What is actually a mid-range car?
01/12/2019
I came across the question of the definition of a mid-range car when I recently looked at the cover of an Auto-Motor-und-Sport magazine from 1972 , which showed the Renault 12 as a "new mid-range car". Shortly afterwards, I came across another AMS cover , this time from 1963, announcing a large mid-range comparison test with the Fiat 1500, Ford 17M, VW 1500 S and Opel Rekord.
Yes, what now?
After all, an Opel Rekord A measured over 4.5 meters in length, and there wasn't much choice above that. The Renault 12 was 4.35 meters short (I remember it being even shorter) and there was certainly a much wider range of cars above that than below, also in terms of status and equipment. Mid-range?
Wikipedia doesn't necessarily help much either: "Mid-size class refers to the passenger car vehicle class above the compact class and below the upper mid-size class. In the vehicle segments of the European Commission, this segment is called upper middle class."
Further down we read: "Historically, the middle class was the third vehicle class to emerge. After the luxury vehicles of the upper class and the small cars used for mass mobilization, a middle class emerged in between."
That made more sense, but a further look at the English-language version showed that such a class definition must have a national flavor: "A mid-size car (occasionally referred to as an intermediate) is the North American/Australian standard for an automobile with a size greater than that of a compact (C-segment) but smaller than a full-size car (F-segment) . In Europe mid-size vehicles are referred to as D-segment or large family cars. ... The automobile that defined this size in the United States was the Rambler Six that was introduced in 1956, although it was called "compact" car at that time."
So the Americans preferred to talk about size rather than class. This made things a little easier, but of course their ideas of size were different; the Rambler Six mentioned measured 485.5 cm in length, 183.2 cm in width and 147 cm in height. That would certainly have been big enough for the luxury class.
Over the decades, the classification probably became more and more complicated, hence terms such as "upper middle class" and the like. In addition, new vehicle categories (SUVs) created new classification challenges.
Long story short. What constitutes a mid-range car obviously depends on time and geography. This explains why an Austin A 60 Cambridge from 1963 (length 4.43 meters), a VW Jetta from 1984 (length 4.315 meters) or an Audi A4 (around 4.5 meters long) were all described as mid-range cars. However, the term itself no longer seems to be used very often today, given the variety of models ...
