Fit To Be Tied

First it was the next-generation base Volkswagen Golf that was in jeopardy of being dropped from the U.S. auto market.  Now it's Honda's Fit model. 

Pictured above is the fourth-generation Honda Fit, which has just been unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show and is due to go on sale in Japan very soon.  It will show up in some global markets as early as February 2020.  But all indications are that the new Fit will be a poor fit for the rapidly changing American market, which is bending more and more toward monster wagons, and so Honda will likely drop the car from the U.S. lineup.

Like the Golf, the Fit is a hatchback, a car Americans associate with austerity and economy - the very sort of car that most of them don't want to be seen in.  And the Fit is indeed economical; it's one of the cheapest cars you can buy, unlike the Golf, and - and bear in mind, I say this as someone who thinks Hondas are boring and mundane - it's a high-quality, basic-transport vehicle that is a good value for the money.  Also, unlike the Golf, it's a subcompact, which means it's way too small to be a status symbol like a Jeep Grand Cherokee.  For those reasons, the Fit has been flopping in the ten-day sales figures; Car and Driver reports that Fit sales down 17 percent through September of 2019 compared to 2018, being outsold two to one by the HR-V crossover.  Honda discontinued production of the Fit in Mexico, where it was being made alongside the HR-V, so it could make more HR-Vs south of the border.  The Mark 4 Fit will be made only in Japan.

This is yet another slap in the face to the small but passionate number of Americans who still recognize the value of a small car and appreciate its economy and nimbleness.  And just as Volkswagen, which sixty years ago urged Americans to think small, is now encouraging us to "drive bigger" - bigger SUVs, apparently - and seems to be ready to let the Golf wither away in America by not even advertising it, Honda doesn't seem to promote the Fit so much, either.  It's too busy pushing Pilots.  Like Volkswagen, Honda made a reputation for itself by selling small cars that drove like go-karts (and were just as fun) and sipped gas like a hummingbird sips nectar.  When the first Honda automobile sold in the U.S., the N600, below, came out fifty years ago, the joke was that you needed to buy two of them - one for each foot.

It may have been a flop, but this little roller skate of a car paved the way for the Civic, which wasn't all that much bigger when it first debuted for the 1973 model year but caught on soon enough and helped Honda as an automotive brand as well as a motorcycle brand. Over time, the Civic has gotten bigger and somewhat more mature, like the Golf, and Honda allowed the Fit to take over from the Civic in the subcompact field.  But Honda still remained committed to selling cars that were small and economical, even as its Accord evolved into a large, comfortable fairly sedan and as SUVs entered the brand's U.S. product mix, by offering the Fit here.  Now it seems less so, if its priorities for the United States going forward are any indication.

Honda has had a checkered history with offering hatchbacks in the States of late, incidentally.  For the Civic's seventh generation, the trunked sedan was offered in base form but the hatchback was only available as a high-performance Si.  So, there's a precedent for Volkswagen to follow if it only sells the Golf GTI and Golf R when the eighth-generation Golf arrives in the United States and sells only the Jetta here for base-model customers.  (The Civic hatchback came back to the U.S. only with the current tenth generation.)  But even if a trunked Fit existed, Honda probably wouldn't plan to offer that here either, given the car's minuscule size and the observation that even sedans are falling by the wayside in favor big family haulers.

The Fit is too good a car to die in the U.S. market.  It may be small on the outside, but it is cavernous on the inside, and from a Volkswagen fan like myself, that's high praise.  Don't expect similar praise from me for the American mainstream's automotive tastes or the automakers' disregard for anyone who hates SUVs and crossovers.  I'm growing even more disgusted with these horrible trends in the U.S. market.

I've done this for the Volkswagen Golf. Now I'm doing it for the Honda Fit.  Contact Honda at American Honda Motor Co. Inc., Honda Automobile Customer Service, Mail Stop 100-5E-8A, 1919 Torrance Boulevard, Torrance, CA 90501-2746 or call Honda at (800) 999-1009 of you want the esteemed Japanese automaker to keep the Fit in its U.S. lineup.

