Chevrolet’s old commercials likened its cars to baseball, hot dogs and apple pie as a way of promoting the brand's all-American character. But the company has models it won’t sell in the United States. These are not the tiny Chinese microcars that Chevy only sells in emerging markets either; these are real cars that are on the roads in North America.
They just aren’t for sale to the general driving public.
They are the Chevrolet Caprice full-size sedan, the Orlando midsize crossover SUV and the Captiva Sport compact crossover SUV.
The Caprice is a full-bodied, traditional rear-drive V-8 sedan of the sort that propelled Chevy to a dominant market position in the middle of the last century. There are still customers for such cars, but Chevy doesn’t currently offer them for sale to the average motorist in the U.S.
But in Australia, Chevy's corporate cousin Holden still builds them, and American police want them. So Chevy imports the Caprice for sale to police departments. Traditionalists can take heart, though, because next year Chevy will offer the SS, a “super sport” V-8 sedan very much like the Caprice, also imported from Australia.
But what about the Captiva Sport? That’s a vehicle in the red-hot compact crossover segment. Surely it would be ideal for the U.S. market. The thing is that Chevy already has the Equinox, which has been so popular that the company expanded production to an additional plant, reports spokesman Tom Wilkinson.
That plant should help make it easier for Chevy to meet consumer demand for the Equinox, but the Captiva Sport helped in the meanwhile by fulfilling demand from rental fleets for a compact SUV with this Mexican-made model. Now that there is enough production capacity for the Equinox, Wilkinson said he doesn’t know whether Chevrolet will drop the rental-only Captiva Sport.
And there’s the Orlando, a global hit for Chevrolet that is made in Korea and sold in Canada. You would think that’s a vehicle that belongs in U.S. showrooms. No, said Willkinson. Because it fits a market niche between the Equinox and the bigger Traverse in size, all the Orlando would do if it were sold in the U.S. would be to siphon sales from those other models. In most markets where the Orlando is sold, Chevy doesn’t offer the Equinox or it doesn’t have the Traverse. The Orlando is a popular alternative to the bigger, more expensive Traverse in Canada because of that country’s higher gas prices and lower household incomes.
All three of these not-for-consumers models would just contribute to showroom chaos and confusion, Wilkinson said. “You’d have a huge number of vehicles in showrooms and maybe not a big increase in sales,” he explained.
So the top-selling U.S. brand isn’t trying to deprive us of interesting models. Chevy just needs to trim the number of them to a reasonable level. It is also good for the U.S. economy that the models they do sell here as alternatives are domestically assembled rather than imported from Australia, Mexico or Korea.