Larry Printz (2026) recently posted a particularly useful article that deserves wider distribution. The title sums up his beef: “Five Things Automakers Won’t Do That Car Buyers Actually Want.”
Printz’s (2026) list has such a ring of obviousness that you may very well be able to brainstorm most of his items before reading on: 1) stop putting everything on a screen, 2) build cars that normal people can afford, 3) make cars easier to repair, 4) come up with designs that actually look good and 5) stop hiding features in ridiculous packages.
If this list looks obvious I don’t think that negates the importance of the article. One of the chief qualities of contemporary American automotive journalism has been a tendency to not criticize the more dysfunctional trends of the day. So let’s acknowledge when scribes actually live up to their responsibilities in an all-too-fragile democracy.
Automotive media can help change industry norms
I think it is important to say when the emperor has no clothes even if it gets roundly ignored — at least initially. As a case in point, consider back in the postwar era when a few car-enthusiast magazines such as Road & Track and Car and Driver criticized American cars as tending to be too big and suffer from mixed roadworthiness and manufacturing quality. This was typically the opposite of foreign automakers, whose cars the magazines would often rave about.
For a while one could easily assume that the magazines were not having much of an impact on Detroit. Yet by the mid-1990s American passenger cars had “internationalized” their product line to a significant degree. In a very real sense, writers who once had been vilified by Detroit executives were proven correct.
An example of the genre was Brock Yates, who was denounced as “worse for the industry than Ralph Nader” after he wrote an essay arguing that Detroit was building the wrong cars (1983, preface).
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that enthusiast magazines single-handedly caused a revolution in Detroit thinking. However, I do think it fair to say that they helped to acculturate a generation of car buyers to the charms of foreign automobiles and the weaknesses of their American counterparts.
What else should be added to Printz’s list?
I would add two additional things that automakers refuse to do. Although these items may be esoteric enough that they might not show up very prominently — if at all — in a survey of car buyers, they arguably are having a huge, negative impact on the direction of the industry.
The first thing automakers have refused to do in recent years has been to deviate from industry groupthink. I was reminded of that recently when reading that Volkswagon, Honda and Hyundai are all planning to come out with body-on-frame trucks and sport-utility vehicles (Wilkening, 2026; Jarvis, 2026; VanHulle and Truett, 2026). Why does virtually everyone need to be in that market? Indeed, can it support so many players, particularly if conditions inevitably shift?
One doesn’t have to look very far to see examples of how automakers that attempted to play “follow the leader” ended up not doing so well. Remember when VW announced that it desperately needed a minivan so came out with the Routan, a thinly disguised Chrysler Town & Country that sold poorly (Wikipedia, 2026)? Or how about when Nissan insisted that it must enter the big truck market so dumped a bunch of money into the ill-fated Titan (Truett, 2022)?
On the flip side, remember back when foreign automakers had the self confidence to carve out distinct market niches? During the 1960s VW executives didn’t lose sleep at night because they lacked a full-sized car that went head to head with a Chevrolet Impala. Nor did Mercedes-Benz try to compete directly against a Cadillac de Ville. Indeed, that automaker’s marketing campaign bragged — quite rightly — that its products were “defiantly different.”
Shouldn’t the auto industry self regulate?
This brings me to the second thing that automakers refuse to do — self regulate. The Trump administration’s dramatic deregulation of auto emissions standards has effectively put the industry in the position of having to do so (Beams, 2026; The Guardian, 2026). Self regulation is not something that U.S. automakers in particular have ever been particularly good at. Yet here we are.
Detroit is now doubling down on gas-guzzling trucks in the wake of deregulation. For example, Ford has increased V8 availability on its F-150 and lowered prices on 2027 performance models (CNBC, 2026). And unlike in the postwar era, foreign automakers are not acting as a counterweight to such excesses.
Meanwhile, a new report says that says the world needs to cut carbon emissions by almost half within the next 10 years to avoid a climate change disaster. Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey (2026) wrote that although the “‘window has closed’ on holding temperature rises to 1.5C, in line with scientific advice, limiting the ‘overshoot’ of that target is still possible.”
The decisions of the auto industry are important because last year cars and trucks accounted for almost a fifth of all U.S. emissions (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2025). And with automakers itching to step on the gas in the wake of reduced regulation, the only brake left may be consumers who have been struggling to keep up with the increasing costs of auto ownership (Eisenstein, 2026).
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RE:SOURCES
- Beams, Mia; 2026. “How the Big Beautiful Bill Act Reshaped Clean Tech Manufacturing, in Charts.” Council on Foreign Relations. Posted July 7.
- CNBC; 2026. “Why Fuel Economy Rollbacks Will Spur More Trucks, More V-8 Engines.” Posted Oct. 18.
- Eisenstein, Paul; 2026. “Used Vehicle Prices Are at Record Levels – Here’s Why and How to Save.” The Car Collective’s Substack. Posted Oct. 20.
- Harvey, Fiona; 2026. “World must cut emissions by 18% in four years ‘to find our way back’, UN says.” The Guardian. Posted Oct. 21.
- Jarvis, Grace; 2026. “Report: Honda to Offer Body-on-Frame Pickup in U.S. Thanks to Mitsubishi.” Hagerty. Posted Oct. 12.
- Printz, Larry; 2026. “Five Things Automakers Won’t Do That Car Buyers Actually Want.” The Car Collective’s Substack. Posted Sept. 3.
- The Guardian; 2026. “Trump administration to slash clean car rules aimed at cutting climate emissions.” Posted Sept. 28.
- Truett, Richard; 2022. “Nissan Titan failure holds lessons for Toyota.” Automotive News. Posted July 12.
- Union of Concerned Scientists; 2025. “Car Emissions and Global Warming.” Updated Aug. 20.
- VanHulle, Lindsay and Richard Truett; 2026. “Hyundai’s body-on-frame truck gambit marks new frontier for surging Korean brand.” Automotive News. Posted April 6.
- Wikipedia; 2026. “Volkswagen Routan.” Page last edited Oct. 18.
- Wilkening, Alayna; 2026. “VW Is Reportedly Developing a New Pickup Truck for the United States.” Car and Driver. Posted Aug. 7.
- Yates, Brock; 1983. The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry. Empire Books, New York, NY.
