Get your limo while you still can.
The Toyota Avalon, Mazda 6 and Volkswagen Passat will soon be added to the rapidly growing list of sedans sent into automotive exile. One reason for this is certainly the unbroken appetite of Americans for sport utility vehicles and trucks. Other? Electric vehicles, say some experts.
“Sports cars and limos were already on the edge of the cliff,” Joe Wiesenfelder, editor-in-chief at Cars.com, told ABC News. “EVs can be responsible for giving them the last nudge.”
Ford, Lincoln and Chrysler have long since given up the sedan segment. Other automakers are likely to follow suit.
“If car manufacturers direct their attention to other things, something is lost and it is mostly the products that are already at risk,” says Wiesenfelder. “Automakers are giving up a mold – no need. Midsize cars are now a small SUV.”
Stephanie Brinley, an analyst at IHS Markit, argued that EVs are now the reason automakers are shunning sedans and stopping long-term models.
“Sedans and sports cars will be gone a little longer,” she wrote recently in a LinkedIn post. “It’s sad to me that these guys are being pushed by the need to invest in electric vehicles and electrification.”
The Passat will be discontinued in the USA by 2023.
According to Brinley, sales of SUVs and crossovers accounted for 51% of the US market in 2020, down from 30.2% in 2020. Sedan sales are reversed: 22.6% in 2020 versus 46.2% in the year 2010.
“If we don’t deal with the cost of [electric vehicle] During the transition period, some sedans can survive even in small numbers, “Brinley told ABC News.” Electric vehicles are capital-intensive and expensive. The money for product development goes into electric vehicles. “
Jalopnik editor-in-chief Rory Carroll said automakers have one goal: to make money.
“If you invest in something, you are not going to take money from products that are sold,” he told ABC News. “Sports cars and sedans – these aren’t sold right now. Automakers sell cars.”
Michael Tripp, vice president of vehicle marketing and communications for Toyota North America, defended the Avalon’s 28-year production run, saying the large sedan had a “layered history” with 30,000 units sold annually. His swamp? SUVs.
“What drives car churn isn’t a government mandate or what automakers do – it’s customer taste,” Tripp told ABC News. “The [large sedan] Segment is down 70% to 75% in the past four or five years. It has nothing to do with the Avalon’s powertrain. It has to do with the segment. “
The pandemic – and not the electric vehicles – has likely accelerated the slipping of sedans, according to Autoweek editor Natalie Neff.
“Automakers have moved away from this segment for a while,” she told ABC News. “People didn’t buy sedans … that’s why Ford dropped out of automobiles a few years ago.”
She also added, “The practicality of a sedan is far less than that of a crossover. It’s not that the sedan is more powerful or fuel efficient or useful.”
Production of the Avalon, Toyota’s large sedan, will end in August 2022.
More and more Americans are slowly starting to get electric. Brinley said battery electric vehicle registrations accounted for 2.4% of the U.S. market for the first six months of 2021 and 1.8% last year. IHS Markit predicts that 32% of US light vehicle sales will be BEVs by 2030.
“Electric vehicles have not been widely accepted in the market, in part because their development has been geared towards straight-ahead travel,” said Carroll of Jalopnik. “It’s a cool trick, but not a driving experience. My mother would be afraid to drive so fast.”
A Porsche Taycan electric car charges in front of a Porsche SE showroom in Berlin on August 9, 2021.
Ten years ago, few Americans were interested in electric vehicles when General Motors launched the Bolt and Volt, Wiesenfelder said. But government policy and an industry push back up these billion dollar bets.
“It is a gamble to give up future product plans for anything but electric vehicles,” admitted Wiesenfelder. “The last big push failed. Not this time. Other manufacturers are involved.”
Brinley still believes sedans have a place in the crowded automotive market. Electric cars may be trending now, she said, but a lot is at stake.
“For many consumers, electric vehicles are still a mystery. It will be some time before they are adopted, ”she said. “It’s going to be a very long transition despite the hype.”
