Hipster is pretty universal; they just congregate more in certain areas.

ROFL! Perfect!

Are you willing to pay V8 Mustang money for it? Because that is what it would take.

The incentives are there in Europe for people to spend the money for smaller cars at profitable prices to the makers. Want the same thing here? Price gas, insurance, and taxes at comparable levels to Europe, and we would have a car fleet that looks like Europe.

The last few years, they were ALL turbos. And I love them dearly. Heck, I even loved the utterly base automatic 100hp Pop I rented that got me into them in the first place. SO MUCH FUN, you keep your foot pinned to the floor and let it rev, rev, rev. The average American won’t be caught dead in one. Amusingly, they…

They added chipped keys into all of them years ago. The Soul is a perfectly fine smallish car (I bought one for my aging mother last year, perfect for her use case) - but they aren’t small cars. They are tall and square while still having a low floor. It’s cheap because it’s a cheap car, with a base price last year of…

The problem is that smaller cars based on those platforms cost the same to produce as larger ones (more really, shrinks always cost more than expansions). But people won’t pay that much for small cars in the US. Why would they? Gas is cheap. Space is cheap - even our “crowded city centers” are not crowded at all…

I LOVED my ‘13 500 Abarth, and wish I had never sold it. But I am also a completely and utterly aberrational American when it comes to my tastes in cars in nearly every possible way. Average Americans buy cars by the pound, just like hamburger - the most they can get for the money.

The Probe was fully intended to *replace* the Mustang. That did not go as Ford planned obviously.

They would sell dozens. DOZENS!

Big pickups are the vehicle of choice everywhere that isn’t a city center for the vast majority of Americans. Even if they don’t have one, most WANT one.

There is no reason a Fit-sized car shouldn’t be perfectly comfortable on the highway too. The Europeans are quite good at that sort of thing.

That would shift the onus onto everyday Americans, which would get a whole slew of people unelected. Good luck with that.

It’s a well-designed feature of the American regulatory environment.

Americans, at least Americans who buy new cars, are relatively wealthy to *obscenely* wealthy.

They sell in tiny numbers, like every other legitimately small car. And they aren’t even all that small.

That has long since happened. “Small” today is what a mid-size to large car was when I was a kid in the ‘80s. We went from land yachts to the opposite extreme, and seemed to have settled to where we are now with the majority of vehicles sold either gigantic pickup trucks or “mid-size” but actually freaking huge…

The last small car American fell in love with was the VW Beetle. And relatively speaking, they didn’t actually sell that many. Every other small car was pretty much bought because you couldn’t afford anything bigger and better with very few exceptions.

More like everything needs black plastic cladding and a lift kit.

This is another bunch of “chicken and egg” cars. Many of these were never intended or produced to sell in more than tiny numbers. Though obviously the SSR was not meant to sell in big numbers but sold even worse than that. The ELR was a legit flop, as was the 500L. But certainly Alfa Romeo sold every 4C they bothered…