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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

China's strategic planning around electric cars is really a thing of beauty.

Imagine a massive growing middle class buying gas-powered foreign produced cars instead. What would that do the Chinese economy and security with all oil imported?

The strategy of welcoming of firms such as Tesla builds up a huge ecosystem of suppliers creating possibilities for China's own car companies. Whether they target a highend international market such as with the Volvo Polestar or the small electric car market.

The small car market basically doesn't exist in the west. We don't find these cars safe or desireble enough. But safety and desirability of this category of cars will improve rapidly over time and ultimately they will become attractive enough to be sold in the west.

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Fixed: The small car market basically doesn't exist in the USA.

There are a lot of small cars in European big cities as it is difficult to find parking space for an "american sized" car.

The sedans which Americans thinks of as "small car", we think of "too big car for the city".

Yep they don't sell the VW Polo (my daily driver) in the US. It seem compact hatchbacks/cars (a.k.a B segment) has no market.

No, they sell the golf which is about a foot longer. I'd still call it a compact hatchback.

Chevy makes the Aveo.

You can still buy a Smart car here.

The mini is quite popular.

There is absolutely a segment for compact cars in the US, it's just nowhere near as large because most people spend time on the highway and don't feel as safe being surrounded by larger cars and OTR trucks.

Yes, agreed.

The US has a strange obsession with massive cars.

However it was not the european style small cars I ment when I referred to small cars but rather the 4000 USD electric cars, the article is refering to. Those you do not see in Europe at present.

In fact, the only Chinese EVs I have seen are the MG ZS EV and Volvo Polestar - both big cars.

The small electrics are things like the VW Up electric and the Fiat 500 electric, both European.

>The US has a strange obsession with massive cars.

It's not strange... it's survival (plus federal regulations about crash safety, bumper height) require the size vehicles I'm used to here. (The SUV thing is just crazy, though)

It is not unusual in the USA on a road trip (vacation) to drive 1000 km/day (or more) at 120+ kph.

How is something smaller than a 1999 Honda Civic (1100kg) going to safely share the road with 40000 kg Tractor-Trailer rigs?

Here's the smallest car I ever owned... it was silver, with a hatchback... I loved that car, and miss it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_(sixth_generation)

There are plenty of trucks in Europe. There's even a whole computer game series based around it.[0] Lots of Europeans go on driving holidays. They even take caravans ("travel trailers"). Caravans are so common that they're a running joke on popular car shows like Top Gear.[1]

It is true that generally people don't tend to drive as long distances in Europe as they do in the US, but it's not unheard of to drive 1000km on holiday. It's not as if everyone in Europe spends their lives pootling around cobble-stoned towns in Fiat 500s with a crusty baguette sticking out the window. There are large highways and plenty of heavy traffic.

I think the difference is that people in Europe tend not use their oversized vehicles as daily drivers. Many people don't even own a large car at all, preferring to rent or borrow one for specifically when they do go on holiday. Driving a large car seems like less of a status symbol in Europe. I don't buy that it's a safety thing for Americans, when most Americans are just driving their SUVs to the shops or to work every day.

[0] https://eurotrucksimulator2.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTnrpL1Uw0

Ok, what do you mean by large car? In the US, a car is specifically NOT an SUV, nor a Truck.

In my mind, that conjures up a 1972 Buick Electra Station Wagon. They are 2320 Kg, more than 2 of the 1999 Honda Civic.

https://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/buick/full-size_buic...

I understand the term "car" to mean pretty much any personal/family vehicle with an engine and four wheels. I don't think that's an unusual understanding of the word. The (American) Car and Driver magazine features stories on SUVs and pickup trucks too. Most "car" dealerships in the US sell all of these vehicle types.

This misunderstanding is because I'm old and when I grew up there were cars, pickup trucks, and Trucks. The language has mutated and I didn't notice.

SUVs in the US are out of hand, I totally agree with that. I thought you were saying that our Sedans are huge.

I'm also old (ish), and I do admit that the "American cars are bigger" argument has gotten less convincing as time has gone on. Even if we just look at cars, it seems the small/compact end has been getting larger, in Europe as well[0].

It would be interesting to see if the move toward larger cars in general has been offset by the increase of "sub-car" vehicles like electric tuk-tuks, e-bikes and so on.

[0] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/investigation-wh...

Less commonly with a pickup truck but plenty of people will refer to their SUV, especially if it's a crossover as most are these days, as their "car." I suppose a large car, in the strict sense of the word, these days would be something like a Lincoln Town Car.

If you are comparing to Tractor Trailers, why would car size matter? Even a really chunky SUV won't do anything against a sixteen wheeler.

If you hit a Semi Trailer from behind, it would matter... a small vehicle might go UNDER the trailer, decapitating the occupants.

There's a bumper-height bar on the trailer to prevent that.

Don't ever change the massive car obsession.

To Europeans used to small, cramped spaces - the great open roads and huge comfy cars of America are much appreciated.

I actively avoid driving in the UK. I adore driving in the US.

edit: Downvoting an outside perspective, how very Reddit!

American here: to offer a counter perspective, I am not at all opposed to a small car. However the last time I went shopping and looked at a smaller car, they were more expensive and more gas hungry then the car I ended up getting. (This was ~8 years ago? Maybe it has changed since then). I was actually surprised to see that.

Citation or that's bullsh!t.

If the car you ended up getting was large, as implied, I'd be interested in looking at how sh!te the small car must have been.

https://www.thecarconnection.com/overview/smart_fortwo_2014

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/167786-2014-chevrolet-cr...

Here you go. I can persoanlly attest that the diesel Chevy cruze easily gets 45-50 mpg. I also paid less for it than a smart car.

Like I said, I was not opposed to it, but I'm not spending more for a smaller car that is more fuel inefficient.

