Jaguar dealers experienced a catastrophic 97.5% sales drop in 2025, leaving showrooms nearly empty while customers wondered where their favorite models went. This isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a broader automotive purge happening across American dealerships, often without the fanfare you’d expect when decades-old brands quietly fade away. Your local car lot probably looks drastically different than it did three years ago, and the changes reveal how dramatically the industry is reshaping itself.
The Consolidation Wave
Financial pressures force dramatic dealer restructuring across multiple brands.
Infiniti dealers now average just 24 car sales monthly—barely enough to keep the lights on, according to industry reports. Many report annual losses exceeding $2 million, forcing Nissan to quietly merge Infiniti operations into existing Nissan dealerships to stem the bleeding. This isn’t exactly the luxury brand experience Infiniti intended, but survival trumps prestige when your market share plummets from 6% to 2.8% in five years.
Smart took a more decisive approach, exiting the U.S. market entirely after 2019 when updating their tiny cars for American regulations proved too expensive for their microscopic sales numbers.
The Silent Sedan Purge
Chevrolet systematically eliminates mainstream models without major announcements.
Chevrolet has methodically discontinued its sedan lineup:
- The Cruze vanished in 2019
- The Malibu ends production after 2025
- The Camaro disappeared from 2024 lineups
These exits happened with minimal corporate fanfare, like Netflix quietly removing shows from their catalog.
The strategy reflects brutal market realities: Americans overwhelmingly prefer SUVs and trucks, leaving sedans fighting for scraps in an increasingly hostile landscape. If you own one of these discontinued models, expect resale values to erode faster than you’d like.
When Brand Reinvention Backfires
Jaguar’s all-electric pivot creates more problems than solutions.
“It’s a luxury brand without luxury sales,” explains one industry analyst about Jaguar’s dramatic transformation. “The all-electric strategy was supposed to save Jaguar, but it’s actually accelerating their death. Dealers have nothing to sell, customers have nothing to buy, and the brand is disappearing in real time.”
Jaguar ended all combustion engine production in 2024, planning an exclusively electric relaunch by 2026—a gap that’s proving fatal for dealer relationships and consumer awareness.
This automotive consolidation mirrors what happened to streaming services after the initial explosion—too many players chasing the same audience inevitably leads to casualties. The difference is your next car purchase will have fewer options, and the brands that survive this shake-up will likely dominate an increasingly homogenized market within the next few years.
