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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The Atom is like the 737 MAX.

American car manufacturers have shown no interest at all in selling small cars but have been forced to by regulators. Thus the Nova, Chevette, Cobalt, Sonic, Neon, Gremlin and other names you don't remember.

Honda and Toyota could not stop making the Civic and Corolla if they tried -- if they did stop for a year they would see people buying 3 year old cars at new prices and be shocked at the money they are leaving on the table. (Honda in particular has been trying to phase out the Fit for the CR-V but they may not have the discipline to be able to do it.)

Atom is a Chevy Nova that is being marketed as if it were a Toyota Corolla. Crap like that should be forgotten in six months, not waved around to remind you how bad it is.

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Thus the Nova, Chevette, Cobalt, Sonic, Neon, Gremlin and other names you don't remember.

Three of these models have seen refreshes and a resurrection in the market in the last generation, dunno if your intent was to suggest they don’t exist anymore and were forever lost to history but they do but they most definitely were not.

They are also forced to by market realities (which you bring up). They can't just ratchet up the prices to where they would get the same margin as for an SUV. But many people can't afford that.

The big 3 made a conscious decision to get rid of their cars because they constantly had to do incentives to make them sell. Compare and contrast to the Japanese makers who tend to be less likely to do so. IMO they weren't selling as many fits as they wanted, and my gut also tells me the new trade agreement may have had an impact (I will admit I haven't dug into it and checked the foreign content and if it would be out of range.)

Heck, Subaru actually moved their US Impreza production to be domestic. If a few players stick to the car market for a while I feel like they will be rewarded for doing so. Not everyone wants the extra cost of an SUV.

Really?

When I go to a "car" dealer it seems the cars are all sold out but they have a long line of SUVs on deep discounts.

My dad would go to American car dealerships in the 1970s and they would refuse to sell him a small car. Every time I've been in an American car dealership since it has been the same story except for a small window after 2008 when you might find a small car.

Last time I went to a Honda dealership the Fits were all sold out because the factory washed out but they had plenty of CR-Vs made in the same factory.

US manufacturers can’t make small cars profitably with their labor costs, but are required to sell them because of CAFE. They are only going to make enough to reduce their CAFE costs, no more.

Right.

So I am sick and tired of the media repeating that "Americans don't want to buy small cars" when the fact is that "American car manufacturers don't want to sell small cars."

The problem is the big three have massive pension costs inflating their assembly costs. For them, it makes perfect sense to focus on larger cars, SUVs and trucks where cost of assembly is way lower proportion of sales costs.

It's probably time to reevaluate that opinion. Apollo Lake/Gemini Lake are extremely competent little chips. The latest uarch puts them around a Core2Quad performance, perfectly acceptable for light desktop usage scenario.

I've been using one all summer for web browsing/citrix/etc so I don't have to run my big gaming rig in the summer heat, and it's been great. There's a seller on Amazon who has been clearing out the NUC7PJYH (J5005 based) off and on for the last year or so for $125 and I've picked up a couple. Despite the official spec they do support 16GB of memory and they also have the new media block with HDMI 2.0b support and HEVC 10-bit decode, they are super great for the price.

Funny you said that about the Chevy Nova...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Fift...

It is the genius of GM that they sold Toyotas and also that they did a joint venture to take their carmaking to the Japanese level.

I remember the chevette being a very popular car that was partly responsible for bridging GM out of a sales slump in the 70s. Two oil shocks did a real number on the market for heavy cars.

I'm not really old enough to remember, but as I recall the chevette was sold at a slight loss because it got the fleet fuel mileage numbers up allowing GM to sell more expensive gas guzzlers. Of course profit is weird and it is hard to account for everything.

The Chevette was hugely popular in Europe as marketed by Opel and Vauxhall, part of the GM empire. Effectively it was an Opel sold in the US rather than an American car sold in Europe.

The Sonic is also an Opel designed platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_Gamma_platform

I think part of the problem is that so many North American Chevettes (and their Pontiac equivalents, the 1000 and Acadian) where sold with a 3-speed automatic transmission that made them unbelievably slow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMsXLYFU0pU&feature=youtu.be...

I generally don't care too much about performance. I was completely happy with the performance of my '85 Toyota Tercel with 65hp. But I don't think I could handle 0-60 in 30 seconds...

Yes, that's just too slow. The same car with a stick shift did just fine.

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