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Comment by uselesscynicism | Hacker News Reader

In addition, EPA rules made it impossible to build sedans and wagons with the performance desired by consumers, which is what caused the death of the station wagon and the birth of the SUV, which according to the EPA is a light truck and is subject to different emissions rules.

Now everybody with three or more kids is practically required to buy a van or SUV because you can almost never fit three car seats in the backseat of an EPA approved sedan.

So families buy larger vehicles, which have the problem described above, and the EPA doesn't even succeed at regulating the market

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> In addition, EPA rules made it impossible to build sedans and wagons with the performance desired by consumers,

To elaborate, current CAFE standards have a gap where station wagons used to be, that basically makes it impossible to make a modern station wagon. By declaring SUVs as light trucks, they aren't impacted by the same rules as a station wagon would be.

tl;dr light weight high volume cars are literally not legal to make[0] and [1] unless tiny little baby engines are put in which would put these cars down market.

I'm hoping moving to EVs resolve this entire issue.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...)

I'm also hoping that EVs encourage a bigger reinvestment in alternative form factors like the station wagon/estate car/shooting brake. So far most of the manufacturers of EVs are sticking to existing truck/SUV trends playing it safe, but now that enough of the major manufacturers are using standardized platforms where they can easily play with the form factor above the "skateboard" core we'll start seeing more EV diversity than ever before sooner rather than later.

(VW Group has an EV station wagon Porsche now [a variant of the Taycan EV], and that's probably wildly out of most family's budgets, but if VW Group is playing with that on the MEB at the luxury end, hopefully that means they are already considering how to play with that on the low end as well.)

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