Car quality is suffering as automakers shift focus to technology | Hacker News Reader

Car quality is suffering as automakers shift focus to technology

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33 pointsthunderbong116 comments

Related discussion two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36441054

Car touchscreen UX still feels 15 years behind in a lot of cases.

I was driving in my brand new Subaru the other day when a full screen message pops up that I have a message from the manufacturer and a disabled button that says something like “stop the vehicle to see the message”. I had been navigating with Google maps and CarPlay and this pop up completely obstructed my map.

I pull over to read the message and it’s a bleeping reminder that I need to schedule my maintenance appointment. It so half-baked, totally could’ve been an email.

I can't wait until this happens for an ad.

It was technically an ad for their service centers.

Shit, you're right. I've become too desensitized. This sucks.

Quick solution: Pull over on the highway shoulder. Get rear-ended by a truck. Get injured. Sue the car company on the basis that their distracting in-car, while-driving, notice system contributed to the accident. Whether you win or lose, that will be the end of such popups.

“Quick” and lawyers/court are antonyms.

Only if the cost of provably caused-by-touchscreen accidents that the company can't blame the user for ("users should only use the car systems in accordance with local laws") exceeds the savings they think they're making by doing everything in software plus the data and affiliations like Spotify integrations they think they can monetise.

At best you'd win some kind of mandatory labeling about when not to do it that people 20 years from now will mock as needless safety warnings for the stupid.

I already mock us for needing endless safety warnings.

Don't stick your hands in a moving chainsaw blade, eh?

Yes this was the social phenomenon to which I was referring.

Cars should not use touchscreens for critical functions, period.

Cars should take hints from the UI of jetliners.

Even the aviation and space world is victim of touchscreen frenzy. There was a lot of criticism when SpaceX adopted full-touchscreen control on their Dragon capsule. Try to get anything done on a touchscreen under quite heavy loads/bumpy ride and you are SOL -- way more than with full physical controls.

the one for the pilot, or the one for the passengers?

I am not sure what would grate on me more - this happening every so often, or my vehicle demanding that I click “I accept” every time I start it when it reminds me not to use the screen while driving. Thousands of times since I bought the vehicle I’ve had to acknowledge that no, I haven’t forgotten that Chrysler wants to cover its ass.

I have a BMW, in fact I have had multiple, both in Europe and in the USA.

The European version does not have nag screen when you start the car. Nor does it have one when I put the car in reverse.

The US one has both.

I leveraged the fact that they have world-wide software with just 'settings' that can be turned on and off.

That way I now no longer have a nagscreen, and I have headlights that turn with my steering wheel.

Subaru also adds unnecessary prompts, eg for bluetooth:

1. press "Select New Device"

2. press device from the list

3. "This will disconnect the old device, proceed?"

Why on earth would I have done 1 and 2 if I didn't want 3? Why add more steps than absolutely necessary in a system that might be used in motion?

I enjoy tech where it is a considerable improvement over the "non tech" version. But I despise tech that's just there because it's "cool" but doesn't add any considerable value, or actually makes the experience worse.

Case in point, auto windshield wipers. I live in a place that gets a lot of "misty rain", and the wipers don't turn on in this situation until it's well too late, so I have to turn them on manually in any case. The options for my wipers are only "auto high" and "auto low" and "manual high" and "manual low", but there is no intermittent setting, which is what I want half the time.

I basically don't understand the problem auto wipers are trying to solve in the first place. Who forgets to turn on their wipers if they can't see out their windshield? Is the tiniest tap to turn on the wipers really a burden that needs to be solved, never mind that I'm tapping that button way more with my auto-wipers than I ever did in older cars with normal intermittent wipers.

Auto wipers have two applications: for when you suddenly get water on the windshield, for example a splash from a puddle caused by another car, and for speed attenuation during a rain. Some people can panic when the visibility from the car suddenly goes to zero and might not be able to manually turn on wipers quickly, while still driving without seeing anything in front. The attenuation keeps driver from playing with the wiper speed control in an intermittent rain, thus not getting more distracted from driving.

