When the Detroit 3 found themselves outflanked by the rise of smaller Japanese cars amid the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s, they turned directly to the competition for assistance, looking for some magic dust.
General Motors partnered with Suzuki, Isuzu and Toyota; Ford and Mazda formed a courtship in Flat Rock, Mich., while Chrysler and Mitsubishi got hitched in Normal, Ill. The Geo Prizm, Chevrolet Nova, Ford Probe, Plymouth Laser, Eagle Talon and later the Pontiac Vibe were hatched. All were admirable but are long gone and mostly forgotten.
It was a humbling and constructive exercise for America's blue-chip metal benders.
Jack Smith was a GM product planner and negotiator during talks in the early 1980s that created New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., the California joint venture between the world's biggest automaker and Toyota.
NUMMI gave GM an insider's view of the Japanese automaker and detailed ways to better engineer and manufacture vehicles — particularly small cars, a Japanese strength but an unprofitable endeavor for Detroit.
The Toyota partnership, criticized by some as a cop-out, put GM on the defensive. But Smith, who would rise to become CEO of GM, defended it as a critical, interim step to help the company learn to develop and build new vehicles more efficiently.
"We have been faced with difficult choices," Smith told a U.S.-Japan Automotive Industry Conference at the University of Michigan in March 1989.
"GM could abandon the small-car business and build only larger cars. But that would mean deserting many customers who have relied on GM for small cars. … We're not going to walk away from that."
We now know how that story turned out in the land of Tahoes, Jeeps and Explorers.
Now, amid the seismic market change as customers walk away from coupes and sedans, even more Japanese automakers are joining the Detroit 3 and retreating from shrinking car segments where they had long thrived.
Mazda — once prized by Ford for its small, front-wheel-drive engineering — is pivoting to bigger vehicles with all-wheel and rear-wheel drive and eventually electric vehicles with a new benefactor, Toyota, under a "co-created" approach.
The Mazda6, an fwd midsize car that dates back to the 626 introduced in the U.S. in 1982, will soon join the Mitsubishi Galant, Suzuki Kizashi and others in the sedan graveyard.
"Mazda had terrific experience with front-wheel-drive technology. They were on the cutting edge — we needed their R&D," former Ford CEO Don Petersen wrote in his 1991 book, A Better Idea: Redefining the Way Americans Work. "As a brand name, however, Mazda was irrelevant. It did have the cachet of manufacturing a high-quality car."
Even the best engineering and driving dynamics can't overcome sweeping consumer shifts.
"Sedans are going to be the minivans of the decade," predicts analyst Karl Brauer, referring to the steady slide in demand for minivans, another once-hot segment of the 1980s and 1990s.
The midsize-car segment has shrunk 55 percent since 2015, when it racked up 2.4 million sales, to just 1.07 million last year. In this year's first quarter, sales fell again, by 17 percent.
Only the strong will survive. The earliest pioneers with the most loyal car customers — Toyota's Camry and Corolla, Honda's Accord and Civic — may someday be the only stalwarts left. But even they must hope to see the car market's floor sooner rather than later.
