Car enthusiasts in America have suffered a lot in recent years. There’s no new STI to buy, the GT-R is gone, manual transmissions are disappearing, convertibles barely exist, and NA Miatas are no longer a $2,000 bargain. We also did our bit and bought a lot of manual GTIs, Volkswagen couldn’t argue that there wasn’t a lot of demand here. But alas, we still lost the manual GTI. It’s tough out there, but it’s not all bad news. Yesterday we thought our longtime foe the Nissan Altima had finally been vanquished, but it turns out the Altima will be around until at least the 2027 model year. Still, we doubt it’ll be on sale much longer, and at the rate drivers crash, the streets should be Altima-free before long.
If you’re young enough to still get out of an NA Miata with any decency, you should know that it wasn’t always this way. In the late 1900s, Nissan sold some fun-to-drive sedans in addition to its sports cars, and the 2002 Nissan Altima was pretty awesome. It was still a front-wheel-drive family sedan, but it was a lot of fun to drive, and Nissan let you pair a manual transmission with the V6. A V6 that produced 240 horsepower at a time when the Ford Mustang GT’s V8 only produced 260 horsepower. When the 2007 Altima came out, the relationship started to deteriorate.
One down, still a long way to go
We might not be swimming in affordable new sedan options right now, and there might be some other wins we’d love to achieve, but I’m not thinking too much about it, and you shouldn’t either. Something about the 2007 Altima starts turning everyone who buys it into the worst drivers ever, and no matter how much we love sedans more than crossovers, that curse needs to be broken.
However, where do we direct our energy next? After a longtime enemy is finally (almost) dead, we need somewhere to direct our energy. We have momentum and we need to take advantage of it. So which automotive foe should we go after next? Many people would expect me to say Tesla, but I think we can dream big. I say we kill the V6. Inline-sixes are better anyway, and if you have so-called “packaging concerns” because the I6s are “too long”, the flat-six is right up there. Perhaps if we put the 95% of the population in the 50-mpg four-cylinder hybrids that they really need, enthusiasts could have a few more V8s, too.
I highly doubt that will happen, but if you’d asked me five or 10 years ago, I never would have thought I’d outlive the Ultima. Maybe we’d have a better chance of all uniting together to slay a different dragon. Maybe you can suggest one. You know, in the comments below.
