rant likely came from. Literally translated as “pure blood” when split into its two root words as “puro sangue,” it reads kinda creepy, especially in today’s weird, backwards world where anti-vax nuts and racists alike bring up their allegedly “pure blood” to jerk off to into the middle of a big circle.
In the Italian-speaking market, yeah, folks will know it’s the word for thoroughbred. Outside Italy, though, some folks are gonna mix that up—especially folks who know just enough Italian to order a good pizza on vacation.
Ferrari’s going to sell every Purosangue they can make with a considerable waiting list to snag an allocation, so they could’ve named it the Ferrari Horngus Dongus and no one would’ve likely blinked—but it is still a weird product marketing decision to not consider the ways a model name might be misinterpreted in major markets abroad.
(Heck, naming it Horngus Dongus might’ve even driven a few calls to Tailor Made for custom badging/model name delete requests. That’s money. Call me, Ferrari—I can give y’all a LIST of funny-sounding words that could be read as euphemisms for schlong.)
You’re finding creepiness where none exists. Purosangue doesn’t mean pure blood. It means thoroughbred. If you know even a little Italian there’s zero ambiguity. If you don’t know any Italian then you’re probably not their customer. So there’s no risk for them, and they may as well name it something cool.
Yeeeeep. I think it’s supposed to be a horse reference, but what a genuinely creepy model name.
Kill the JL and revive the CJ5a.
Kill crossover SUVs and return to us a real station wagon.
CJ5a? You mean pre-’72 CJ5s?
GM giveth and GM taketh away. The next-gen Chevy Trax looks like it’s slowly morphing back into a station wagon.
So it’s not just me…I find if I squint a little, it looks kinda/sorta carlike.
I think this is happening to a lot of CUVs. Current Highlander looks much more wagonish that the boxy first gen.
Kill the Ranger to bring back the Ranger. Give it the same dimensions and such as it had in the 90s, but give it a better powertrain. Maybe the engine from the Maverick?
I know I’m late to the party but as a 5G ranger owner who started his automotive journey with a 01 ranger I almost have to disagree!
When I first drove the 5g I thought it was huge and I hated it, but eventually I decided that I needed/wanted a truck again and that the Tacoma was too weird to be so expensive (and when I was buying a truck the GM twins made no sense). I can park the 5g (mostly) comfortably here in Boulder, unlike a full-size, I can (and have) haul a ton of weight in the back thanks to its larger size compared to my old 01 (which hit the bump stops with a moderate load of lumber) and I can (and have) tow a pretty heavy trailer–as an example out of many I took a friend’s 6000k lbs trailer to Boise and back, doing 75 whenever the road permitted it and had no problems. Some of that is the better powertrain, yes, but part of it is being a little bit larger. The kicker is when I line it up to that 01 a friend drives now yes, it is a lot taller, but the footprint didn’t seem to be too much bigger in-person.
The current ranger, which is about as big as a full-size of about 30 years ago sure, is a great intermediate size between the maverik and an f150 and I think its great. If you’re saying that the f150 should have never gotten so big and we should just shuffle the names down a size (current ranger -> ideal f150, current maverick -> ideal ranger) I can roll with that but personally I think my truck is about as perfectly sized as it gets.
Kill: “Toyota” GR 86
Resurrect: “Scion” (Toyota) iQ
Interesting choices. Not sure a lot of other people would want to kill a rare sports car in favor of….. a worse smart car?
The GR 86 would still be available, just from your Subaru dealership.
The Scion iQ seats 4 and is FWD (which is really nice for a vehicle with such a short wheelbase) while turning nearly as tight as a Smart car. There were also lots made with manual transmission (sadly none of them were sold in the US though).
Kill the GR86 and bring back the MR2 with pop up headlights.
Easy. Kill Z4, bring back Triumph (BMW owns the nameplate. No EV. Small, cheap, roadster, RWD. Done.
Bring back a cheap no-nonsense spitfire! I love it!
This. A modernized GT6 coming in at less than Miata mass, less than Miata frontal area, less than Miata height, with a focus on drag reduction, would be lovely with a modern Supra engine. Give it sexy, smooth, wind-cheating curves, 14″ wheels, RWD with a 6-speed manual, and the smallest grille necessary for adequate cooling, not this angry face BS ubiquitous today. A 50 mpg car with 300 horsepower, weighing around 2,000 lbs, that can top nearly 200 mph, at a sub $30k price tag, is doable. It’s just that it will be very much a no-nonsense car with minimal features. AC and radio optional.
Then one can go trolling for supercars that cost 20x as much.
Kill off the lease special/poser mobile Audi Q3 and keep the TT alive
Infiniti: nix the QX50, bring back the original G35 sedan.
Nissan: go ahead and nix the Murano and bring back the Xterra – they killed it right before off-roading and overlanding went trendy again.
Mazda: the CX-5 is probably on its way out anyway; I know some will say bring back the 5, but I say bring back the MPV.
Subaru: reincarnate the Legacy as the SUS again. 100% ahead of its time now that the high-riding sedan is maybe becoming a thing – Crown, Evos…