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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

This is a tangent and I know there’s already a front page story on it but still couldn’t resist.

By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.

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I find it super frustrating. There's been leaps forward in fuel efficiency, but car manufacturers compensate by making trucks and SUVs bigger and heavier. The newer trucks can fit a third adult in the front seat comfortably. I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.

> I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.

You hit the nail on the head. Manufacturers aren't forcing anybody to buy big trucks. They respond to demand. If people show enough demand for a tiny pickup like the Maverick, we'll see competition in the space.

Demand is partially driven by cheap gas. Cheap gas is subsidized by all kind of benefits provided to oil manufacturers, US international policy (ie: military), removing negative externality (increased insurance rate due to global warming) etc.

So I'd say that this is an artificial demand that is driven by policy. If people paid the "true" price of this worldwide oil infrascture, I'd likely be more expensive and big trucks would not be chosen just to move your family around.

Another way to say that would be 'demand is not artificially constrained by expensive gas.' People want trucks, and the price of gas is not making them change their mind. The electric F150 will probably be sold out at MSRP for years

If gas wasn't so cheap, more likely the price of trucks would come down to compensate and the same number of units would roll off the lot. GM makes nearly $20,000 in profit on the sale of a truck. For comparison, a Chevy Trax barely sells for $20,000 out the door. The margins on trucks are huge.

It's a tough situation for buyers. I'd rather have a car 90% of the time, for a lot of reasons, but I legitimately need a truck 10% of the time. A car cannot become a poor truck, but a truck can become a poor car, and so the truck wins.

I mean you're welcome to buy a GM Chevy Spark which is a 4 seater hatchback for like $20k...If customers wanted small cars, they'd build more small cars.

Lots of open space, people choose comfortable cars. Pickups are a little bit bigger now, and they have taken over the role of the land yachts from decades past. I mean, look at the back seat space in an F150. Can't touch that in any sedan, even a full size. No wonder people like them for family cars.

I've been in enough traffic in Hyderabad that I can appreciate why nobody drives a big car there. Different situation.

The U.S. built wide roads in order to be tolerant to the small mistakes people make while driving. It’s called “forgiving design.” Planners were not expecting auto makers to inflate their vehicles to the larger lane width.

A modern F150 is 80 inches wide. ~50 years ago, the F100 was 78 inches wide. Not much change there. The legal limit is 96 inches, and has been since the 1950s.

Even rich people drive small cars in Amsterdam. But America is big and empty so plenty of space for everyone to drive a bus.

Part of the reason is that road engineers basically adopted a standard that treated all roads the same as highways in terms of buffer zones and so on.

So they treat a 2 lane road in suburb the same as a highway. Literally.

So you end up with local roads that can fit 4 SUV next to each other despite being like a 2 lane road.

Literally everything is built to accommodate huge cars and even has safety margin for huge cars.

Its actually funny, go to google maps and compare car subburbs from the 50s with those from the 80/90s and you will see the roads being like twice the size. And then you compare it to old street car subburbs and the roads are even thinner.

Ironically those street car subburbs often have population density that make them almost city like.

This all works together to make US style sprawl such a distinctive feature.

In my area its the 1950's and 60's suburbs that started to have enormous streets between houses, like 6 vehicles wide. I have always been curious why this was done.

You can read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town". I have not read it yet but Charles Marohn talks about this a lot.

Basically they just developed road safety principles for highways and then somehow thought it made sense for all roads no matter if there were people there.

There are cultural and legal reasons.

One legal reason is fuel economy regulations (CAFE standards) encourage car makers to make their cars large enough to be classified as "light trucks", leading to less stringent fuel economy standards.

A larger footprint also reduces the fuel economy standard, incentivizing larger vehicles.

See: https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...

If a truck or a van is big that seems reasonable to me. What really gets me is how stuff like the Mini. Park a BMW Mini next to a BMC Mini and the modern mini looks like a SUV. Buying cars that comfortably fit in "compact only" spaces in the city is getting harder every year.

It's partially safety. There is a minimum weight for road traction that's observed. It's not larger than an Accord, but certainly a classic Fiat 500 could never be made again.

Mostly it's the automobile as a status symbol.

Bigger is better according to lizard brain.

Its not lizzard brain, a larger car is objectively more useful if the environment is build for large cars.

Big roads, big cars.

There also seems to be some social expectation that when you have a family, you need a bigger car, despite modestly-sized cars being perfectly sufficient.

The market has spoken :)

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