Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Toyota Camry

WOODCLIFF LAKE, N.J. — The historically important midsize car segment is largely an import show, even though General Motors and Ford have reclaimed some lost share this year, with models like the Chevy Malibu, the Pontiac G6 and the Ford Fusion.

Sales of the all-new 2008 Malibu were up a whopping 47 percent to 119,665 in 2008, year to date through August.

But at the top, there’s the Toyota Camry, the Honda Accord, the Nissan Altima — and then there’s everything else. Toyota sold 473,108 Camrys in 2007, an increase of 5.5 percent from 2006, a number that dwarfs the Malibu and every other car. Year to date, Camry sales were 319,870, up 16.2 percent, according to AutoData.

Import brands overtook domestics in the “C/D” segment back in 1999, according to a presentation from Mazda North American Operations. That is, C/D size, as opposed to subcompact “B”-size cars.

Since the late 1980s, Toyota Camry sales have more than doubled. Since the early 1990s, the Nissan Altima has more than tripled. At a lower volume level, the Hyundai Sonata has more than tripled, since 1999.

Through all these years of import-brand growth, Mazda’s entry in the segment, the Mazda6, and its predecessor, the Mazda 626, bumped along for 20 years, in a range from around 70,000 to 80,000 units annually, said David Dildy, group manager, product planning and strategy for Mazda North American Operations.

“This is something we can’t allow to continue,” he said at a Sept. 18 press introduction here for the redesigned 2009 Mazda6. The all-new, bigger and more powerful Mazda6 is supposed to break that mold and approach 100,000 units a year, Dildy said.

Under the skin, the Mazda6 is distantly related to the Ford Fusion. Ford owns a controlling share of Japan-based Mazda. The two companies cooperate over a wide range of products, from some that are virtual clones, like the Mazda Tribute and the Ford Escape SUV, to models like the Mazda6 and the Fusion, where the sharing is at a much more basic level of common underlying architecture, out of sight of the customer.

With high U.S. gas prices, compact cars have gained share versus midsize cars, said Tom Libby, senior director of industry analysis for J.D. Power and Associates, at a Sept. 18 “Auto Industry Hot Topics” conference in New York, co-sponsored by J.D. Power and Standard & Poor’s.

According to AutoData, midsized cars in 2008 year to date accounted for 46 percent of car sales, down only very slightly from 46.8 percent in the year-ago period. Meanwhile, small cars went from 32.5 percent of car sales to 36.2 percent share in the same period. Large cars and luxury cars were the losers, AutoData said.