-See the USA in your Chevrolet. -Have you driven a Ford?
-The jingles -- catchy.
-Lately.
-The chases -- the stuff of Hollywood.
Cars at their pinnacle.
-In a class of its own, Chevrolet for 1964 stands alone.
-The automobile is America.
American is the automobile.
It's really kind of the myth and the metaphor
and the meaning of American life.
Whether you drive or you don't drive,
you live in the world that the automobile made.
-And, in that world, the sedan ruled.
-You know, I'd thought about buying a smaller car,
but the more I thought about it,
Impala's the only car that makes any sense for us.
-This is another car that I own.
-Dan Albert is the author of "Are We There Yet?
The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless."
He says automakers are scrambling to still make money
off luxury cars, SUVs, and trucks.
It's money they will need to fund a huge leap
to electric cars and ones that drive themselves.
-As far as, you know, the standard sedan
or the run-of-the-mill car, if you will,
the kind of car that people buy because they need to get around,
I don't think they're that interested in doing that,
and I think the car companies
are really hoping to change the business model.
-Have your Chevrolet dealers knock.
-In 1965, the Chevrolet Impala
was the best-selling car in America,
with more than a million sold.
-The Chevy Impala is the bread-and-butter car of America.
-To be in a car that has such a legacy
but isn't just resting on that legacy
but is going out there and doing something fresh.
-Decades later, not even a slick ad with singer
John Legend could save it.
The Impala is getting dropped by General Motors,
joining other Chevrolets, Buicks,
and Cadillacs in a mass purge of its sedan lineup.
With assembly lines closing, it's partly why some 46,000
GM workers went on strike in the fall of 2019.
The other car companies already slicing sedans.
Ford is moving to SUVs and trucks.
The Mustang will be its only car left.
At Fiat Chrysler, Ram trucks and Jeeps.
Here in Detroit, it all has people in the car business
saying the same thing.
-It's a really interesting time in the auto industry.
-We're gonna see more change in the next ten years
than we've seen in the last 100 years.
-There's been more innovation in the last three years
than I'll argue has taken place in the last 20.
-It's on the cusp of the biggest disruption we'll have seen
since it became a market over 100 years ago.
-You can see some of these changes
at Detroit's big auto show.
It's a place where car companies reveal new models
then show them off.
The rocks, trees, and dirt -- all real.
It's also a place where automakers peer into the future,
trying to predict what people want to buy,
and people keep buying crossovers --
sport-utility vehicles on a car frame.
-The new Honda Passport. -More volume, more flexibility
on how you can configure the interior,
elevated ride height,
and an image that you're an adventuresome person --
all those things that people love now.
-Karl Brauer is the executive
publisher of AutoTrader and Kelley Blue Book.
-If you can give me an SUV-like vehicle
that does everything better than a sedan,
and there's really no down side, why should you buy a sedan?
-Let's go. Let's live.
Let's love every mile.
The only way to travel is Cadillac style.
Cadillac.
-The Cadillac of sedans was Cadillac.
Go back far enough, and they sprouted tail fins and chrome,
but then -- -That beautiful American car,
that boat that you floated down the road in,
became old-fashioned.
-Now Cadillac is all about crossovers and SUVs,
but it needed one more.
-Where every seat is a great seat,
so that begins with an interior package
that's world-class, a really fantastic third row,
heaps of leg room, heaps of head room.
-Andrew Smith is Cadillac's director of design.
-Cadillac should be boldly American,
it should be optimistic, and, frankly,
it should be a little bit outrageous.
-It will need bold moves.
The luxury-car market in the US is dominated by imports,
with Cadillac down the list.
If today is about crossovers and trucks,
with electrics moving in,
tomorrow is about driverless cars, or maybe not.
-It's gonna take us a long time to perfect this driverless car
that we're all hoping for.
-If we could flip a switch,
and all the cars were autonomous tomorrow,
and they all talked to each other and to the infrastructure,
it'd be actually much easier to make this switch,
but everyone knows that's not gonna happen.
-Nine lives, cat's eyes.
-Which brings us back to where we started --
the open road and the American car.
-Whoo! Listen to her purr.
You ever heard anything so sweet?
-At this car show outside Washington,
there's an aquamarine 1964 Pontiac Catalina
that is Dan Glitcose's baby.
-This is a six-passenger sedan. -With space for more
if you put bodies here, as college students do.
-We did six. Six folks in the back.
-Try doing that in an SUV.
Pontiac was the excitement brand, chasing younger buyers.
GM killed it in 2010.
I don't want to say that I'm sad to see the sedan go,
but always treat the sedan as where we came from.
-What hands crafted the look? -Don't forget where we were.
-The heartbeat of America.
That's today's Chevrolet.