Nobody Cares About Gas Mileage, Until They Do

Ford has exited the sedan market almost entirely, and even the Japanese car industry is having trouble selling its flagship product:

As Americans’ taste shifts toward sport-utility vehicles, Nissan’s U.S. sedan sales fell almost 35% in April from a year earlier, driving an overall decline of 28%. Honda’s overall sales fell 9.2%, while Toyota’s dropped 4.7%….Honda maintains that its Accord, which was named North American Car of the Year in January, still can recover although sales fell by nearly a fifth in April.

Henio Arcangeli, the company’s U.S. sales chief, said “growth opportunities still exist within the passenger car side of our business” because “not all customers in the market want a truck or SUV.”

We’ve all seen this movie before:

When gas prices go down, suddenly everyone wants a gas guzzler. Then they’ll all start moaning when the price of gas goes up and they have to pay full sticker for a Camry because they’re in such high demand that Toyota can’t keep up. We Americans are such idiots.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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