> The attenuation keeps driver from playing with the wiper speed control in an intermittent rain, thus not getting more distracted from driving.

Except, at least in my experience, this never works well for my car, especially in a light rain, causing me to have to get more distracted just turning my "auto" wipers on manually.

Looks like it's a problem with your car and not with the concept of auto-wipers?

Auto wipers will never be able to know how well I, the driver, can see.

While this is true, I don't see how this is relevant. Auto-wipers detect the changes in optical properties of the windshield, not your ability to see.

Sure potentially, but I guess different people may have different desired settings for "how rainy" it needs to be to have the wipers turn on. Maybe other cars let you change this sensitivity level, but mine does not.

But my overall point still stands, needing to turn on my wipers in the rain is never something I felt needed "fixing" in the first place, that's why I think the added complexity of auto wipers makes it all downside.

But "turning on when rainy" is not the way auto-wipers are normally working.

What does that mean? Of course auto-wipers work by turning on when they detect rain on your windshield.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470065

I feel like automobile quality peaked around 1995-2005; probably on the earlier side of that range. They used to make little roller skate cars that got 50MPG, and expected to run for 200k+ miles. We have two small trucks from that era, 250k on the Dodge and approaching 400k on the Toyota.

We're weird people who treat our cars as pets tho.

I've started watching Regular Car Reviews on youtube recently - he waxes poetic about those cars, it's just beautiful to hear. Really was a nice time.

Newer Toyotas still last forever and are not full of gimmicky tech, well at least some of them.

I expect my tacoma to just keep going and going

I also have a Toyota from that era - 2000 4Runner with 200k miles. The fanciest things in it are power windows and locks.

At least once a month I get approached asking if I want to sell it. Sometimes it's a note taped to the windshield, other times the potential buyer will walk right up to me.

A couple weeks ago, a group of car enthusiasts driving their custom classic hot rods asked if I wanted to sell. Obviously car experts and mechanics. One guy in the group said he also had a 4Runner from the same era with 300k miles and marveled that they last forever.

I'll never sell it. There's something very freeing about driving a completely untethered car that lacks all the modern bells and whistles.

Keep it. It will last 500k-1M miles. Simplicity and reliability are king. The new ones have all plastic bumpers and grills that degrade in 10 years. The absolute worst are the new Lexuses.

3rd gen 4runner ftw. '97 myself. Manual. I love it but I live in NJ so it's rusting out. So I've been thinking about a new one, but I dread trying to find a new vehicle that doesn't essentially have all the same things I think are terrible about a Tesla. I test drove a 2020 4runner a few years ago and hated it. By now all cars made by anyone seem to be software defined, with software you have no control over.

How hard would it be for a company to start manufacturing small, barebones cars, compliant with safety and emissions, 4 seat, 4 door harchback and a 2 door version? Barebones meaning single/double din radio, hand crank windows, no cameras.

Oh and if I may, no CVT, and made for easy access to parts. Oh and a transmission fluid dipstick. Oooh and a cheaper manual version.

Selling something like that for..say 10k? Less maybe?

I guess it won't work since it's competing with the second hand market..but people would like a new car, feels more reliable.

Oh it'd be so nice.

Edit: Oh and put the oil filter UNDER the engine, so when you remove it the engine isn't covered in oil.

A lot of Japanese Kei cars fit that description, and they are available in every big market except the United States. I like to daydream about an alternative universe in which Suzuki was still operating in the US.

I believe US requires you to have a backup camera, so probably won't be void of one (and its screen). But I would love to see a relatively small hatchback with manual, reliable and bare bones.

Don’t forget the TPMS too.

Oh really? Since when? I have a 2017 in canada without TPMS (tire presure sensor for anyone passing by) and it is the most obnoxious piece of tech I can omagine having in a car. Crazy to think it's mandatory.

