Hot Hatches Used To Be Cheap Daily Drivers, But Now They Require A Tech-Executive Salary

Why is the SUV/crossover the dominant form of car in the world right now? When did we, collectively, decide that? Because I don’t recall being consulted. It’s not that I have anything against SUVs and crossovers, but I just don’t get why they ended being the default state of cars at this moment in history. Most people don’t off-road them, they’re not all that big inside, and I just don’t get the appeal of wanting to be so high off the ground all the time. Really, if you were to be completely, pointy-eared-alien rational about it all, the car type that should be dominant is a four-door hatch. Ideally, a hot one. Yes, this well-banged drum is going to get further banged! Spanked, even! Because it’s true, dammit, and everyone that drives any decent hot hatch has this same glimmer of realization, and it’s absurd to pretend it’s not A Thing. Because it is. I was reminded of this because I was recently loaned a 2027 (I think? Model years sometimes confuse me) Volkswagen Golf GTI, the Autobahn edition, and the GTI is arguably the hot hatchiest of all the heated hatches, so it was especially hard not to have the realization of, damn, why doesn’t everyone drive one of these?

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I’m what you might call an “elder” millennial. I was born in the first half of the 1980s, so I remember a lot that younger members of my nominal generation might not, like Betamax, rotary phones, and the heyday of the four-door sedan. The 2026 Toyota Camry I just drove had me thinking about how we got here—and how much I sometimes miss the “good” old days. The demise of the sedan seems strange to me, at least on the surface. Sure, automotive trends come and go, especially among family trucksters. My parents came up in the age of the station wagon, which the one-two punch of malaise-era fuel prices and the minivan’s arrival booted out of the zeitgeist. Through it all, the old-fashioned family sedan held its anchorage in our collective psyche.

I remember when Dixie Chopper lawn mowers were the best around—or, at the very least, they were believably marketed as such. The sign at my local tire shop, which doubled as a Dixie Chopper dealer, touted them as the “World’s Fastest Lawn Mower.” Between that and the old men around me backing up the claim, I reckoned that it must be true. And now, Dixie Chopper is winding down. Alamo Group Incorporated owns Dixie Chopper, and it broke the news to the brand’s dealer network in a letter recently. The plan, as Powersports Business and other outlets report, is to cease operations by April 1, 2027. That means the brand’s story will conclude some 47 years after it started in Fillmore, Indiana.