Ok,that's fair.

But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.

If those are its numbers, then its a horrible car, both in terms of mpg and everyday practical use. It looks good as a quick city run around and that's it.

In Europe, a typical small car might be a Toyotal Yaris or Peugeot 208, both hitting 70-90mpg

https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/toyota/yaris/hybrid/14351...

https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/peugeot/208/owning

> But I don't accept the smart fortwo as a typical small car.

Yeah that was why I had that disappointment, I was expecting gas milages closer to what you said. If I could get a car like that in the States, that would be awesome. I would love to get a car that gets 70-90 mpg.

And why is that. Small cars should be as practical in the USA as in rest of the world, and it seems it is only the mentality of the American consumer that seems to avoid them, perhaps?

It would be scary to drive european sized small cars on back roads with big SUVs and trucks whizzing by.

I live in the USA (California) and it's almost impossible to get anywhere without getting onto a highway.

The only local roads are littered with stop signs or red lights at every goddamn intersection and then some speed bumps. It's either the highway or the obstacle course.

I do have a electric scooter (max 40 km/h, so can only stick to local roads) which I use for <5km trips and and I can definitely say those stop signs cut my battery range by a factor of 2 or 3.

Americans have this weird fascination of bigger is better mentality to the point that practicality goes out the window. The hummer is a prime example: burns a ton of gasoline with little benefit to the owner or others.

Bigger cars are almost always safer, which isn't a weird fascination at all.

This used to be true back in the 80s and such, but with modern safety standards, you have to take extreme ends of big and small to get anywhere close to a statistically significant difference. How you drive, what kind of airbags your car has, what the general traffic culture is in your country etc are all considerably more important factors than your car size. To put it another way, you're way more likely to walk away from a crash in a modern small car than in an older large car. For all intents and purposes, size being safety is an urban myth today.

Are you sure? In a Consumer Reports article [0] from 2013, they mention in head-on crashes involving a car and SUV, the car driver was 7.6 times more likely to die than the SUV driver.

So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.

Just think about getting t-boned in an intersection. Would you rather be in a light, low vehicle or in a heavy, tall vehicle? I'd pick the latter, especially if the vehicle t-boning me is tall and its bumper at the height of my head if I were in a small car.

[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/05/suvs-are-sa...

> So in a world where there are SUVs driving around, buying an SUV for yourself instead of a car is a safer move.

That sounds like the same kind of circular reasoning that's often cited to oppose any gun regulation: "When everybody has a gun, you also need a gun to stay safe!".

A lot of people are confused about the difference between a stable and unstable equilibrium, because hey, they are both equlibria!

No one having a big car is an unstable equilibrium.

Thats because the SUV is too big, not because the car is too small.

If you lived somewhere where all the cars were small, both vehicles would be better off, because there would be much less energy in the collision.

SUV's aren't safer, they're more dangerous to other people. and that shouldn't be OK.

But it is a dumb fascination when the logical conclusion is everyone riding around in tanks.

There's a lot more space in the US. Roads are bigger. Parking spaces are more numerous, etc. Small cars are practical in the US, but big cars are not practical in Europe.

Low gas prices in the US.

Small cars became very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s in the US due to gas shortages. They gradually died out as gas prices came back down.

Go look at car sizes in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US. Compare that to car sizes in Europe as it recovered from WW2. Think Cadillac boat like cars vs the Mini.

Also, cars are essential transportation in parts of the US and raising gas prices would/have result(ed) in a lot of protesting. In fact, high gas prices would be seen as regressive.

We have more space, so US auto manufacturers used the space differential to change the dynamics of the market. Small cars have been removed from the situation by the SUV Wars. They were able to shift the Overton Window so they are no longer a valid answer.

Volkswagen and the Japanese auto companies filled this role in the 60s, 70s and 80s. In the 90s foreign vehicles started on the same obesity trajectory, 2nd born generation regresses to the mean.

A small car would disappear in the Bay area pot holes unfortunately

They’re not available for purchase here. Part of it is safety standards, and part is bad marketing.

For example, a subcompact Ford in the US might get 35mpg, vs 33mpg for the next size class up. The two cars cost about the same.

In Europe, Ford will sell the same subcompact body style with a smaller engine, and maybe a diesel, and it’ll get 50+ mpg.

No one buys the tiny gas guzzler, in the US and then Ford execs claim there’s no market for fuel efficient cars in the US.

It was this way 5-10 years ago; maybe it changed since then.

I'm sure a large part of it is we're more spread out. My anecdotal refute to the compact car is: when I've been in europe and have to travel from country to country, I personally saw about the same ratio of "large cars" on the highways in europe as I do in the US. Obviously the pickup truck is basically non-existent, but otherwise the mix was about the same.

Europeans don't seem anymore excited about taking what I'd call "city cars" on the highway than Americans are. That being said: I think far more Europeans can spend almost all their time in their local city and don't NEED to get on a highway with large trucks and vehicles. In the US that's basically unheard of unless you're in a large city. I'm sure during holiday the roads look quite different than a regular workday.

I'm guessing if you compared New York to most of Europe you'd see similar numbers, public transit and city layout in the rest of the US basically makes that impossible.

I think most cities and highways are designed for larger cars.

I've wondered what it would be like if there were cities with tight, maybe even exclusionary urban areas. "you must be less than this big to enter downtown"

There are some cities in Florida where retired people can drive golf carts, and it has become very popular.

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/ff-ecars/

For a small road trip to Chicago my family member rent a 8 person fan a huge car and off course I offered to be the driver.

Once we arrived in Chicago I kind of started to sweat because I'm used to European city parking spots. How many times will have to retry to park this huge car, but to my surprise the parking spaces are also huge.

These small cars are illegal in big cities in China (just not enforced) so it’s not strategic

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