Chart Of The Day: Compact Class Turmoil In May

Side note: I heard that podcast, and while I really like Terry O'Reilly, I think he got that one somewhat wrong. People don't sell to older folks because the current crop of older folks don't see themselves as old, and absolutely won't buy something targed as such. This is interesting, because the next group up (Gen-X) by and large self-identifies as "old" more than the Boomers do. The reason advertising targets the young was classically because the young were are more lucrative market (which is less and less the case as time marches on), but now it's because of self-denialism on the part of an ageing population. Or, to put it in car terms, you could probably sell a Buick to a Gen-Xer with greater ease than you could a Boomer, whereas the reverse would be true of, say, the Camaro. Now, whether or not Advertising is the cause or effect of this, that's a different topic. And +1 for mentioning Age of Persuasion---it's a great show.

Yeah, O'Reilly's show is great. I think the only people with any real spending money are those far enough along that their kids have moved out of the house. Also, psarhjinian, you may well be right about the Boomers, but however young we might be (or feign to be) in mind or spirit, anyone who is not marketing to all those aging bodies has made a major error, because they are the ones who tend to be far enough along that their kids have moved out of the house. p.s., I'm at the tail end of the Boomers myself, but I still have very young kids (I was a late starter in the family department), so I don't fall clearly into either of the categories mentioned above.

They still have the Golf for people who want the old-school VW mojo (and are willing to accept buying a hatchback and rolling the VW reliability dice.)

The 'crapbox' Corolla is a car that actually works. It isn't the bland that sells it, it is Toyota's 40 years of not building Volkswagens.

@MoppyMop Every time I see one, I look longingly at the Mk6 Golf, and then remember the servicing I had to do on my Mk1 GTi. I think the key problem is that the Golf's proposition is interior quality and practicality, but in the age of the internet, people are attuned to things like specs and reliability. The Mk6 GTi makes a fairly solid unique selling proposition (USP) for itself, and the diesel models if you live in an appropriate area, but not so much for the cars underneath it. Take your typical gas powered Golf... roughly the same size as Civic but weighs as much as an Accord, and gets similar milage to boot. Shame, really. What i would really want is a car like the Fit, quality and magic seats and all, but with the size and interior quality of the Golf.

re: USA Today says the Focus is noisy. It's a good point showing the subjectivity of cars and the limitation of reviews. Jack Baruth said the Focus is as quiet as it should be, while Michael Karesh said both "the quantity and quality of the noise that enters the cabin suggest a premium car." Obviously everybody needs to test drive themselves, but I have the perception that TTAC reviews are much more thoughtful than the competition.

@vbofw I've driven the Focus and really liked it. I thought it was fairly refined as compacts go, and actually reminded me a little of the Golf/Jetta family, at least on the positive side of the slate (which, interestingly enough, were also always thought to be refined, but slightly overpriced).

The intermediate Fairlane, and then the Mustang, killed Falcon sales. People forget that most of the early Mustangs were sold with sixes or mild-mannered, base V-8s. Sales of compacts as a whole were weak from about 1964 until the early 1970s, as the intermediates and ponycars stole sales from the segment. As intermediates became more bloated, and the ponycars emphasized performance with big V-8s and bigger size, compact sales rebounded in the 1970s - led by the Maverick, Duster/Demon/Dart Sport and Nova. The Maverick sold well in the 1970s, until it the Granada debuted. What killed it was an in-house competitor. The Pinto also sold well throughout the 1970s. Sales were even good in 1979, when it was seriously long in the tooth, and stories about the fuel-tank fires were in the news. The Focus sold well at first, dipped in the wake of the recall fiasco, and then rebounded with the 2008 redo. It doesn't look to me as though sales of Ford's small cars fade immediately after a good year or two. If anything, with most of these cars, sales remained strong until Ford introduced an in-house competitor that stole customers from the older sibling. The exception is the Focus, which sputtered because of the early recalls and quality problems, but it did eventually recover after a redesign and several years of quality improvements.

@geeber Good points, and hence my comment above about the C-Max.

I'm amused that the general consensus of the comments section below the article is that Healey is an old coot whose complaints are either baseless (engine noise, it sounds good to me in the video as well) or miss the point of the car altogether. I'll give the man the right to his opinion, but the bit in the video of him using the MyFord Touch system shows yet another reviewer who misses the point of the system entirely. There is a lot on the screen, and a lot of small buttons, yes, but that's why the system has so many built in shortcuts and excellent voice recognition - you aren't supposed to be fiddling with the screen while you are driving. Use the screen to set up your shortcuts and delve into the deeper functions while stopped, but while driving anything you would ever need to do can be accomplished with a simple voice command without taking your eyes off of the road or your hands off of the wheel.