Volkswagen Doesn't Do It Again

For years, I have eagerly awaited the day Volkswagen would finally offer its smallest model, the Polo, here in the United States, which seemed unlikely given the continuing preference Americans have for big cars, particularly SUVs. But recently, with the growing interest in small cars like the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris, not to mention the increasing talk in a "green" future of environmental friendliness, it suddenly seemed very possible, and Volkswagen seemed ready to offer it here at last.

It was yet another mirage. Up until last month, I'd been waiting to see if the Polo - now the second smallest VW in the make's lineup - would finally make it, but when it became apparent that nothing seemed to be moving on that front, I bought a new Golf instead. Two weeks after I bought my Golf, Volkswagen of America announced that it was bringing neither of its subcompacts, the Polo or the smaller Up!, to North America (the U.S. and Canada) any time soon.

The reasons for not bringing these cars boiled down to costliness and greater priorities for Volkswagen of America. Jonathan Browning, Volkswagen of America's CEO, explained that the profit margins on subcompacts are too thin for VW to import them from Europe and also too risky for VW to build them in Mexico. Right now, VW is only a bit player in the U.S. market and is trying to become once again the major import brand it was back when Lyndon Johnson was President. In order to reach its "8 in 18" goal - 800,000 cars sold per year by 2018 - VW has to spend its money and resources in upgrading its supply chains, training its dealers, and - most importantly - expanding its dealer network. Forty years ago, Volkswagen had over 1200 dealers in the United States, but intense competition from the Japanese halved that number over time. VW says it simply has too much on its plate in North America to try and sell here subcompacts that it fears would lose money when the firm is trying to make money on this continent.

There's one silver lining. The fluctuating price of fuel in the U.S. and Canada could suddenly make subcompacts desirable, and VW could theoretically "bring the Polo here tomorrow" if need be, Volkswagen product planner Rainer Michel told Car and Driver magazine. Adding at least the Polo is still a distinct possibility, but for now, the company has decided that the Golf is small enough for the New World.

I'm skeptical, of course. Back when VW was content to be a niche marketer in the U.S. and Canada, selling inexpensive European cars in North America at a time when no one else did and moving about 300,000 cars a year, the company could have easily sent over the Polo here and limited its availability to avoid having more Polos on the lots than it could sell. There is a market here in America for the Polo (the Up! ? hard to say), and VW doesn't have to sell a lot of them to satisfy it. How much money could VW lose on them, especially with the Civic/Cobalt/Corolla -inspired Jetta selling like gangbusters? Okay, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe satisfying a small demand does cut into profitability. (The BMW-built Mini? Never mind that.)  But when I hear the latest news from Volkswagen that neither the Polo nor the Up are coming here, only to hear the promise of adding them to the lineup at a later date, I have the same reaction that I have when a new high-speed rail initiative is announced: "I've heard it all before."

My guess is that VW, having tried a subcompact model in America with the Brazilian-built Fox a quarter century ago, is far more cautious after that car - which the late Volkswagen of America executive James Fuller said could "be the appetizer for a lifetime of buying Volkswagens" - turned out to be such a sales disaster. If that's the case, then Volkswagen AG and Volkswagen of America have learned the wrong lesson. The Fox was a crude, antiquated, basic automobile. The Polo is none of those things. Furthermore, the Fox came to this country without an optional automatic transmission, because the parent company told Volkswagen of America that such an option was unnecessary - an assessment that completely missed the traditional American ambivalence toward stick shifts. The Fox was discontinued in 1993, VW's worst sales year ever in America; there hasn't been a subcompact in the American lineup since.

I have to hope that VW knows what it's doing. And in forsaking subcompacts in order to rebuild its North American network, it probably is. Volkswagen may very well have to get back to where it was in America in 1968, the Beetle's best year in the U.S., in order to satisfy smaller demands for smaller cars, and that's important after losing so much U.S. market share over the years to the Asian and domestic automakers. "What an auto company loses in the market today," Volkswagen's then-chairman Heinz Nordhoff said in 1963, "it probably can't recover in the next fifty years." Now how many years separate 2018 from 1968?

In the meantime, here's a picture of the latest iteration of the Polo, the VW we in the New World can't have.