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Photo: GM media website. Unless you’re a hardcore demographics geek like me, you’ve probably never heard of Kenneth W. Gronbach. If you have heard of him, chances are you’re a regular listener to Coast to Coast AM, the popular nationally syndicated talk radio show, on which Gronbach has been interviewed a couple of times by host George Noory. But regardless of whether you’ve heard of him, Kenneth W. Gronbach, author of Upside: Profiting from the Profound Demographic Shifts Ahead ,  just might be the most important demographer alive. And his take on millennials, the generation that has overtaken baby boomers as the largest demographic group in the U.S., just might go a long way toward explaining the ongoing decline of the traditional passenger car or sedan—a phenomenon that we at Auto Enthusiasts Newsblaster like to call #DeathOfCar. If you’re like Kenneth Gronbach, you understand that one of the most dangerous errors of omission that any enterprise can make is to have an incomplete or ...

With Ford's decision to pull Fusion and Taurus from North American Dealerships, the Fusion may now be truly riding off into the sunset. Photo: Ford media website. First, let's put things in perspective. The Ford Fusion is a car that we have spent a lot of time ragging on lately as an example of what's wrong with passenger car design today—those look-alike body shapes that are supposedly driven by safety requirements and other regulations, and those awful, awful grilles. So we're not exactly sad to see the Ford Fusion go, at least not its current generation.

Left: 1954 Chrysler Ghia Thomas Special. Photo by "Mr. Choppers" (posted to Wikipedia).  Right: 2018 Ford Fusion (Photo: Ford media website). Are you excited by the car designs you’re seeing today? Or are the lineups, by and large, getting tiresome—because everything seems more and more alike? The sad truth is that, today, with some notable exceptions, many models within a given category—sedans, crossovers, SUVs, even sports coupes—are tending to look dishearteningly similar. To those of us who appreciate the breathtaking looks from the heyday of car design (which, for us, was roughly from the 1950s through perhaps the mid-1970s), the current generation of look-alike fastback sedans, for example, is sad to behold.

Current Lineup Bewilders with Strong Performance, Head-Scratching Styling                Clockwise from Top Left (all from 2017 model year): Jaguar XE, Ford Fusion, Jaguar F-Type, and Ford Mustang. Notice the styling similarities? Collage was assembled from photos from the Jaguar and Ford media sites. I have to admit some bias here, because I grew up around Jaguars from the 50s and 60s. My older brother owned several. The ones I remember best were an XK-140 coupe and a 340 sedan. No, I wasn't from a wealthy family. I'm the son of a teacher, and our standard of living was barely middle class.