Auto segments that never caught on in America

We don’t want to get too abstract here, but have you ever wondered how we decided on the general shapes and body types you see on the street? How did we decide that limousines are about 1.20 meters high, 1.80 meters wide and 4.5 meters long? And why are pickups like the Ford Maverick the only vehicles you see with a cargo box in the back?

Take a look at the global automotive market and you’ll see that vehicles are shaped by a number of factors, including car requirements, emissions and safety regulations, economic realities and even the local climate. There are entire segments that only exist because of things like tax laws and import restrictions, and cars that we never get here in the US because of that. Here are some segments that simply never caught on in the US, whether for legal, economic or cultural reasons.

Shooting brakes

For many readers, this is the first time they have even seen this term. That alone could explain why this body type never caught on in the United States. The truth is that shooting brakes are somewhat of a niche segment even in their country of origin. The name is a mix of station wagon and coupe body styles and refers to horse-drawn wagons used to transport hunting teams or competitive shooters. A “brake” was a chassis with high pulling power and braking ability, so you got a “shooting brake”. There is some disagreement about the exact characteristics of a shooting brake, but “two-door station wagon” is as good a definition as any.

For an American driver, a shooting brake like a Volvo 480 is the worst of both worlds. They have the cramped layout of a two-door coupe with the unwieldy dimensions of a station wagon. In the UK it is a fuel-efficient alternative to larger sedans, minivans and SUVs such as the Range Rover.

In the US it solves a problem we don’t actually have. If we want more seats or more trunk space, we buy an SUV. If we want a coupe, we buy a coupe. The fact that minivans largely replaced station wagons in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the 21st century crossovers have largely eclipsed the minivan, leaving behind only a few models such as the Honda Odyssey and Chrysler Pacifica, underscores this different priorities between English and American drivers. Basically, gas is cheaper here, and if we want a bigger car, we just buy a bigger car.

Coupe commercial vehicles

The term “commercial vehicle” doesn’t even mean the same thing in every country. In Australia, for example, pretty much anything that is capable of off-road use is called a “ute” (pronounced: “ute”) Yoot). To clarify, we are talking about this coupe Commercial vehicles are cars like the El Camino, Subaru Brat and Ford Ranchero. Coupe utility vehicles have been tested more than a few times in the United States, and cars like the Ford Durango and Dodge Rampage have their fans, but subways have always been a fairly small segment in the United States and they’ve been practical ever since disappeared El Camino was retired in 1987.

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The answer to this question is pretty simple: compact trucks exist. In the late 1980s, Americans had their choice between the Toyota pickup, Ford Ranger, Chevy S10, and Mazda B-Series, to name a few. These trucks were typically cheaper and more fuel efficient than coupe utility vehicles. For example, a 1987 El Camino started at an MSRP of around $11,000, while an entry-level 1987 Ford Ranger could be had for less than $7,000. At the end of the decade you could barely buy a car And A truck at the price of the strange car-truck compromise, so the ute, whose appeal in the US was already limited, naturally fell out of fashion.

Tiny cars

We have our share of small cars here in the US, but tiny would be far-fetched. You can buy an eleven-foot Fiat 500, and the mostly forgotten Scion iQ was just ten feet long from nose to tail. What we’ve never seen at real production levels in the US is anything that can compete with the Japanese kei car market or European subcompacts.

If you ask most people why this is, they will tell you, “Americans like big cars,” but does that argument really hold water? The two-seat Porsche 911 is a dream car for many Americans, and we bought 11,728 of them in 2023. Ford’s smallest truck, the Maverick, sold 94,058 units last year, and 135,199 units will be sold by mid-October in 2024. We don’t necessarily need the largest possible vehicles here. A better question might be how cars got there So tiny in Japan and Europe.

Japanese drivers pay taxes based on vehicle size

You can’t just buy a car in Japan. You must rent or own a private parking space before you can even pay a deposit, and taxation depends on the size of your car. And taxes don’t just apply to the sales price and registration fees. Every April, Japanese motorists pay a tax assessed that fiscal year just for owning a car, with the proceeds used for road maintenance.

The exact tax rate you pay on your car varies from year to year, but larger cars are always subject to a higher tax rate than smaller ones, with the starting sales tax at 5% for a typical sedan, or 3%. for a kei car. In America, sales tax isn’t affected by size class, so we don’t really need kei cars like the Honda Beat (and they don’t make much sense on American highways anyway).

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The post-war European microcars were the result of limited resources

Why else would you build a three-wheeled car that fits in the trunk of a Toyota? We can’t imagine any manufacturing manager rightly believing that clown cars are the future of the automotive industry. Given the limited resources available in the post-war economy, motorcycles became very popular in Europe because of their low fuel consumption and lower tax rates. Small cars also had the same advantages, but they could run with lower fuel consumption – than ideal weather. Meanwhile, gas prices in the US remained fairly stable during this time. In 1949 we spent 27 cents a gallon and in 1969 it was 31 cents a gallon. In England, gas costs have more than doubled over the same period.

Subcompact cars experienced an initial boom that lasted into the 1950s, ending with manufacturers such as Mini, Fiat and Renault eventually displacing the segment by producing agile, affordable city cars with far more power under the hood in the late 1950s and early 1960s brought the hood onto the market. including the Renault 4, the Mini Cooper and the Fiat Nuova 500. The Renault 4’s original 1961 engine, a 21hp 3MT, wasn’t exactly a Cobra Jet, but placed it alongside a 1949 single-cylinder Bond five-hp Minicar , and the 4 is practically a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. It’s no wonder the Brits fell out of love with subcompact cars when these larger, cheaper cars came on the market, and it’s no wonder Americans didn’t care as much about European cars until they made something that was large enough to accommodate a driver And at the same time a pack of cigarettes.