Get ready to spend more for a small car.
With gasoline prices hovering around $4 a gallon, buyers are trading in trucks and sport utility vehicles for smaller options.
For Detroit's automakers, that's a massive problem. They usually lose money every time they sell a small car.
"They're going to have to find a way to make money on these cars" if they're going to survive, said Bob Ebert, an economics professor at Baldwin-Wallace College.
That's going to mean either raising prices on small cars or cutting costs and features.
Either way, well-equipped, inexpensive compact cars are going to be a thing of the past.
Over the next several years, the U.S. market will have to start looking a lot more European if auto manufacturers are going to be able to thrive on small cars, analysts said.
In England, for example, compact cars cost about double what we pay here. They also tend to have leather seats, satellite navigation and other premium amenities.
Ford and GM have both said they will bring to America versions of the compact cars that they make in Asia and Europe to America over the next few years.
That's a big shift from several years ago when Ford decided not to bring the European version of its Focus to the United States for fear the company couldn't charge enough to cover the higher production costs. Instead, Ford updated an older version of the Focus for this market.
For nearly 30 years, Detroit's auto producers have sold small cars for two reasons -- to attract young buyers with inexpensive options and to increase their fleet average fuel economies to meet federal standards.
Ford didn't mind losing money on the Focus, for example, because sales of that car let it legally sell gas guzzlers like the Explorer SUV for big profits.
During their best years in the 1990s, companies made $10,000 or more in profit per SUV sale. Losing a few hundred dollars on a compact car was a price they were willing to pay.
That lucrative SUV market is gone. To sell SUVs, Ford has had to revive employee-pricing discounts, effectively erasing profit margins. Chevrolet is offering thousands of dollars of cash-back incentives and discount financing for its pickups.
"The consumers today are really demanding something different," said Kim Hill, associate director of the economics group at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.
In May, Ford's F-Series pickup line lost its spot as the best-selling vehicle in the country for the first time in 16 years, beaten by two compact cars and two mid-sized sedans from Toyota and Honda.
Ford has responded by increasing Focus production. General Motors said this week that it would add a third shift at its Lordstown plant this summer to increase production of the fast-selling Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5 compacts.
With high gas prices, consumers are paying close to sticker price on these vehicles, making some of them profitable.
But even if automakers are able to eke out a $1,000 profit per vehicle, it won't come close to filling the gap left by declining sales of those once-golden SUVs.
In announcing its restructuring plans this week, GM confirmed that Lordstown would build the next version of Chevrolet's compact car. The new model will be based on the same compact car GM is selling in Europe and Asia.
"The new Chevy compact will be better-equipped than today's compact cars," GM Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said in a news release.
Those newer compacts won't be on the road here for another two years. Until then, Ebert of Baldwin-Wallace and others said car makers would make more money per vehicle by slowly adding features. Over the next several years, compact cars will get more luxurious -- and more expensive.
Ford made a big splash this year when it promoted its Sync voice-activated computer system as an option on the Focus. Sync coordinates phones, personal data assistants, MP3 players and other devices, allowing drivers to simply tell their cars to change the song on the stereo.
Although Ford charges only $400 for the system, it comes only on better-equipped versions of the Focus.
Hill said consumers should expect more of that trend. Companies will still sell very cheap compacts, but they won't have much to offer beyond basic transportation.
Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore., said consumers have been showing a greater willingness to spend more on small cars in recent years, so companies do have a chance to make a profit.
Big successes include luxury small cars like BMW's Mini Cooper and Toyota's Scion line. But GM has also seen success with vehicles such as the Chevrolet HHR wagon.
The HHR breaks even, at best, in its base version, but makes money when consumers choose options such as chrome accents on door handles, specialized grilles, better stereos and other options.
"Small car buyers aren't looking for 'cheap' cars at all," Spinella said in an e-mail message. "They're adding lots of extras, and that means it is possible to make a profit by selling them."