They have. They build just the junk the crowd wants. LOL.
For that same list I would say:
Trucks: They haven’t had any real competition for decades. GM never built anything truly new since 00, and Dodge? Meh. Getting better but still a decade behind. Not hard to be “class leading” when nobody else is even on the playing field. LOL. Plus using that marketing term outside of a commercial means you have to take a shot. Automotive commercial drinking game. LOL
Mustang is a disaster all around. Let’s not even go there. Using a classic badge to push junk is pitiful.
Explorer is just the cheap version of what people actually wanted in a square SUV... a Toyota... bur couldn’t afford it. Haha.
Fusion was actually good. I’ll give you that. So it’s dead now. Of course haha.
Expedition is the same story as the other full size trucks. Shove some leather inside an 00 era design and call it “new”. Nah. It’s just the last of two massive truck frame based haulers and Suburban is equally old. They’re both still around because some people over-breed and also need to tow things. Hahaha.
Of course this reality isn’t on any car review sites (which would be awesome by the way) because even the mildly snarky ones would never get another new car to review ever again. Hahaha.
SG soft petals it but he’s right. The masses want bubble cars. Stuff you can barely tell apart from the next brand in the Walmart parking lot without a GPS parking reminder app.
Safety is all good and all but you end up with bubble cocoons that look all the same so when your 20” Nav screen “distracts” you even though you used to know how to drive to places without it, and go flipping ass over teakettle in the ditch, they’ll just extract you from a thousand air bags and you’ll be home tonight instead of in the hospital. It’s a find goal, but there’s only a limited number of ways to accomplish it design-wise.
Which is why the door sills are so high the windows look like slits in WWII pillboxes. The cameras and sensors will look. You can’t anymore. And a minor dent in a bumper turns into $3000 to replace the sensors and radar. LOL.
It’s one of the reasons we are looking at Foresters. Might be the last small wagon anybody can actually see out of. It can’t last very long in modern design. It got the sensors but also retained tall windows and those whack it in MPG which CAFE and other standards won’t allow for long.
People put up with it on Forester and Outback for the solid AWD system which is headed well into the over-engineered and software driven fussy and less reliable every model year. Not to mention the terrible CVT and fake shifting.