I doubt there’s a market for that, or just an extremely niche ine. Whenever I see someone with a brand new car they’re usually boasting about the car features.

I know, the cars that I would like to see appear again (EG Civic, Tercels, etc) were all built at a time when there was an incentive to get people cars to reinvigorate the economy, so cheap gas sippers were a good call, and that's not the case today.

It would just be bought by cheap car enthusiasts and people that are presently in the used market - although I can see people being interested to stop leasing and buying their own car. Anyway!

Maybe if the price was competitive with used cars. The people such a car would be attractive to probably has a large intersection with people who usually buy used cars.

> Whenever I see someone with a brand new car they’re usually boasting about the car features

You’ll notice people boast using similar words to what the marketing team uses. Ask any Catheram user what they like about their car and they’ll go on and on about how analog and barebones it is – a pure driving machine.

That's basically a smart car, except for the impossible price. They don't sell well.

> people would like a new car, feels more reliable

You are basically describing Tesla Model 2 - dirt cheap, pays itself in fuel savings in few years, super mass produced so parts are cheap as, millions of them on road so everyone knows how to fix them. And if you are complete luddite you can smash the screen, cameras and it will still run. Digital key card will be your only problem.

They start at 30 k so they are out of the running instantly, and you can't work on your own car, and repairs cost a fortune. Can't even change your own tires if you get a flat!

And living up north I'm uninterested in full evs, hybrids at best!

In NZ every 100kkm saves $15,400 NZD in fuel alone. Car pays itself thru it's lifetime. Likely twice if you calculate maintenance.

(7L/100km2.5$/L=17.5 - 15kwh/100km0.14$/kwh=$2.1/100km = 15.4)

Car quality is suffering because people treat their cars like junk. Too many people lease. Too many people are driving cars they don't actually own. Too many people see cars as temporary. A growing number see them as "necessary evils" and treat them like a bad habit that we all should kick asap. That attitude means people don't care about their vehicles. Cars are no longer partners that you trust year after year. People once grew attached to their cars. People remembered important life events based on which car they were using at the time. When you don't care about something you aren't going to take pride in it. You aren't going to maintain it yourself. You aren't going to demand proper engineering or design. Cars are now just a commodity, something to be used and tossed aside. Current design reflects that attitude.

Sounds like enshittification comes for cars.

It’s a death spiral too. Cars get less reliable -> people lease and don’t care about cars -> cars get less reliable.

I think the kinds of quality issues people are taking issue with are primarily with the power-trains. No doubt some other features have seen disappointments especially the infotainment systems like you said though.

Toyota only recently introduced a brand new Truck engine which replaced their previous 5.7L naturally aspirated V8. Presumably because they sell a lot of smaller cars they were able to keep the 5.7 for so long, it got worst-in-class gas mileage. But their clients loved that engine and there's only one reason you completely ditch a SKU the vast majority likes, emission standards. It's all being driven by emission standards. I'm not saying that's a totally bad thing either, I'm hoping to one day walk down a busy street and not have to breath in toxic fumes. But I think we all should know what the actual cause is that's helping drive car prices up and predictability/dependability down.

It's a good point. Where a larger normally aspirated engine would have sufficed manufacturers have shifted to smaller turbocharged engines that are significantly more complicated, more mechanical strain on the core engine, more mechanical parts, more cooling, more hoses, valves and electronics to control it all. Due to emissions.

And hybridization on top of that.

ICE is at the end of the road. Consumers and manufacturers are between two stools - a huge course correction. It'll take at least another decade, probably two before it's completed.

It’s really about fuel economy, not emissions, unless you’re counting CO2 as an emission. Idle-off that makes it so you can’t steer while stopped at a red light, unreliable CVTs, sloppy gas pedals in eco-mode that you have to disable every time, the list goes on and on, and no driver ever asked for it. In general the CAFE fleet average rule makes it so that each manufacturer gets to build 1 or 2 interesting cars and the rest have to be weak econoboxes. Maybe the whole point of ratcheting fuel economy standards so high is to make ICE cars worse and eventually illegal.

