BMW X6

Every few months a new obituary gets written for the sedan. Sales are down. Automakers are canceling models. The crossover has won. The four-door is finished. And every time someone writes that obituary, the Toyota Camry sells another 300,000 units, the Honda Accord moves another 200,000, and the Tesla Model 3 quietly becomes one of the best-selling vehicles on the planet. The sedan is not dead. A specific group of automakers decided it was not worth their effort, walked away, and then pointed at falling sales as proof the customer did not want it anymore...

Most cars look worse dirty. A dusty black sedan looks neglected. A water-spotted white crossover looks like it spent a week in a grocery store parking lot. But there is a specific category of vehicle where a layer of dirt, dust, or mud does not hurt the design at all. In some cases it actively improves it. These are those cars and the reason is more interesting than it sounds...

In 1990 the ten best-selling vehicles in America included sedans, coupes, and a handful of trucks. By 2005 the list was unrecognizable. By 2015 it was almost entirely trucks and SUVs. By 2023 Ford had stopped selling passenger cars in the United States entirely except for the Mustang, which survives only because it is culturally untouchable...

The debate about two-door versus four-door cars almost always ends up in the same place. Two doors look better. Four doors are more practical. Case closed, move on. But that framing skips over something more interesting, which is why the two-door almost always looks better, what specifically it does to a car's proportions, and the cases where the four-door actually wins...