Comment by Tanoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tanoc | Hacker News Reader

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This is true to a ridiculous extent.

Ford has no compact hatchback or sedan in the U.S., only the Brazilian built EcoSport. They killed all their cars in favour of CUVs and SUVs. Chevrolet no longer has the Sonic, having nixed those in 2022. Honda no longer has the Fit as of two years ago. Mitsubishi no longer sells the Mirage as of last month. Dodge hasn't had anything since the Dart died in 2016. The Jeep Renegade's gone as of October of last year. Hyundai had the Veloster, but those are all sold as top trim Veloster Turbo Premiums or Ns even when they were being sold. The current Hyundai Ioniq 5 is more of a mid-size and is also expensive for the size. Kia has the Forte, but it's dragging out a slow death this year. Toyota has the Yaris and Prius C, but the Yaris has grown quite large, and the Prius C is quite high priced. Nissan killed the Versa Note in 2022, so you can't get those either.

It's all been replaced with "compact" CUVs that have the exterior dimensions of a mid-size hatchback.

I have heard people lamenting the loss of small trucks for 20 years. There has never been another one as small or as light as a Ford Ranger or Toyota RN Pickup from the 90s. Rangers stopped being made and the Tacoma that replaced the Pickup got larger every model year until it was bigger and heavier than the original Tundra. It really is ridiculous because people love the utility of those smaller, more efficient old trucks. (More efficient relative to their contemporaries, at the very least. Other efficiency improvements would have come to them as well, if they still existed as a category.) Not everyone wants a land barge.

I grew up with my father's 84' Ranger. 2 seater. Everything else looked big by comparison. And many had a smaller bed!

A Renault Kangoo has twice the storage space as a F-150. One of those fits in the street parking spaces around here. The other sticks out a significant amount on all sides.

Big american SUVs are not only big. They are also just badly designed.

I bought a Ford Maverick a few weeks back and absolutely loving it. It’s the size of what used to be the Ranger before the Ranger grew to be an F150, the F150 grew to be an F250, and so on.

To even add more embarrassingly for Ford:

https://www.ford.com/cars/fusion/

The "Explore All Sedan Vehicles" button links to the "Ford SUVs" section.

>>Ford has no compact hatchback or sedan in the U.S., only the Brazilian built EcoSport. They killed all their cars in favour of CUVs and SUVs.

Have I got some bad news for you... It seems the EcoSport is also dead ( https://www.ford.com/suvs-crossovers/ecosport/ )

Sedans are useless. I consider them car evolution dead end. They take as much road space as their counterparts, but carry less.

Hatchback, universal, minivan, suvs are much more practical.

Carry less of what? It's the same number of people inside.

Cargo

The specific noun to distinguish "car" from "truck" is "personbil" in Swedish, and "Personenkraftwagen" ("PKW") in German. Guess why.

There are actually quite a few reasons why sedans stuck around.

One is separation of the passenger cabin from the cargo area. More than once I've accidentally bonked someone in the head putting something in the hatch or have had a dog escape because they managed to leap over the seat and get out through the open hatch. It's also easier to hide valuables in the trunk, as there's no indication anything's in there unlike the open rear deck of a hatchback you can see through the windows.

Another is lower center of gravity. There's not a large chunk of metal and glass above the beltline. This helps handling characteristics and makes it easier to engineer predictable patterns for the suspension. It also helps tire wear as there's less lateral force on the sidewall from the lowered center of gravity.

There's also the structural rigidity. Sedans have a slightly higher structural rigidity to them than hatchbacks due to the three box shape creating cross bracing. It makes it easier to engineer them to survive a crash without harming the occupants.

And lastly there's aerodynamics. Many hatchback designs in the modern era are extremely rounded for stylistic reasons. This is terrible for aerodynamic efficiency compared to a proper Kammback rear design. A sedan with a properly designed rear windshield and trunk actually has far less parasitic drag because it creates a much smaller area of low pressure air directly at the farthest rear edge of the vehicle. Unless you drive a Ford Fiesta sedan, in which case you're getting the worst of everything. If you've ever seen those monstrosities that BMW calls an "X5 Coupe" this is them trying and failing to apply the Kammback aerodynamics of a modern sedan to an SUV.

> More than once I've accidentally bonked someone in the head putting something in the hatch or have had a dog escape because they managed to leap over the seat and get out through the open hatch.

There a basic nets and if one is extreme cages which separate the boot from the second row.

> It's also easier to hide valuables in the trunk, as there's no indication anything's in there unlike the open rear deck of a hatchback you can see through the windows.

Pretty much every hatchback I've seen in the last 20 years here in Europe has a removable cover.

> [Ford] killed all their cars in favour of CUVs and SUVs.

They still sell one car -- the Mustang.

The mustang also comes in an SUV format now in addition to the sports car format.

They're spinning Mustang off into a sub-brand, like Chrysler did for Imperial. We're set to get a Mustang "offroader" sometime in 2027, and there's rumblings of a mid-size CUV to slot below the full-size Mach-E. Marketing loves these rub-off schemes meant to give inferior or fledgling products some of the shine of a halo product. They almost always end up failing, and even when they don't they damage the halo products after the first round of releases using the shared name.

I think the marketing term is 'line extension'. It very rarely seems like a good idea. As you say, even if it makes money in the short term, it almost certainly loses money by damaging the brand in the long term.

Ah, but you admit there's a possibility of short term profit, and as you may know, that's what matters to decision makers.

Hyundai has Elantra with its 45+ MPG (with a regular ICE), distinctive exterior, advanced safety features (at least in Limited trim), and above average manufacturer warranty.

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