> Too many people lease. Too many people are driving cars they don't actually own. Too many people see cars as temporary.

To paint this as a consumer problem is hilarious to me because I used to work for a rental company that was owned by a big automaker and the way you describe consumers looking at cars is EXACTLY the way we did as a business. Why? Because cars are rapidly depreciating assets that carry high maintenance costs, and if you’re not paying attention to the age of your fleet, you’re completely SOL on you operational expenses.

Whatever “partnership” you used to have with your car was cooked up by a talented marketing and sales team to convince you that your car was more than just a car, and it clearly worked.

>> Whatever “partnership” you used to have with your car was cooked up by a talented marketing and sales team

Have you ever listened to county music? Every other song is about a truck. None of them EVER mention rental cars. Rental care are soulless.

Anyone who doesn't recognize some sort of "partnership" with a car either doesn't drive much or has only driven rental cars. Wait until you are in a snowstorm in the mountains, at night, in fog, and you run into an emergency situation. Then all those little features designed by engineers kick in. Things like traction control/ABS, tire design, weigh and balance ... the engineering becomes your partner through a dangerous situation. If you only drive a few miles between an apartment and a office job every morning it is understandable to treat a car as a nothing object. But anyone who has done a multi-day drive covering 1000s of miles, especially across mountains, quickly learns that every model has a unique personality.

When I come home from a long trip or overseas deployment, it isn't always family greeting me at the airport. Often, the first sense of being "home" is retrieving my car out of long-term parking.

> Cars are now just a commodity

Henry Ford literally invented commodification so when exactly, in your opinion, was this not the case?

Edit:

This comment is actually really funny. Starts out strong with a kind of a "back in the my day" tone that's actually backhanded victim blaming (the consumer) and then completely jumps the shark and somehow ropes in commodification as if that's all in the control of consumers.

Ford made cars cheap, at least cheap enough for the average person. But those cars were never disposable. Every Model-T was a serious investment in both money and time on the part of the new owner. And owners kept them going for a decade or more. Back then it took knowledge and work to keep a car on the road, to deal with inevitable roadside breakdowns long before cellphones. People took pride in such car-related skills. Henry Ford did not invent cars to be fixed only at the dealer and then be thrown away after the lease/warranty expires. That is a very modern phenomena.

Model T 1918 price: $680

680$ in today's money: $14,732

>Henry Ford did not invent cars to be fixed only at the dealer and then be thrown away after the lease/warranty expires. That is a very modern phenomena.

Henry Ford invented assembly line manufacturing. A product manufactured on an assembly line is the textbook definition of a commodity.

> Back then it took knowledge and work to keep a car on the road, to deal with inevitable roadside breakdowns long before cellphones.

I'm sorry but am I to believe you were around "back then" to know what it took to keep a car on the road "back then"?

Henry Ford sent inspectors to junkyards to find out what parts could be made cheaper.

> A growing number see them as "necessary evils" and treat them like a bad habit that we all should kick asap.

This is the correct attitude to have.

Enough people still buy a car and it's one of there first big purchases.

In my opinion it's more about land vs city and company car vs self bought

The average age of US vehicles has increased 11 years in 2011, to 13 years in 2022 [1]. Americans are holding onto their cars longer than before, not treating them like junk.

I don’t know why we’re seeing more technology in cars, but s based on my observation that no one says they like the change tells me that it’s not consumer driven.

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera...

Owner of a CRV 2022. On my recent 200-miles trip, the tire pressure sensor lighted up. I pulled over to a station and filled the air (and before I filled the air, I measured the pressure on each tire and it was fine). It didn't go away. Had anxiety the whole trip about whether there was a leak in any of the four tires.

