The American new car has put on more than a thousand pounds in forty years, and the compact that once anchored the lineup has all but disappeared.
The average new car keeps getting heavier, and it is not subtle. Four decades of added safety equipment, bigger footprints, and a wholesale shift to SUVs and trucks have piled on more than a thousand pounds. Each generation of vehicle is a little taller, a little wider, a little heavier than the one it replaced.
Weight begets weight. Bigger vehicles feel safer to buy, which pushes the next buyer up a size for parity, which pulls the fleet average up again. The small car did not fail on the merits; it got squeezed out of a market optimizing for mass.
The compact car did not lose a fair fight. It was designed out of a market where everyone else got bigger and standing still meant looking small.