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I've often felt that a significant part of the defeat of the Big 3 was just mind-share. I daily a Buick from the 2010s, and it has met my needs in every way. I've never had to put it in the shop beyond tires, fluid changes etc. It's a great car in general. But by the 2010s, the battle was already lost - there was no car that Americans could put out that would displace Toyota and Honda in the minds of the American public.
On Reddit, if cars are mentioned in any thread, you will never see a recommendation other than Toyota or Honda. It is 100% lockstep. Even if you could get 90% of the reliability from an old Ford Taurus at 50% of the cost, the hive mind has decided. I do get that - I've ridden in a Pontiac Le Mans. I've driven a Plymouth Volare. They fucked up for decades. But I hated it when the Big 3 bailed out of the sedan space, just because there are far fewer options now; and by the end, the cars were quite good.
Weren't they losing money on every sedan sale? They didn't quit so much as fail.
I will have to research that. I know Chrysler was at the end, but I'd be surprised with regards to Ford. They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.
Honestly, the same was true of Chevrolet; they were making six-digit (as in, 100-200 thousand) sales of their compact sedans at the time.
They aren't actually bad cars, it's just that the early-90s through mid-00s Hondas and Toyotas were objectively the best cars ever made and that bought them customers for life, even though Civics and Corollas now cost twice what they used to (and are 1.5x as large).
Meanwhile, Gen Z buys Korean, and they're even more unreliable than mid-00s Big Three cars because their engines go before 100,000 miles due due to incompetence (machining chips not cleared properly kills the normal engines) and premature cost-cutting (undersized rods flying through the blocks of turbocharged engines). Detroit-designed cars might not be as solid as Toyota's, but their engineering was/is still good enough that, just like the Japanese cars, the main reason they stop working is because they rusted out.
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https://thenewswheel.com/ford-killing-value-destroying-sedans-because-they-lose-money-every-year/
Taking this at face value, Ford lost money selling sedans the year before they simply stopped making them.
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There is a much more in-depth answer, I've been following the American auto-industry in-depth as a hobbyist since long before I could drive, but it cashes out in a sentence to: they never made a mid-size family sedan that could beat out the Camry and the Accord. The story of Detroit goes back to how the big companies formed by buying out other brands, the antiquated dealership laws that leave them beholden to local middleman businesses with serious lobbying power, and to the decline and resulting deal with the devil that saddled them with a raft of poor choices after the bailout.
The Detroit Big 3 occasionally made great cars, but couldn't put together a consistent record. I've been reading my dad's car magazines since I was maybe 12, and I've read more comparison tests than I could possibly remember. American cars occasionally won against Japanese and German competition, but they also occasionally finished last. The class standards, the Camry and Accord and 3-Series, tended to avoid last place, even if they didn't win. Detroit products were hit or miss. Or if they got a hit, like the PT Cruiser (people LOVED that thing when it came out and there were waiting lists to buy it), they would let it go entirely too long without real updates. As a result, even winning products when released would ultimately drag down and get bad reputations. Then they'd get discontinued, removing any brand loyalty, a shocking number of people keep buying the same car every time theirs breaks down and they couldn't do that with the Big 3 in too many cases.
The knock on effect of this was that Detroit automakers were constantly reworking their model line-up. They were eliminating cars that had acquired bad reputations, and replacing them with new nameplates. The car that a Cadillac dealer wanted to stack against a Three Series went from the Deville to the DTS to the CTS to the ATS to the CT4. In that whole time, the Three Series stayed the Three Series (even if I have some complaints about the direction it is going). The car Ford wanted to run up against the Camry was the Taurus, then the Taurus was canceled and replaced with the Fusion (globally Mondeo), then the Taurus was brought back as a bigger car to replace the Five Hundred, then both were cancelled again. The Camaro never recovered from its hiatus. That kind of lineup churn reduces consumer faith.
That lead Detroit into the bailout era, which left the corporations as permanent government pawns. The gov forced GM to axe Pontiac and Hummer. Pontiac was probably a good idea, Hummer definitely wasn't, that was Obama Admin ideological meddling Hummer would be a great brand to have around today we'd have an H4 crossover getting 30mpg and the H3 would be a huge seller. This weakened the ability to negotiate with two important constituencies: the UAW and the Dealerships. Both lobby for bad marketing choices, bad corporate choices, both have the ears of their representatives in congress.
In the long run, Detroit was stuck with a lot of poor choices for badge engineering reasons because of UAW and Dealership lobbying efforts. Half the brands they run shouldn't exist; but the dealership structure made it difficult or impossible to shutter Lincoln, Buick, GMC, etc. Pontiac and Saturn and Hummer and Mercury could only be killed safely because of the bailout. Zombie brands selling badge engineered junk sucked the life out of real efforts at running a modern car company.
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