'The Supremacy of Japanese Cars Has Been 40-Plus Years In the Making' (bloomberg.com)

American business journalist Joe Nocera writes in a Bloomberg article about "how badly things have deteriorated for the U.S. car makers," after the recent news that both General Motors and Ford will soon be exiting the sedan market in the country. Slashdot reader gollum123 shares the report: Much of the analysis about Ford and GM's exit from the sedan market stressed that sedan sales have lost ground in recent years "as consumers have gravitated toward pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles," as the New York Times put it. If you look at the historical sales figures of the top Japanese sedans, you'll see a small decline in recent years, but nothing like the big drop-off in sales that have hammered the American companies. So in addition to the overall decline in sedan sales, there is a second, largely overlooked, dynamic taking place: Americans have only stopped buying American sedans, not Japanese sedans. The American car companies now say they are going to count on profits from trucks and SUVs while moving toward autonomous and all-electric vehicles. They had better hope that transition takes place quickly.

I couldn't help noticing that while the top three selling vehicles in the U.S. are, indeed, American-made trucks, No. 4 on the list is Nissan's top SUV, the Rogue, the sales of which have gone from 18,000 in 2007 to 403,000 last year. No. 5 is a Toyota SUV, the Rav4 (407,000 in 2017). No. 6 is the Honda CR-V (378,000). And the leading American SUV? It's the Chevy Equinox. Last year, Chevrolet sold 290,000 of them -- 100,000 fewer than the Toyota Camry.

Comments

duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Honda just hit 300k miles. You'd be lucky to get 80k from a GM or Chrysler

Re:duh

[viperidaenz]

And it's on it's 3rd battery, after only 3 years.

Re: duh

[Type44Q]

Googling-up Honda+defective+transmissions clearly exceeds to the capacity of your intellect. The sixth resultsixth result was more than relevant.

Dumb, lazy fuck.

Re:duh

[dryeo]

Which is usually when the trannies go. I've got one with a 5 speed and 420,000 kms on it. I've also known of quite a few, including my last one that lost their capability to move at just under 300,000 kms due to tranny problems, and like so many modern cars, replacing the tranny is an unreasonably large job, as in the first step is remove cab.
After driving Japanese trucks, having something that dies at 300,000 kms is quite a let down, and having worked on both, all I can say is "what the fuck were those Ford engineers smoking?".
First F150 I owned kept blowing its brake light fuse, finally traced it down to the brake light wire running up the steering column, through the little u-joint, where turning the wheels rubbed the insulation off. Fixing that was fun, steps like remove the plug from this wiring harness, keeping track of which of the 20 odd wires went to which pin, then pull the wires through the column. Couldn't even wrap them all into one bundle either.

Attempting to work on any new vehicle has become insane, between the computer buses being overloaded with stuff causing a bad radio to stop the vehicle running to spark plugs that need the engine pulled to replace or just read about the latest Toyota Truck where you had to remove the top of the engine to replace the starter. Even that F150 I had that lost its tranny, had the rear plugs so far under the cab that they were almost impossible to work on and you really needed a $500 tool around for when the plugs broke when removing (carbon with plugs longer then the threads).

Doom and gloom

[PGaries]

According to https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-gm-plant-closing-restructuring-20181126-story.html, six models were scrapped at GM: the Buick LaCrosse, the Cadillac CT6/XTS, and the Chevrolet Cruze/Volt (but not the similarly-named all-electric Chevrolet Bolt).

There are still a number of other sedans listed at https://www.gmfleet.com/overview/cars.html including the Buick Regal/Verano, Cadillact ATS/CTS, Chevrolet Bolt/Impala/Malibu/Sonic/Spark, so "exiting the sedan market" seems to be a bit of an exaggeration unless more model cancellations are planned.

The real story here is the job losses and a man in the White House who sold people on the idea that he alone could wave a wand and magically fix them (which means we also get to credit him with a failure to do so).

It's 100% about tarrifs not build quality

[goombah99]

The reason the US car makers favor trucks is that the japanese trucks have a 25% tarrif since 1973. It's much more profitable for US automakers so they emphasize this category over the thin margins on sedans. Additionally one has to consider the labor and material costs. For some cost structures it's much better to sell one high ticket item over two smaller ticket items, favoring the production of trucks over cars.