The word compact was invented to make small American cars sound respectable
In 1950 Nash had a problem: Americans associated small cars with cheapness. So an executive coined a gentler label for anything with a wheelbase of 110 inches or less. He called it compact. The Nash Rambler, still big by European standards, created a whole market segment, and the rest of Detroit soon borrowed the word.
Demand grew slowly. In 1954 imports and small domestic cars made up just 64,500 of roughly five million sales. Then the 1958 recession hit, and American Motors, maker of the Rambler, was the lone company whose sales rose. By 1959 small imports held 14 per cent of the market, bought largely by educated, better-off families adding a second car who still wanted headroom and a decent boot.
The big manufacturers answered between 1958 and 1960 with the Ford Falcon, Chevrolet Corvair, Plymouth Valiant and Studebaker Lark. Yet a 1960s American compact was really a slightly shrunken six-seat sedan with a six-cylinder or V8 engine, larger than many European mid-size cars. The Falcon's chassis even produced a new breed, the pony car, named after the Mustang built on it.
The 1973 energy crisis pushed buyers towards cheap-to-run imports, and from 1977 Detroit downsized everything. Cars that had counted as compact were relabelled mid-size, while models the size of the old subcompacts inherited the compact badge. Around that time, the government's fuel economy rules shifted from measuring wheelbase to counting interior space, with a compact defined as 100 to 109 cubic feet of passenger and cargo volume. Genuinely international proportions arrived only in the 1980s. The drift has since reversed: by 2024 the Honda Civic and Hyundai Elantra were big enough to rank as midsize, and compact SUVs have been eating the category.
Japan took a planned route. In 1955 its trade ministry challenged manufacturers to build a national car that could top 100 kilometres an hour, weigh under 400 kilograms and run 100,000 kilometres without major service. That goal helped spawn the Toyota Publica and, a decade later, the Corolla and Nissan Sunny. In 1972 the Honda Civic's CVCC engine met California's emission rules without a catalytic converter.
Source: Compact car
