Nissan drives new nail in Detroit sedan coffin
When Nissan Motor’s redesigned Altima flagship goes on sale this week, it will pound another nail in the coffin of sedans built by companies based in and around Detroit — the city that invented the whole idea of family cars.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles stopped building sedans in the U.S. two years ago. Ford Motor plans to follow suit in 2020 but won’t bother to advertise sedans in the meantime.
With only General Motors left in Detroit still pursuing a full lineup of cars, Asian automakers have a pretty clear field and are poised to capture 88 percent of midsize car sales by 2022, up from 64 percent in 2012, according to Zohaib Rahim, a Cox Automotive analyst.
This car dominance is worth less to the Asian companies in 2018 than it used to be, since American consumers are still flocking to sport utility vehicles and crossovers.
Alan Baum, an independent auto analyst in Bloomfield Township, Mich., expects total U.S. car sales to drop to 4.0 million in 2023 from 7.1 million in 2012. Already last year, the traditional domestics’ car sales fell below their 2009 level, Baum said.
But Nissan, Honda and Toyota can withstand this decline better than their Detroit competitors, Baum said. That’s because their flexible factories can shift more easily from cars to crossovers — and perhaps back again if rising oil prices spark a sedan revival, he said.
The new Altima, for example, shares mechanical underpinnings with the Leaf electric sedan, the Murano crossover and the Pathfinder SUV. And even though Ford last month sold the most F-Series pickups in any August since 2005, Baum called Detroit’s car surrender a self-inflicted strategic weakness.
“The Nissan Altima, Honda Accord and Toyota Camry weren’t always big sellers,” Baum said. “They became big sellers as Detroit walked away from cars.”
Industrywide deliveries probably ran at an annualized pace, adjusted for seasonal trends, of 17.0 million in September, according to a Bloomberg News survey of nine analysts. That’s down from a year earlier, when many people in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, had to replace vehicles ruined by Hurricane Harvey.
The new Altima is longer, lower and wider than its predecessor, and even the most inexpensive versions come with an array of first-ever options, including all-wheeldrive and a ProPilot Assist package to help with braking and steering on highways.
Altima designer Ken Lee said that in the vehicle’s new look, he sought a performance-oriented, hug-theroad appeal that SUVs can’t match, and that might have struck buyers as tone deaf during the financial crisis.
“We can be a bit more flamboyant now,” Lee said, “but we still don’t want to freak people out.”