After the trip, went to the dealership's workshop (btw, if you live in FL, NEVER EVER buy from Rick Case; they are scammy as hell in terms of pricing the cars as well as the maintenance fees). They said the pressure sensor sometimes got triggered and it needs the electronic reset to make it go away.

I think these electronification of cars is going too far and I'm really afraid in the future, I'd have to go to the dealership's workshop to get any minor glitch fix.

Don't go to a dealer. Go to a tire shop. They will know more about the problem and will be far more willing to tell you what is actually wrong. You may just need a new sensor battery.

Yep. I went to Rick Case for annual check up to have a feel. I signed up online for a regular oil change (I have 6K miles on the car because we don't drive a lot) and tire rotation. The online quote was $90. When I arrived, the guy (expert consultant or whatever they call them) said he recommends me to do wheel alignment (and the quote was $110 without tax and other fees). I pushed back and said I only want tire rotation and oil change. Then he started looking a bit displeased (as if I dare challenge his authority). So I decided to go for it (in case he put a secret note on the paper to let the guys in the workshop know to do/not do something to my car).

Then I swore myself I'll never go back to Rick Case again for regular maintenance (I'm going to have to find a good mechanic though, which is kind of tricky, but I'll do it out of my hatred of Rick Case). I had a horrible buying experience with them too (their finance guy trying to sell me $2600 'umbrella' insurance package, which when I pressed him, didn't specify anything it covers. I didn't end up taking it and the finance guy looked pissed (but I didn't care because the amount of money, $2600, is non-negligible).

Yes! Be careful, the dealer will tell you not to touch transmission fluid, but it should be changed after 70k miles - it looked like sludge on my 2017.

Check everything yourself, trust no computers - if it doesn't catch an issue on your car and it breaks, the computer won't cover the costs!

TPMS (Tire Pressure Maintainance System) is actually quite a useful feature of more modern vehicles, given the driver advance notice of slow leaks. Yes, it does introduce several new components some of which are subject to failure, but I'm not sure we should view this as a step too far.

If you really don't like the light being on and don't the sensor(s) repaired/replaced/reset, a small piece of electrical tape over that part of the dash display is a cheap fix.

Cars are trending towards a consumer electronics lifecycle.

For that to be true reliability needs to trend upwards and the price needs to trend downward.

Over time the former is true. The latter seems to be out of control, the lower cost segment is vanishing.

I read somewhere that since today cars are made with computer aided design, and parts can have their usage simulated for cheap, manufacturers make their cars to last just as long as necessary - and the average car owner keeps their car for 6 years (!!) before changing.

So they get away with putting faulty parts in the cars because they are able to make them last juuust long enough for the original owner to be satisfied and them be a piece of doodoo on the used market.

It's also touted as "less wasteful" since they treat the 6 year ownership as something enforced by the consumers (i.e. even if the cars lasted longer they wouldn't kee them longer than 6 years), it wouldn't make sense to make the cars to last longer. Like if we were building houses to last for 500 years instead of just 100, it'd be wasteful (?)...I guess?

That completely ignores the fact that most cars have multiple owners. If the average time to keep a car is 6 years, and the average car has at least 2 owners, that means it needs to last 12 years. But of course the carmaker doesn't have much of an incentive to car about people who buy it used. Maybe that needs to change somehow. Maybe some kind of requirement for much longer warranties?

Damn true from my experience. I own 16yo VW Golf 5 that is mechanically superior to a brand new Golf 8 with equal engine power, to get same rear suspensions system you have to buy a much more expensivemodel. My 235000 kms car still has original clutch. This just doesn't happen anymore, but prices went up by a lot even with cheaper solutions.

Dodge, Ram and Alfa Romeo are the top 3 brands in terms of quality?

I double checked to make sure this wasn't an April 1st article.

I have a 2013 VW diesel, and if the quality trend continued from 2002 (last one I owned) until then, I can see why they're at the bottom.

