The sports car market isn't what it used to be. With car buyers mainly interested in practical crossovers and SUVs, cars designed just for fun and style are a tough sell, and they're pricey to develop. Still, a few automakers are fighting the good fight with a handful of models that are still relatively affordable (starting prices under $60,000, with some starting for less than $35,000). And even if they don't sell in big numbers, every one counts. Among them, one is doing incredibly well, and the rest are mostly holding steady. Let's dig into the details.Ford You Won't Be Surprised By The Dominant Model Under $50,000 To make things more digestible, we're putting a cap on sports cars under $100,000, and breaking those into two categories, one with cars for less than $50,000 and one for those that start for more. We're also only looking at those that don't have four-door models with the same name (so no BMW 2 Series and 4 Series). In the more affordable group, you won't be surprised to learn that the Ford Mustang leads by a considerable margin. Ford has sold 19,904 this year, and 5,830 of them were sold in April. That's more than an 18% increase month-over-month, and an even more remarkable increase of nearly 40% year-over-year.Ian Wright/CarBuzz/Valnet The rest of this category features vehicles that haven't sold more than 3,000 units this year, to give some idea of how big a gap there is between them and the Mustang. Leading them is the Mazda Miata at 2,858 examples, which, unfortunately for Mazda, is actually down by nearly 10% over last year. At least April was pretty good for it with an increase of 60% compared with April 2025.Shockingly close to the Miata is the Toyota GR 86. Toyota sold 2,542 of them. Subaru's version, the BRZ, only managed to sell 1,086, though that's down by just 4.2% over last year. So, it's not the most impressive showing for the pair, but at least their combined sales (since they're nearly identical) still top the Miata.Toyota At the back of the pack are another Toyota and a Honda that pushes the definition of sports car. The Supra's total sales this year have reached 1,263. We don't have exact numbers for January through April 2025 to compare to, but through March of last year, Toyota had sold fewer than 500 Supras, so it seems like it's off to a strong start this year. Some of that could be the fact that this generation of Supra is going away after this year. Meanwhile, the Honda Prelude, which is arguably more of a GT car than a sports car, is in its first year and struggling a bit. Honda has only sold 1,152 examples this year, just topping the BRZ. The Cars That We Don't Have Full Numbers For, And Are A Bit Pricier There are two models that, at the time of publishing, we don't yet have. Those are the Nissan Z and the BMW Z4. As of March, the Z's sales were quite low at 899. That's a decrease of nearly 60% compared to its strong 2025. BMW has sold even fewer Z4s at 478 through March, though that's only down by about 8%.Falling slightly outside our slightly arbitrary "affordable" categorization, and also lacking April sales yet, are the Chevy Corvette and the Porsche 718. The Corvette now has a base MSRP of $70,000 before destination, and the 718 was more than $60,000 when Porsche was still making new ones. Of course, now the 718 is on hiatus while Porsche figures out what it's doing with the new generation. We digress, though. Chevy has sold 6,235 Corvettes through March of this year, which is down a few hundred over last year, but still second-best of all the cars, here. Porsche has only sold 206 718s this year, but as we just mentioned, the models are out of production.
+37 others
