With US sales at halftime, we now have the bigger picture regarding the six-month delivery window from January to June. And it looks great for some – but not so much for others.
For example, General Motors again managed to gain the sales crown at the expense of Toyota's inability to recoup last year's losses. Compact crossover SUVs are also the most popular vehicles in America, swiftly followed by trucks and large crossovers. And the first passenger cars (midsize class) are only fifth, after subcompact CUVs.
But that's not surprising, right? Not when Tesla EVs sell by the hundreds of thousands (Model Y and Model 3 are at over 190k and 121k, respectively) and sports cars like the Ford Mustang, Chevy Camaro, or Dodge Challenger can only reach a fraction of that (less than 70k vehicles combined). So, no wonder that Toyota and Nissan are hiding their GR Supra and Z 'performance' as deeply as possible in the first-half reports.
Still, we got them to light and discovered that Toyota only sold 1,621 GR Supra units during the first six months of the year (almost minus 40% compared to the same period in 2022), while Nissan reached the grand tally of 966 examples. That's not too encouraging, right?
Alas, we were quite happy to report in June that the company gave us the first (and currently only) track preview of the feistier 2024 Nissan Z Nismo with three-time Formula Drift champion Chris Forsberg putting the sports car through its paces – drifting, donuts, and quick looks at all the goodies inside and out was also on point during the short video that we embedded second below as a reminder.
However, some folks might not consider the seventh-gen Z Nismo enough to save the sports car sector from turning into an endangered species soon. And some like to take matters into their hands – or rather, at the tip of their CGI brush, as is the case here with the imaginative realm of digital car content creators. However, certain pixel masters also choose a destructive path if you want our two cents on the matter.
This could also be the case with Dimas Ramadhan, the virtual automotive artist behind the Digimods DESIGN" channel on YouTube, who has already taken up the task of revealing a next-gen Z Nismo - in CGI for the 2025 model year. Luckily, no real Zs were hurt in the making of this digital presentation – which simply reskinned the current iteration with elements from an improbable face and rear-swap candidate, aka the third-generation Qashqai compact crossover SUV that will (one day) sell as the latest Nissan Rogue Sport in North America too.
Frankly, given the changes, if you ask me about our proverbial CGI hall pass, I would be inclined to send this virtual creator to indefinite detention time…
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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