What junk!

Personally speaking I want my car quality and my car interior to be good enough, and the tech to be great.

I have a year and a half old Tesla and despite all the complaining about build quality I hear, I haven’t had a single issue. The interior is simple, comfortable, and has fewer components that will eventually break. It’s good enough. Why I love the car is the tech. Self driving completely aside, the software is fantastic, thoughtful, and always getting better.

Contrast that with the BMW SUV I recently rented while on vacation. BMW seems like it’s at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. It’s loaded with buttons and physical accoutrements that they charge for as premium upgrades. When it came to the tech, it was absolutely maddening and was the single reason why I’d never buy one. Just finding and connecting to CarPlay was nearly impossible, buried 10 pages deep in a buggy and unresponsive interface.

This is representative of my experience with almost every traditional auto manufacturer and I rarely see any signs of progress. If “software is eating the world”, it’s barely begun in the auto industry.

Tesla gives you less for more because / through there ev risk and fast charger network.

Bmw can't do that.

They are bought because of everything you don't care for.

I don't mind it either because even an not so we'll build Tesla is still much better what was build 30years ago.

We solved the 'how to build a car's

It's still shitty if you rip of the sun shield plastic holder when you use it. Which I did as a passenger.

The downvoting without any context or feedback as to why is so predictable on any post that’s remotely positive about Tesla on HN :)

There’s got to be a market for a “dumb” car. Bare minimum computers (and easily replaceable) for emissions and safety. And then nothing else.

Just a 1980s UI, no connectivity, and easy to repair.

I wish Tesla would make that actually. I’d bet they could shave 10k off the price?

I think most OEMs still made base models that are super duper basic?

Its not just tech, its also the push for better gas mileage that caused a switch from metal to plastic parts, among of weight reduction for reliability trade offs.

I still don't get why our cities are populated with full sized cars and not 1-2 person cheap electric cars.

Kids. That’s usually two people plus (for young kids) a stroller, diaper bags, food, other gear, maybe toys…

Then you want to be able to also take their friends…

If you are young and hip and wonder why some aspect of the suburbs or transport is so absurdly oversized or badly designed, the answer is probably kids and you are not seeing it because you don’t have kids.

> you don’t have kids.

Or rich enough to live in walkable neighborhoods.

Walkable does not imply expensive. If it does, that's a (local government) policy choice.

To my constant dismay, that's the government choice in much of the US these days.

In the US walkable means either unsafe or very expensive or occasionally both.

Changing this would be very challenging because we have also decided that real estate should be an investment. This means it should always go up, which orients urban planning toward making housing unaffordable. The primary role of the car is driving further away to escape rent extraction, which is sharply at odds with making cities walkable.

The only way to have a walkable city that is affordable is to get those crime rates up. Maybe that’s what SF is trying to do. But even that doesn’t work if you have people like OpenAI locating there and making people work in the office and paying $300k+ entry level.

I'm eagerly awaiting the urban planning renaissance in Memphis, then :-) (Highest violent crime rate for a large city in the US.)

Though violent crime is dropping over time, there was a resurgence following COVID. I couldn't find any statistics on whether that is sustained or has since started to decline.

In CA it is.

I am not aware of a single walkable city or town in the US that is not expensive.

I'd love to have a light, inexpensive electric (or even ICE) I can use to transport kids. It would save my family thousands of dollars per year. I don't need the tons of metal.

A lot depends on the size of your kids, and the layout of your neighborhood, and your local climate. In my neighborhood (south side of Chicago) a lot of people schlepp their kids around on the back of bikes (electric or otherwise), either long bikes with a[n extra] seat on the back, or with a trailer, or both. Not sure how that stands safety-wise, but it sure is a lot lower-impact than even my Prius hybrid. Anecdata, but I feel like I'm seeing more of these families lately.

edit: add clarifying word

I mean why not get a used Corolla for something like 4k? Maybe 5k? I don't know how much you are spending, but an old Toyota will be reliable past 200 000 miles, easy and cheap to repair, and you can find one that was a one owner car, ideally a grandma or priest.

