From bell bottoms and acid washed straight legs, to baggy overalls and boot cuts, to skinny jeans and mom jeans, one thing is certain: consumer tastes change.
Of course, the denim market isn’t dead, and neither is the auto industry. But just as jean buyers shifted away from flared and embellished denim, consumers also steer away from certain types of vehicles, collectively pivoting their focus to an entirely different category. This isn’t unique to denim and automobiles, of course.
Your kids may not want Beyblades for Christmas in 2024, but they still want toys. People move on from the Macarena and the Griddy, sure, but they still dance. You’re no longer stocking up on George Foreman grills, but you’re still buying wedding gifts. You get the idea.
Likewise, Canadians aren’t very interested in seven-seaters with sliding doors, low-riding four-doors with dedicated trunks, or really anything with a traditionally affordable price tag. But Canadians are still buying cars. Tens of thousands of cars every month. In fact, through the first three-quarters of 2024, Canadians bought or leased an average of over 150,000 new vehicles per month.
Indeed, Canadians want new vehicles, just not the kind of vehicles that originate in one of the five segments listed below. These are the five most rapidly collapsing vehicle categories in Canada in 2024, not just on a year-over-year basis but with a look back five years, a decade, and two decades ago.
Subcompact Cars
Subcompacts are supposed to be the entry point to the new vehicle market. What they lack in space, refinement, safety, and style, they make up with fuel efficiency and affordability. Or at least they’re supposed to. Most manufacturers have completely skipped out on the sector because they simply couldn’t get the right combination of affordability – after all, it does cost to build the car – and demand. As proof, consider the fact that 2025’s most affordable new vehicle is the subcompact Nissan Versa: $23,406 including fees. It appears as though the Versa will earn 100% market share in the Canadian subcompact segment in 2025; its rivals have all vacated the premises.
Long gone are the Hyundai Accent, Toyota Yaris, Honda Fit, and Ford Fiesta. More recent departures include the Kia Rio, Mitsubishi Mirage, and Chevrolet Spark. Subcompact car sales in Canada plunged by more than 90% over the last decade and by roughly 80% over the last five years alone. Nearly 6% of 2014’s new vehicle sales were subcompacts; that’s now 0.4%.
The Family Sedan
Ah, the midsize sedan. While the Toyota Camry continues to put up big numbers (particularly south of the border, where Toyota will sell more than 300,000 this year), its competitors have floundered and/or fled. Half of the midsize cars sold in Canada in 2024’s first nine months were Camrys. But that’s “half” of very little.
The segment is on track to produce fewer than 24,000 sales in 2024, a drop of 56% in just five years. The midsize sector’s share of the Canadian market in 2004 stood at 11%. It’s now down to just 1%. In 2004, 14 different midsize sedans put up four-digit Canadian sales figures. In 2025, there’ll be only be four contenders in the entire category.
Minivans
If you’re in search of proof that car buyers don’t want to drive what their parents drove, here it is. Minivans owned 11.6% of the Canadian market in 2004, 4.8% in 2014, 3.1% in 2019, and now account for fewer than 2 out of every 100 vehicles sold in the country. The segment is likely to end the year with little more than 30,000 sales. Rewind to 2004 and you’ll find out that General Motors – which owned less than one-third of the minivan market that year – drummed up over 52,000 sales on its own.
Granted, it doesn’t help that the minivans still on the market – Honda Odyssey, Kia Carnival, Toyota Sienna, and a Chrysler duo – aren’t exactly plentiful on dealer lots. Nor does it help that the average base price for a minivan heading into 2025 is $49,000. But rest assured, if the North American consumer wanted a minivan, the competitive space would become, well, far more competitive.
Affordable Sports/Performance Cars
As a volume brand, building a legitimate two-door performance car – by which we mean conceptualizing, designing, engineering, testing, certifying, and manufacturing – is a risky proposition. Sports cars need to make hay very early in their tenure; consumers are very prone to losing interest in style-centric performance cars as the years pass by. This explains why so few sports cars actually persist through the generations: the Ford Mustang and Mazda MX-5 Miata aren’t the rule; they’re the exceptions.
Virtually every automaker has learned this lesson, as evidenced by relatively short-lived sports cars such as the Toyota MR2 Spyder, Fiat 124 Spider, and Mazda RX-8 (not to forget sporty coupes such as the Toyota Celica, Mitsubishi Eclipse, and Acura RSX). With demand predictably low, automakers generally don’t want to risk a massive expenditure that very well may not pay off. As a result, the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Ford Mustang, Mazda MX-5, Nissan Z, Subaru BRZ, and Toyota 86 will combine to own roughly 0.5% of the new vehicle market in 2024, down from 0.8% in 2019, 1.0% in 2014, and 1.6% in 2004.
Large Luxury Cars
The BMW X7 SUV outsells the BMW 7 Series sedan by more than 6-to-1. At Mercedes-Benz Canada, the G-Wagen and GLS outsell the S-Class sedan by more than 5-to-1. At Toyota’s Lexus division, the LS sedan produced only 22 sales in 2024’s first three-quarters – the LX SUV produced 24 times that volume. Audi’s Q8 and Q8 e-tron outsell the A8 sedan by better than 52-to-1.
The full-size luxury sedan was never going to be a high-volume market in Canada. Even 20 years ago, long before luxury SUVs asserted their dominance, the large luxury sedan segment generated only 0.16% of the Canadian market. But there was a big difference, with mid-pack players such as the Lexus LS and Audi A8 producing 309 and 290 sales, respectively. Combined, that duo now produces only six sales per month. Overall, the segment’s market share has fallen by half since 2014.
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