The Sports Car Is in Serious Trouble

Kyle Stock KyleStockil

A true sports car—a genuine ground-scraping, carbon-veined track monster—is terrible at most things. It doesn’t lend itself to Uber, it’s crap on a Costco run and in today’s truck-crazy culture, it's so low that the driver can't see anything but the bumpers of the SUVs around them.
And that’s to say nothing of the traditional drawbacks. There's the astronomical expense of purchasing one (plus keeping it running) and their tendency to make a driver look a bit cheesy unless handled carefully (see Newman, Paul; Rodriguez, Michelle; and this guy).
For all of those reasons and more, swanky sports cars are losing momentum in the U.S. of late. Sales in the segment have declined for the past six quarters. Last year, nearly one-third of premium sports car purchases vanished, according to Edmunds.com. The trend is only accelerating this year. There was a 52 percent drop in sales during the first quarter of 2016.

"I think there’s a significant change in the desire for driving—I think there’s a significant slowdown in that," said Erich Joachimsthaler, CEO of consultancy Vivaldi Partners Group, which advises carmakers.
Will the sports car die? Of course. Eventually, the only people shredding tires and burning dead dinosaurs will be the small group of hobbyists on private tracks, where they are dropped off by the fleet of anodyne robot cars the rest of us commute in. But that day is still a long way off.
The recent skid in the sports car market is far more nuanced and interesting than road-scanning radar. It is being fueled by strange turns in consumer psyche, a redefinition of curb appeal and the gamesmanship of auto executives. Here are the three things crimping—but not killing—the swanky sports car.

1. Cheap Thrills

The Ford Mustang is, hands-down, the bestselling sports car in America these days. The king of pony cars roped in nearly 123,000 U.S. buyers last year, a 48 percent spike over 2014. That's pretty impressive for a vehicle that requires backseat passengers to possess the flexibility of a yogi.

Ford's dramatic redesign of the sixth-generation Mustang sent sales soaring. Here's a 2015 version in "triple-yellow."

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

This is where all the Porsche priests start furiously drafting e-mails about the Mustang not being a "real" sports car. The argument goes something like this: Anyone with $130,000 to spend on a two-seated rocket with a Stuttgart pedigree isn’t going to consider a cheap thrill such as the Mustang.
This line of reasoning may have been valid in the past, but that's the past. Carmakers have gotten so good at their craft that performance is becoming a commodity (to say nothing of fetching design and reliability). The newest Mustang can be had with paddle shifters and a V-8 engine that makes 435 horsepower. It gallops to 60 miles per hour in less than 5 seconds, faster than many Ferraris from the 1990s and just a hair slower than a contemporary Porsche Cayman. 

Chevrolet’s new Camaro puts up even more impressive performance metrics, and Dodge’s Challenger Hellcat offers an engine that makes an astonishing 707 horsepower. Those in the market for something more refined are clamoring for Mazda’s new MX-5 Miata. Small, light, and almost perfectly balanced, it’s the driving equivalent of a bonsai tree. Any of these cars can be had for less than $30,000. Taken together, U.S. drivers bought 373,000 of them last year, a 23 percent increase over 2014.