The Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, and Hyundai Elantra are still out there, holding down the sedan fort. But ask American car buyers what they actually want more of, and the answer lands like a fist on a boardroom table: sedans, from the companies that abandoned them.
Jalopnik put the question to its readers this week, asking which automakers need to step up with more four-door offerings. The responses weren’t polite suggestions. They were indictments.
Ford caught the most heat, and deservedly so. The company that once sold the Taurus in numbers that would make a Toyota accountant blush now offers exactly zero sedans in the U.S. market. Readers floated everything from a four-door Mustang with a V8 to a modern body-on-frame successor to the Panther platform, the bones beneath the Crown Victoria that Ford killed off in 2011 and never truly replaced.
Mazda drew similar fire. The company that gave us the Miata when nobody asked for a roadster could, readers argued, channel that same contrarian energy into a spiritual successor to the Protege or the 929. A playful compact sedan and a refined highway cruiser would fit Mazda’s tradition of building cars nobody knew they needed.
Rivian surfaced as a more surprising pick, but the logic is airtight. There is no compelling EV sedan for buyers who refuse to send money to Elon Musk. Rivian already builds desirable electric vehicles with real engineering credibility, and a sedan would slot right into the gap Tesla’s brand toxicity has created.
The most detailed case came for Buick. With Cadillac’s CT5 and Blackwing confirmed for another generation on the Alpha 2 platform, readers connected the dots. Buick could share those underpinnings for a reborn Regal, complete with a turbo V6 and even a Grand National variant.
The old Regal TourX wagon was adored by journalists and ignored by buyers, but the math may have changed. Mercedes sells every E450 All-Terrain it allocates to the U.S., and BMW is pushing back into wagons with the M5 Touring. A Buick wagon and a full-size Roadmaster revival on a stretched platform aren’t as crazy as they sound.
The Detroit Three collectively took a beating. One reader put it bluntly: by surrendering the entry-level sedan market to Honda, Toyota, and Kia, GM, Ford, and Chrysler didn’t just lose first-time buyers. They lost second and third purchases too. Brand loyalty starts somewhere, and it usually starts cheap.
Then there were the dreamers. Someone wanted Saab back. Another nominated Pagani, arguing that if sedans are going extinct, they might as well go out in a blaze of Italian carbon fiber.
A plea for Saturn — cheap, plastic-paneled, and unapologetically basic — hit a nerve that no marketing department in Detroit wants to acknowledge. Millions of Americans just need affordable, efficient transportation, and nobody is building it for them.
The thread reveals something the sales charts obscure. Crossover dominance wasn’t purely organic demand. It was manufactured by automakers chasing fatter margins and simpler product portfolios.
They stopped building sedans, declared nobody wanted them, then pointed at the sales numbers as proof. Physics hasn’t changed, though. A lower, sleeker shape still cuts through air more efficiently than a tall box.
That matters more than ever in the EV era, where aerodynamic drag directly eats range. And aging buyers who struggle to climb into jacked-up crossovers aren’t going to get younger.
The sedan didn’t die of natural causes. It was killed. And the people who loved it know exactly who pulled the trigger.
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