Will small cars and sedans ever become popular again?

The Cars Act was terrible. It was just a move to prop up auto manufacturers during the recession, paraded around like some green initiative that was going to help save the planet. The stipulations for what qualified to be purchased are a major part of the program’s flaws. Tying this in with your comment about sales numbers: 40,000,000 sales but not all of them qualify for the clunkers buyout, in fact a lot of them wouldn’t. The stipulations made the program less “cash for clunkers” and more “cash for very good condition vehicles”. The vehicles needed to be roadworthy and registered/insured for a minimum of 1yr, and less than 25yrs old. If you had a car that was running on 7 out of 8 cylinders dripping raw fuel out of the tailpipe and 10x the emissions it should, you wouldn’t qualify for the buyback. Someone with a good running car would. Think about that from an ecological standpoint. The economics of it all were terrible as well. We spent over $3 Billion in the middle of a recession and housing collapse to overpay for people’s used vehicles, landing ~700,000 **good running** vehicles in a government parking lot with no end game. Did we auction them off to recoup costs and supply quality used vehicles back to the public that could use them desperately in that moment? No, that would undermine the whole point of the program, which was to incentivize people to buy new cars and keep the corporations afloat. This also inflated the used market prices, pricing a lot of people out of trading up into something better out of an old dying car, or prevented them from getting a car at all. So we crushed them. All of the GHG, energy, and resources expelled or used to make those vehicles were done in vain, because those vehicles still in good condition and running are sent to the crusher with strict orders and auditing done to ensure nobody salvaged anything from the cars. Oh, also the engine and transmission are filled with a mixture that turns to glass to destroy them. Just to be sure nobody picks up any crumbs. The government officially compounded the levels of stupidity with this whole thing. Surely it saved the environment, right? No. Average fuel economy did go up, .07mpg for the totality of registered vehicles which I won’t say is a bad thing but certainly doesn’t offset all the negatives. Dialing in and only looking at the emissions from driving the vehicles, the program saved 4.4 metric ton of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. BUT…those new cars didn’t just appear out of thin air, and the program didn’t exclude foreign made vehicles, so we have to include all the resources and pollution from manufacturing and shipping new vehicles instead of running old existing vehicles to their death. I don’t have those numbers rattling in my brain anymore, but I recall reading an article about how ecologically minded people buying Priuses to save the planet are actually killing it. It outlined the total emissions from both manufacturing and driving an H2 Hummer and a Prius to 100k, and the hummer was counterintuitively the more environmentally friendly choice. Finally, and this is only a negative in the eyes of auto enthusiasts, the program killed the stock of some really desirable models even today. The Chevy k1500 being the top kill in the program, remaining trucks fetch a premium. The program did what it was designed to do, fuck the populace and prop up the corporations.