Study: car evolution trends (2015)
teoalida.com
teoalida.com
What about the increases in safety over that time span? Crumple-zones in some areas and stronger structural members add weight. Air bags add weight and decrease interior space. A-pillars used to be dainty for visibility but have been thickened to provide rollover protection.
The analysis provided doesn't give any reasons for the changes, only pointing out that they trend toward larger/heavier.
Add all the luxury elements that attract customers and you have a lot more extra weight. Small cars are generally seen as entry level, unsafe, so car manufactures are more than willing to provide bigger, fancier models. It's not just the size that shot up, prices did too in order to cover all the extras.
People are also bigger and heavier than they used to so extra space and carrying capacity are more than welcome.
By around 2005, almost any "premium" mid-sized car like a Mercedes E-class or a BMW 5 series had a turbocharged 6-cylinder diesel engine around 3 litres with common rail injection. These engines have much heavier blocks and need a lot of additional systems for emission control.
At the early 2000s, about 90% of the cars sold were Diesel IIRC. We always care a lot in terms of economy where buying a car, and with a Diesel oil cheaper than gas, and Diesel cars that had more mileage than petrol ones, there's the reason.
I feel this pressure from my baby boomer parents and millennial partner - especially in the southeast; they ignore the likelihood of rollovers in SUVs and the proven safety of modern suspensions and airbags in sedans.
But bigger is pretty universally better from energy management perspective, right? Simply having more material/size means lower deceleration rates for whatever you're trying to keep out of the passenger compartment.
Bigger vehicles have bigger engines, frame rails, and suspensions. Some of these for cost, some of these for towing performance.
An example being a truck, bigger frame rails that will crumple less, leaf spring suspension that will crumple less, and a high rake grill that will capture more force, and a higher mounted engine and higher mounted passenger compartment that makes separation less ideal.
* A loophole allows SUVs to bypass pollution regulations by calling themselves 'light trucks'
* Japanese automakers were outcompeting American automakers in the late 1990s in the car segment - but not the SUV segment. Lawmakers don't want to close the loophole, because SUV sales are propping up US automakers.
* The US auto industry made a big marketing push for SUVs - adverts, product placement in movies and so on - branding them as a sporty choice for your active lifestyle, in contrast to the staid image of minivans and station wagons.
* If you do market research on SUV owners asking them why they chose that car - they'll say they like the fact it's spacious. Makers of regular cars saw the market asking for bigger cars.
* As you've identified, stricter safety demands for things like crumple zones have also added to vehicles' sizes.
* With people's heights and waistlines growing every generation, it's unlikely we'll ever see a renaissance of cars as small as the European cars of the 1970s like the Mini Mk 1 or the Reliant Robin.
The reason for this is tariffs on SUV imports.
SUVs, light trucks and cars have to pass the same emission standards in the US. I think you meant fuel economy that has different rules for light trucks and cars.
More regulation = more complexity = more weight
Similar can be seen with houses sort of.
More regulation = more complexity = higher cost
If you could weigh a house it’d probably be heavier too ;P
Both cars and houses have certainly inflated in size over time. But both are almost certainly not due solely to increased regulation.
Of course, what I _actually_ want is to be riding a bakfiets with my kids in the front, but when I'm getting tailgated by an F-150 that's not very practical.
An accident involving two large vehicles seems like it could actually be more dangerous than an accident involving two smaller vehicles since there is a lot more force involved. And to your example, it seems like larger vehicles could make people drive more aggressively since they feel more invulnerable. Certainly larger vehicles are less agile, harder to control, and more prone to things like rollovers, which could make avoiding an accident in the first place more difficult.
I think the statistics show that if you're making a personal buying choice in 2023, a larger vehicle is safer than a smaller one. But the impact on overall safety of all those personal choices added up is less obviously a positive one.
It is a tragedy of the commons. Any individual rationalization is in effect making the situation worse, and a post hoc justification of the current arms race.
This needs top down regulation, not bottom-up convergence. Many cities are objectively worse now than 15-20 years ago, because cars have gotten more foul. Note that the only places where this noxious effect is countered, are the places that side-step the issue by curbing driving as a whole. The galvanizing program of every western european city the last 10-15 years has been calming traffic and encouraging walking, cycling, transit. The effects are clear. Cars are trashing up those cities less than before, they've improved quality of life. In most of the US, the effect is the opposite. No efforts to curb driving; and the bigger cars and trucks have made cities worse; deadly, dangerous, scaring people into bigger cars, scaring people from riding bikes, walking.
Things can always get worse, and we've been finding out.
Listen, I hate the electric hummer and Chevy 2500s as much as the next guy but talking point needs to be taken out back and shot. The wear and tear light vehicles put on the road is a rounding error on any road that sees commercial traffic
>Many cities are objectively worse now than 15-20 years ago,
This is just pure lying. The "fleet" is much cleaner than it was 15-20yr ago for a variety of reasons. Cities are much safer and richer.
>This needs top down regulation,
Top down regulation is what gave us LA. People in general can't be trusted to centrally plan and the people who think they can solve the world's ills with central planning are the least trustworthy. We need to "regress" to pre-1940s urban development patterns.
Speaking generally, rather than specifically in the context of cars, most big US cities were worse on pretty much every axis (other than cost) in 1990 than they are today. I suspect most people who object to the, say, Disneyfication of Times Square weren't there at night 30 years ago. Cities were in general significantly more dangerous and grittier than they are today.
"Being in a larger car" is basically the classic competition of armor vs projectile: the currently bigger thing has an advantage, but the opposing side of the collision quickly gets up to par and beyond, and the cycle continues.
This isn't all due to SUVs of course, a Volvo XC40 does it in a stunning 110ft. But cheap tires and small brake packages harm SUVs worse.
I'm inclined to think that's a bad idea since it incentivizes the production and purchase of larger, less fuel-efficient cars, and could probably be fixed by simply treating all passenger cars and light trucks the same.
Another aspect which is fascinating is how neatly these mythical segments all increase in length over time. The reality is that for any given year, there are a variety of sizes of car for sale. Do we look at a scatter plot per year of length vs price, or length vs engine displacement, or length vs marketshare? There are so many ways to slice and dice the data.
The auto industry has also been predicated for years on the concept of planned obsolescence. Each year the new model of a particular car needs to get slightly "better" in some way. Bigger, better (more "luxurious"), faster....
The overall average of all of this may be essentially similar. The graph reminds me a bit of a Shepard tone. It's an audio illusion where a sound seems to be constantly rising in pitch, but on average it's actually staying the same.
Polo 1 - 360 cm VS Polo 6 - 407 cm
Golf 1 - 382 cm VS Golf 8 - 428 cm
Polo Mk1 - 360 - 1975
Polo Mk2 - 365 - 1981
Polo Mk3 - 371 - 1994
Polo Mk4 - 389 - 2001
Polo Mk5 - 395 - 2009
Polo Mk6 - 405 - 2007Honda & Toyota do the same thing -- for instance the Honda Fit covers the niche the Civic used to cover.
So the study should be done on brands that don't have cachet. For example, cars like the GM Vega, Sonic and Spark didn't really grow. They just got cancelled.