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Comment by HNTA_1 | Hacker News Reader

If you have two kids and the grandparents live with you (our situation), unfortunately SUVs are more or less the only option. Otherwise you take two cars everywhere, and two sedans are worse for the environment than one SUV.

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I think there's a disconnect between some of the folks here and the live of the average suburban family. My mother regularly had to drop-off 4 kids at school then pick up groceries for 6 people. You can't do that with a sedan. There'd be a better case against trucks - they're undoubtedly a fashion statement most of the time, but when you need a truck (which is inevitable for someone with a house/land) there's no substitute. It's even more so in rural areas - no one's gonna throw a deer carcass in the trunk of their Tesla.

Even a mid-sized sedan can handle that. A full-sized sedan could do it with room to spare.

Not comfortably...

If you frequently have that many passengers, then the vehicle makes sense. However, my guess is that most SUVs and trucks on the road at any times have 1-2 passengers in them. It's not broken up by vehicle type, but the average car has 1.5 passengers.

https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/personal-transportation-fac...

Maybe an alternative would be to convert all major roads to tolls, then offer discounts for HOV and electric.

I suspect this may be in part because many people have a need for something like an SUV to carry children and/or cargo from time to time, but can't justify another vehicle so the SUV or truck doesn't need to be driven all the time.

In my case, I have a pickup truck I need for work, but I don't drive enough outside of work to justify the cost of keeping my smaller car on the road also.

When I first got my SUV, I was the only passenger 25% of the time. And I NEEDED it.

I would load my 3 kids up, take them to day care, got to work. My wife would pick them up from day care and I would drive home without kids.

The SUV was the smallest vehicle I could get to transport 3 kids in car seats. And I needed to drive my kids to day care.

What happened to minivans?

They're still around, just not as fashionable these days. I was under the impression that they get the same MPG that SUVs get, so they're equally inefficient in my mind.

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