Lee is right that small cars HAVE had some modest success in the US, mostly for non-US manufacturers.
I think the problem is that US automakers just don't want to bother with modest success. Maybe it's not entirely that they don't want to, but also that they can't. In recent decades we've seen large institutional stockholders demanding ever larger short-term returns. If the execs deliver them, they're rewarded with eye-watering salaries, bonuses, and stock options. If they don't, they're shown the door. That's an incentive to forget next year, let alone next decade, and focus on the highest possible profits for this quarter. Hence bigger vehicles, which yield bigger profits. Willie wonders why that's so. I'm not an insider, but I think it's because a lot of the cost of building vehicles is labor, and it doesn't take much if any less labor to build a small car than a large one. But buyers perceive more value in a large vehicle, so large vehicles can be priced higher relative to production cost. I might add parenthetically that I think one reason that Detroit is so hot for pickup trucks is that "new" models are even cheaper than cars to develop. Pickups haven't fundamentally changed since Ford added independent front suspension in 1965, so there's no significant engineering. Tweak the sheet metal a little; make new grille and taillight molds; raise the suspension another 2"; add more exhaust rumble, big phallic tailpipes, and some chrome trim; et voila - a "new" pickup with a 10% higher price. The world event that turbocharged US small-car sales was the 1974 Mideast oil embargo. It caught GM, Ford, and Chrysler flat-footed. They had square miles of lots filled with 13mpg bloatmobiles, and no small efficient cars that anyone wanted to buy. (Can you say "Ford Pinto" and "Chevy Vega"?) Toyota and Nissan stepped in with 28mpg cars (1974 Nissan billboard: "Datsun saves - about a gallon a day") and the US discovered how GOOD Japanese vehicles were. GM/Ford/Chrysler lost market share and positioning that they never fully recovered. Today it might be corporate attitude or their stockholders, but whatever it is, GM, Ford, and Fiat/Chrysler just don't seem to give a hoot about EVs. Look here and tell me if you see them anywhere: https://carsalesbase.com/european-sales-2020-q1-ev-phev/ (In case you don't know, GM sold Opel to the French PSA Group in 2017.) I can't say for sure that we'll have an EV-boosting equivalent of the 1974 oil embargo, or when, though I'm pretty sure the world's oil supply isn't infinite. But if and when something like that does happen, the big three (and maybe Toyota too this time) are going to get blindsided again. That's when Tesla will become the #1 US automaker, provided that they have a nice range of EVs that the world still wants, and haven't sold out, moved to China, or been sued into oblivion. David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Nowadays it's not important if a story's real. The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it. -- Neetzan Zimmerman of Gawker = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
