From tail-finned land yachts of the 1960s to hulking family haulers in the 1980s and then the 1990s bestseller Ford Taurus, driving for Americans meant driving a sedan.
Then SUVs and trucks won over drivers’ hearts and garages. Ford axed its sedan lineup in 2018. Chrysler-parent Stellantis essentially scrubbed its showrooms of passenger cars. The last General Motors mass-market sedan rolled off the line at its Kansas City, Kan., plant in November 2024—a cherry red Chevy Malibu.
But today drivers want lower prices and the automakers are considering the once-unthinkable: bringing back sedans.
“I would kill to have a hybrid-electric sedan,” General Motors President Mark Reuss said during a recent company town hall. “We’re working on how to do that.”
Across town, executives at Ford are studying if a new assembly line set to go up in Kentucky next year could build not just small electric pickups, but sedans as well. Dealers for years have peppered the automaker with pleas to bring back the Fusion sedan, which the company stopped making five years ago.
“The sedan market is very vibrant,” Ford CEO Jim Farley remarked to reporters on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show last month. “It’s not that there isn’t a market there. It’s just we couldn’t find a way to compete and be profitable.”
Stellantis, too, wants another go. Chrysler is working on a small car that would cost less than $30,000—one that will “be beautiful and fun to drive and aspirational,” Chrysler CEO Chris Feuell said at an event last year.
Cars face a national affordability crisis. Simply put, they’re getting too expensive for many people. The average price of a new vehicle now tops $50,000. Some of that increase is due to new tariffs and rising manufacturing costs. Also to blame are carmakers’ lineups of bigger, pricier vehicles filled with high-end features.
The conundrum is that carmakers get far better profit margins on more expensive trucks and SUVs—and sedans are a shrinking piece of the market. Passenger cars, which commanded half of new-vehicle sales 15 years ago, accounted for only 18% of the U.S. market in 2025, according to Motor Intelligence data. Sales of small and midsize cars fell 9% last year from the year before.
“They should’ve kept at least one around,” says Ivan Drury, an analyst at Edmunds, the online car-shopping authority. “You don’t need a full sedan lineup but you do need a jack of all trades.”
For automakers, a lower-priced sedan can also be an entry point for consumers who later trade up to pricier models. “Because it’s bloody obvious what happens when you remove a vehicle from the lineup, people stop coming back to your brand altogether,” Drury says.
In exiting sedans, Detroit effectively admitted defeat in a decadeslong struggle to keep pace with foreign rivals like Toyota, Hyundai and Honda for entry-level car shoppers. Only GM has succeeded in keeping some of that market with a lineup of compact SUVs. Ford is trying lower-end versions of its pricier vehicles.
A U-turn on sedans would be a reversal of uncharacteristic speed even for Detroit’s notoriously fickle industry. These, however, are unusual times. After prepping for an electric-vehicle revolution, one by one, GM, Ford and Stellantis have dialed back EV production and canceled plans for future models.
The U.S. electric-vehicle market, which had already started to slow, collapsed last year after Congress and the Trump administration eliminated clean-air mandates and federal incentives. Combined, the three automakers have taken a hit of more than $50 billion to cover the cost of the EV reversal.
Of the five cheapest vehicles on sale in the U.S. this year, only one—GM’s Chevrolet Trax—was from an American automaker, according to Edmunds. The Trax, a pint-size SUV made in South Korea, proved exceedingly popular: GM sold 200,000 last year. GM has one other small SUV with a starting price below $25,000; Ford and Stellantis have none.
All other budget vehicles—whether sedans or compact SUVs—were made by Kia, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen.
Sedans like the Chevrolet Impala, Ford Fairlane and Chrysler New Yorker filled American roads from the 1950s to the 1970s—but they weren’t known for their fuel efficiency.
The oil crisis in the 1970s and the arrival of Japanese-owned factories on U.S. soil were big blows to Detroit. Honda started making the Accord sedan in Ohio in the early 1980s, followed a few years later by Toyota’s Corolla and Camry. The Accord became the bestselling U.S. car in 1989.
Detroit fought back. Ford poured big money into developing its aerodynamic Taurus sedan, hoping to fend off the famously reliable Accord at a time when quality problems plagued Detroit.
“Prepare to be impressed,” was the tagline Ford used in a 1992 TV ad comparing the Taurus to its Japanese rival. That year, the Taurus overtook the Accord as the nation’s bestselling car.
By the mid-’90s, however, SUVs took off with Americans who preferred the higher ride height and roomy cargo space. The pace of defection stunned auto executives, who scrambled to remake their lineups.
“SUV just became the default body style,” said automotive consultant Adam Bernard, who led competitor intelligence for General Motors from 2007 to 2024.
