This was the sight that greeted me when I left work this afternoon: one of the least popular cars on the American market and the Camry-on-stilts that drives the most successful brand to debut in America since the Vietnam War. The Mazda2 is often used by automotive journalists as an example of The Car That Real People Don’t Buy despite the fact that it possesses the cardinal virtues of small size, light weight, and a responsive chassis.
The Lexus RX, on the other hand, is the most cynical effort in additional manufacturer profit since the Cadillac Cimmarron and is the upscale vehicle most often purchased by the people who don’t know a God-damned thing about cars.
It’s also obviously a hatchback. If the Venza is a mega-sized version of the “bread van” Civic generations of the mid and late Eighties, then the RX is the scaled-up five-door 1979 Civic of our era.
Once upon a time, cars like this were very popular, you know. So much so that the be-trunked versions of the Camry and Stanza seemed like odd curiosities when they started rotating around small-town auto show stages. The demise of the family hatchback seems preordained in retrospect but there was nothing inevitable about it. While it’s easy to blame CAFE for the awkward, unpleasant, and occasionally deadly transition from full-sized sedans to pickup-based SUVs, it’s much harder to figure out why the hatchback disappeared from family cars only to reappear on family cars that just happen to possess an additional two inches of entirely useless ground clearance.
Perhaps it was the fact that BMW and Mercedes-Benz never embraced hatchbacks, which marked the fifth door permanently as an accessory of the proletariat. The problem with that theory is that the Gran Touring BMWs are showroom poison, which suggests that Americans will only accept a hatchback if it comes with additional ground clearance.
Maybe what’s required is one really good regular hatchback to turn this thing around. My vote for such a device would be the Honda Crosstour. Make the new one better-looking. Don’t raise the suspension. Make the pricing attractive. See if people buy it. If it succeeded, Toyota would respond with the return of a hatchback Camry. At that point, Nissan would have no choice but to bring the Stanza back.
You know what would happen then, right? Anything the Japanese do, Ford will do two years later and GM will do seven years later. Close this browser right now, hop into the interstellar cold-storage chamber, come back in ten years. The world could be full of hatchbacks. You never know.
The post What’s Wrong With This Picture: Americans Don’t Buy Hatchbacks Edition appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
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