Detroit Wants to Make Cars Normal Again

Americans are fascinated by tall cars. We will pay handsomely for luxury pickups, pedestrian-annihilating SUVs, and even these oddities called “crossover SUVs” that are like normal cars if someone stretched the jpeg vertically but not horizontally.

Data show that we Americans would also, however, buy normal cars, also known as sedans, if we could. It’s just that the American car companies don’t make them anymore. Fortunately, this drought may be on the verge of ending, according to a recent story from the Wall Street Journal.

“In exiting sedans, Detroit effectively admitted defeat in a decadeslong struggle to keep pace with foreign rivals like Toyota, Hyundai and Honda for entry-level car shoppers,” the Journal notes. But the leaders of the big Detroit automakers are thinking of fixing that.

At a recent event, Mark Reuss, the president of General Motors said, “I would kill to have a hybrid-electric sedan,” and that his company is “working on how to do that.”

Chrysler CEO Chris Feuell, the Journal notes, said last year that his company is working on a $30,000 small car that we should expect to “be beautiful and fun to drive and aspirational.”

The CEO of Ford, Jim Farley said quite correctly that “The sedan market is very vibrant,” but added, “It’s not that there isn’t a market there. It’s just we couldn’t find a way to compete and be profitable.”

Farley is getting at the essential fact underlying this problem: tall cars cost extra, and people pay extra. Normal cars cost…normal.

Kelley Blue Book said a week ago that the average new car MSRP is, somehow, $51,288. Ford, for its part, has just seen its sales slump—and conventional wisdom holds that the politics around EV prices are to blame. But it started to sink in for auto makers last year that Americans are also just looking for something cheaper at a time when cars are only getting pricier.

And yet, the Journal says that according to a data firm called Motor Intelligence, the category “passenger cars,” accounted for half of all sales of new cars in about 2010, but amazingly that portion plunged to 18% in 2025.

Robby DeGraff of the consumer analysis firm AutoPacific told The Drive yesterday that in a fairly impressive study of 18,000 consumers, over a third of those who are in the market for a car say they would consider a midsize or large sedan.

Cars could use a reset. Everything’s computer, as the president noted last year, and you have to add your own buttons just to feel something. Too often, they are shrieking monsters, moving around with no one inside them.

Now is the time for car companies to stop being weird and roll out some Sebrings, Tauruses, and Cobalts. The executives want to make them, and customers want to buy them. What’s the holdup?