15 years ago, these six cars were Nissan. Sure, they sold a few Zs back in ’95 (4,176, actually), and the 240SX was in its last year of five-digit sales, but the Altima, Maxima, Sentra, Frontier, Quest and Pathfinder were the bread and butter. Needless to say, things change over 15 years, and though Nissan still sells all of these vehicles (excepting the Quest’s 2010 model-year hiatus), they’re no longer the reliable core they once were. Yes, the Altima sells like hotcakes, but Nissan’s other core nameplates are on steady steady glidepaths downwards, and the brand’s volume is largely being maintained by the introduction of new models. And as is so often the case in business, this shift away from core strengths is being rewarded by some thorough housecleaning. Having spent quite a bit of today talking with Nissan consultant Sharyn Bovat, yesterday’s rhetorical question What The Foxtrot Is Going On At Nissan is starting to come into sharper focus. Expect full reporting shortly, but in the mean time know this: things are changing at Nissan. My question now: does this chart help explain why?

What’s that? We still haven’t plumbed the depths of our bag-o-automotive-sales-data thoroughly enough to have published annual sales for the Toyota Prius? Well, here it is, my truth-starved friends: ten years of Prius sales, culminating in two consecutive years of falling sales. And granted, most nameplates are down over the last two years because the market has been down for a solid two years now. Also, if you think the downturn is due to gas prices, you’ve got a surprise waiting for you after the jump. So has the Prius lost its luster? Could the most culturally significant passenger car of the last ten years be running out of steam (or whatever it runs on), or is this just a natural drop in demand in line with a weak market?

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Compact and mid-sizers after the jump…

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The best-selling nameplates in America may still be pickup trucks, but for the first time in nearly a decade, cars and car-based crossovers are outselling the body-on-frame competition. The shift occurred in the second half of 2007, as gas prices built to their Summer 2008 peak, and despite more reasonable energy prices, consumers do not appear to be going back to large trucks and SUVs en masse. And, as Automotive News [sub] reports, the downsizing of America’s buying tastes is doing more than just putting a fork in the SUV fad.

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These are the ten vehicles that NHTSA says are made from 90 percent domestically-produced components [via cars.com]. Notice a common thread there? Yes, the correct answer is Ford involvement, but according to cars.com, the task of crowning a “king of domestic content” isn’t as simple as NHTSA’s number.

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Whither the electrified market? According to this slide from a recent Johnson Controls analyst presentation [full PDF here], 2m global units by 2015 seems to be one of the models the industry is working on. And compared to other 2015 estimates, like Pike Research’s 3.1m worldwide number, it’s a fairly conservative approach. Still, there’s a long road ahead for plug-in and even hybrid vehicles. Toyota’s Prius, by far the best selling hybrid nameplate in America, sold about 152k units in the last 12 months. All hybrid nameplates sold 27,800 units last month [per Edmunds], for an annualized rate (non-SAAR) of about 333,600 or about half of the estimated 2015 market. Why that’s a problem, after the jump…

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We’re still taking email requests for Chart Of The Day [editors@ttac.com], but today’s chart isn’t one of them. This little data nuglet, of May volume by manufacturer, was requested by popular acclaim in the comments section of the last COTD… and was bound to be posted eventually anyway. After all, brand volumes are all well and good for armchair junior execs to wrangle over… but the armchair CEO demands volume by manufacturer. Let the harumphing begin!

Thomas Olesen wrote in to request a May 2010 brand volume chart. His wish just came true. Your wildest US-market auto sales questions can be answered too, if you just send your request to editors@ttac.com.

TTAC Commenter Charles T writes in:

Any chance you could do $30-$40k entry-level luxury, ie BMW 3-series and everyone else gunning for a piece of that pie? For completeness sake, include cars that normally aren’t positioned against the 3-series despite being a similar price (Lexus ES and Lincoln MKZ, for example) just as a sense of their relative market sizes; I’d be curious to see how the sporty vs unsporty dichotomy plays out in the real world.

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We like to think of TTAC as something of the thinking (wo)man’s car blog: sure, we’ll try to drive the hot cars, but we’ll be just as interested in their history, sales and cultural context as their 0-60 time. One of the ways we like to help contextualize these, the most emotional artifacts of our material culture, is by breaking them down into their unforgiving sales numbers. In addition to our now-normal monthly binge of sales graphs, we will try to bring you one graph per day, illustrating a previously unexplored view of the market for automobiles. Today, we start with Luxury Crossovers, a segment invented by its current chapion, the Lexus RX.

What will tomorrow’s Chart Of The Day be? Email us at editors@ttac.com, and let us know what models, segments or brands you want to see compared.