Honda Civic is a mileage champ, but is it becoming one of the new sales champs, as well?

Americans are on a diet.  No, they’re still spending too much of their money asking the kid behind the McDonald’s counter to “supersize me.”  But even if our waistlines keep growing, our taste in sheet metal is leaning towards smaller and smaller models.

Last year, in a significant shift, midsize cars were knocked off the throne as the king-of-the-hill segment in the American automotive market.  The new sales king is the compact car, reports George Peterson, of the research firm, AutoPacific Inc.

The news probably shouldn’t be surprising.  The run-up to record fuel prices, last year, had everyone rethinking their driving decisions.  The pickup and SUV markets imploded, while sales of hybrids hit record levels, mid-2008. But with fuel prices running less than half their peak, truck sales are showing signs of recovery, while mileage-misers are in a slump.  Last June, Toyota sold more than 20,000 Priuses.  This year, the trendline is running at well under a third of that volume.

So, will the compact car slip back and the midsize car regain its dominance?  Peterson doesn’t think so.  Midsize “will play second fiddle,” he writes, “for years to come.”  That puts U.S. motorists more in line with their European counterparts who have long felt “small is smart.”  Consider the compact Ford Focus, which has traditionally appealed more to young American buyers just getting into the car market, or empty-nesters on a budget.  In Europe, a more lavishly-equipped version of the Focus is a center-of-the-market family car.

That suggests there’s an opportunity for automakers to deliver the same sort of product to American buyers: fuel efficient, well-equipped yet affordable, and more roomy inside than traditional compacts.  “What we are seeing is consumers rightly identifying the best of both worlds in today’s compact segment,” adds Ed Kim, AutoPacific’s director of industry analysis.

Kim also points out that today’s compact is a very different car than those we think of, looking back just a couple decades.  He points to Honda which, like most of its competitors, has steadily up-sized its products, in recent decades.  Early versions of the Accord would be considered a compact to today’s buyer.  Read another way, the 2009 Civic is as large as an older Accord, but far better outfitted, with virtually all the features midsize buyers expect available at least in optional form.

Click here to read the full story from AutoPacific.