The proliferation of SUVs included smaller and more efficient styles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V and Ford Escape. Ford axed its sedan lineup in 2018, the same year GM said it would kill the Chevy Impala and Cruze. Chrysler ditched its 300 sedan in 2023 after 68 years.
Foreign automakers pulled back from sedans as well, killing dozens of models in the past decade, such as the Toyota Avalon and Nissan Maxima.
Filling some of the sedan void is a new wave of entry-level vehicles that, like GM’s Trax, are built on the frame of a compact car but feature the higher ride and a truncated liftgate. Others include the Buick Envista, Nissan Kicks and Honda HR-V.
‘Gateway product’
The lack of lower-priced cars presents a challenge for Matt Bowers, owner of a New Orleans-based dealership group that sells Fords, Chevys and Chryslers, among other brands.
“There were a lot of people that bought Ford Focuses and Escorts that ended up buying Explorers and Expeditions and F-Series trucks later,” he said. “It was an entryway, a gateway product to the brand.”
Ford CEO Farley told employees at a town hall this week that Ford has a string of affordable vehicles planned for the U.S., and that the company plans to step up its focus on that end of the market. A sedan could be in the cards, he said, if Ford can figure out a way to make it profitably.
Ford’s least expensive offering is the compact Maverick pickup. It’s manufactured in Mexico and has a starting price just under $30,000. Sales of the truck grew 18% last year, as did lower-priced versions of other models.
Ford is working to overhaul its manufacturing system and, by next year, start up a new type of factory line that churns out $30,000 electric trucks. The goal is to be able to compete against Chinese EV-makers once they are able to sell vehicles in the U.S.
Ford executives are studying whether a sedan might make sense on that line. They’re also looking at whether it’s possible to develop either a hybrid or all-electric sedan that is both affordable and appealing enough to make money. If the answer is no, Ford will continue to sit out the sedan game.
“Affordable versions of our vehicles are really hot-selling. Customers are telling us: Please offer more,” Farley said.
As it weighs a sedan, GM is eyeing carbuyers who can perhaps afford an SUV but prefer a car. Executives believe U.S. consumers continue to move toward SUVs and pickups. High-end sedans like the company’s Cadillac CT5, which starts around $50,000, are an exception, a GM spokesman said.
Reuss, in speaking to employees, lamented the failure of the company’s last attempt at a hybrid sedan: a Malibu that GM discontinued in 2019. “The timing wasn’t quite right,” he said.
He said GM serves the lower end of the car market—even without mainstay sedans. Last year GM sold nearly 700,000 vehicles whose sticker prices start under $30,000—all compact SUVs like the Trax, he said.
Feuell, the Chrysler CEO, said the company must prioritize affordability. A price tag nearing $50,000 “doesn’t work for most consumers,” she said. The company is working on a compact car it could sell for less than $30,000 to meet that need, she said.
Cost conundrum
It is really hard to make money on sedans.
Even after they moved some manufacturing to countries with lower labor costs—Mexico, South Korea—in recent decades, GM, Ford and Chrysler struggled to compete with their Asian rivals.
Even Toyota considers the U.S. sedan business bruising. Toyota executives, in a recent call with reporters, discussed the travails of trying to turn a profit on cars, especially small ones, in the U.S. It’s a growing concern as tariffs eat into profits.
“We make money on the Corolla—just not a lot,” said David Christ, Toyota’s North American sales chief.
Toyota has been happy to scoop up sedan-loving customers, Christ said, noting its share of the U.S. sedan market has grown to 22% from 12% since GM, Ford and Chrysler left the market. And people who buy a sedan on a budget may return later to the same showroom for a higher-price offering.
Adam Lee is chairman of Maine-based Lee Auto Malls, with seven dealerships. He’s frustrated he has little to offer more budget-minded customers.
“If somebody could build an affordable sedan, it would sell,” said Lee, who, along with a cousin and a friend, took over the business that his father and grandfather had run since the 1930s. “We have made these cars so expensive that nobody can afford them.”
Japanese and Korean automakers were more adept than Detroit at leveraging their bigger, global scale to remain competitive in sedans during the mass migration to SUVs, said Bernard, the consultant. “They can make a sedan and sell versions of it all over the world.”
The sedan buyers who remain are committed.
At a Ford dealership in Canton, Ohio, lube tech Brandon Burgardt perks up when he sees a Ford Fusion coming through for an oil change. He’s hanging on to his own Fusion as long as he can, since Ford doesn’t offer a new one anymore.
“Every Fusion owner I have talked to said Ford needs to come back out with a sedan and they really want the Fusion back,” he said. “I believe you have to listen to the customers.”
Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com and Christopher Otts at christopher.otts@wsj.com