Editor’s Letter The decline of the traditional “car.”

Features Editor Editor’s Note

PHOTO

DARREN MARTIN

ooking at our 15-strong 2023 Car of the Year field, it’s apparent

Lwe’re witnessing the form’s decline. Our field is not only smaller than in recent years but also more “foreign.” The Detroit Three sell a total of 10 cars between them. Add Tesla and Lucid into the mix, and that number balloons to a whopping 13. A decade ago, the Detroit Three alone sold upward of 30 car models. This year’s COTY field featured just one American car.

But what if we’re looking at the car’s decline the wrong way? What if we’re being colored by recent biases? What if the traditional car—typically a three-box design with a distinct hood, body, and trunk—was a historical anomaly? Was the SUV’s rise inevitable?

Looking back at the bestselling vehicles of the past 100 years, there might be something to this. In the car’s early days, when the Model T reigned supreme, the majority of cars sold were what Ford called “flatbacks.” These were trunkless two-box vehicles (meaning the basic design consisted of a box for the engine compartment and a larger box for passengers), with high-riding suspensions designed for the two-tracks that passed as roads.

Sound familiar?

This body style was among America’s most popular until the end of World War II, when automakers stopped building Shermans and started building sedans. Why? The Joes returning from overseas and the Rosies fresh off factory lines wielded a historically large amount of economic power for the middle class, and they could afford two cars. Typically, these were a stylish sedan for around town and a more practical station wagon for road trips on the new interstate highway system.

The car continued to predominate as the greatest generation passed the torch to baby boomers. It wasn’t until 1982 when things began to change. That year, in the heat of the Reagan-era recession, the Ford F-Series toppled the Oldsmobile Cutlass, becoming the bestselling vehicle in the U.S. A rotating cast of sedans and the F-Series (with Chevrolet’s Silverado predecessor not far behind) would trade blows in the sales race until 1995. That’s when the new second-generation Ford Explorer outsold all other vehicles in the U.S. aside from Ford’s and Chevy’s full-size pickups. From that point forward, SUVs were always found among the country’s sales leaders. By the 2010s, they dominated.

There are likely thousands of reasons for this, but I theorize the middle class’ shrinking purchasing power, the generational debt saddled to Gen X and millennials, and a confluence of other economic and social factors are driving the turn to SUVs and the resurgence of the traditional two-box shape. When you can only afford one new vehicle, it must be capable of meeting any foreseeable need, whether it be shuttling around a family addition, chasing the job market across a continent, or just enjoying the use of our interstates and national parks. (As an aside, Model T’s were commonly used for more than just transportation as people employed them often in place of tractors or to power equipment.) SUVs may be more inefficient than the sedans they replace, but they’re more practical and comfortable for many families and often handle 21st-century America’s increasingly inconsistent roadways better than their car counterparts. They’re usually more expensive than comparable cars, sure, but when you look at the things they can do that a car can’t, the value argument starts to crack.

So what does this mean for the car in 2023? Well, if our Car of the Year field is any indicator, it’s a great time to be a well-heeled car enthusiast. With the SUV going mainstream, cars are becoming highly specialized. Of our 15 entrants this year, four were traditional luxury four-doors, three were electric luxury sedans, two were sport coupes, three were high-performance sport compacts, one was a luxury roadster, another was a ’70s-style personal coupe masquerading as a modern four-door fastback, and the last was the new Corvette Z06—our sole American entrant.

All 15 of these cars, to varying levels of success, were built to do one thing and do it well. The new 2023 Honda Civic Type R, for instance, is made to be a wallet-friendly track rat. Genesis’ new flagship 2023 G90, on the other hand, aims to swaddle its occupants in coachbuilt-quality luxury. The Mercedes-EQ EQE-Class exists to out-tech Tesla. And the aforementioned Z06 is here to keep Ferrari and Lamborghini engineers awake at night.

With such differing purposes, it always helps to keep each contender in context. We rely on our six Of The Year criteria for this: advancement in design, efficiency, engineering excellence, performance of intended function, safety, and value. In other words, an EQE is not competing against a Civic; both models are effectively competing against themselves and the standards of their segments. The questions we seek to answer include:

How well does the car do the job? Does its powertrain use novel solutions to advance the state of the art? Do its designers appropriately resolve sheetmetal lines and effectively deploy high-quality interior materials? Regardless of whether news of the car’s death is exaggerated, we’ll continue doing what we set out to do in 1949, right as three-box car sales started taking off: keeping you abreast of all the trends in the motoring world. Our Car of the Year package begins on page 48. Q