You might be interested in the Suzuki Mirage as well.

If you are stressed about reliability, don't worry. You need to do regular maintenance (oils, fluids, filters, tires) and you'll stay on the road longer than brand new cars. I had a Chevrolet Aveo that had the radiator blow up while leaving the dealer!

I understand this argument, but genuinely wonder how this works in European cities. Maybe it's because in cities most people just take the stroller on the subway?

The transport infrastructure very much determines this. If you live in a city with good public transport you don't need a car. I have two kids and live in the UK. When the kids we born we got a car but didn't need it much as many places were accessible by light rail, in a place with ok (but not great) public transport. Then we moved to a place that was badly connected and had two cars. Now we've moved to somewhere with better transport and the kids are old enough they can cycle just about anywhere they're interested in going. Going to sell one of the cars soon.

> I want X, Y, Z and I can't live without A, B, C and also I really like 1, 2, 3

Well yeah sure... that's why we completely fucked up the world in less than 100 years. It doesn't really qualify as an answer though.

Plenty of places, and times, where people had kids and no cars, you only """need""" a car now because we built everything around them.

Cars have a purpose - people get older, they are disabled, and they want to shop and not carry things. There is a lot of anti car sentiment here these days but many people depend on their cars and that won't change soon.

The default reply here would be that people depend on cars because we've built our world that way.

The parent was wondering why we don't have smaller cars, not why we have cars at all. Especially for older people whose kids are out of the house, a car for 1-2 people would make a lot more sense.

My answer would be that if you only have one car, you buy what accommodates the likely maximum use case. So you buy a car that is sufficient when you have out-of-town visitors to chauffeur or buy something bulky. If car rental was more seamless and common outside of travel elsewhere we might be able to shrink cars.

Another factor is feeling safe. I'd love to commute in a single-seater like the Toyota iRoad, but would be terrified between massive pickup trucks.

> If car rental was more seamless and common

Just not eye-wateringly expensive would be a start. Though, having met people, I can see why renting cars to people can't be a cheap business to be in.

and, as was pointed out to me here on HN a few months back, it is extremely hard to rent a vehicle under terms that allow you to tow anything, so if you haul that camper/5th-wheel or the yard trailer just once or twice a year, you pretty much have to own a vehicle that can do that, rather than the small car that would be a better fit for the vast majority of the time.

The extreme vast majority of people driving are neither old nor disabled. In the US on average there is 1.5 person per car, most clearly don't need 4+ seats. They're parked on average 95% of their lives

It just doesn't make any sense, we should be able to come to this conclusion fairly easily.

Old people whose kids have left home should be a great demographic for smaller cars. There is a dead comment here that blames this on a vicious cycle of feeling unsafe in smaller vehicles next to giant pickup trucks. To me that's a big part of the reason.

So old people who’s kids have left never have kids come back to visit, or grandkids, or a 30+ lb dog?

As I said in another comment, if we had more easily available rental cars that would be more commonly used outside of a vacation context, we could buy cars that match the need we have 98% of the time, rather than optimize for the 2%.

I also think that this is another corrective action problem. The benefit to everyone from having most carsm in our cities be much smaller would be huge, but the inconvenience from having a smaller car is the thing an individual can control.

the real metric here is miles not ownership. I have a large truck because I need to haul building materials and a trailer. there is no way I am renting

I don't think anyone is saying that nobody at all should have a pickup truck. Of course some people need it to actually haul large equipment or materials. That seems to be <50% of those with those large vehicles though. At the same time there also seems to be a somewhat vocal group (not sure if large) that needs pickup trucks for work, but find that the design of current pickup trucks favors aesthetics over practical benefits with beds being too high to load comfortable, too much space being taken up by the cabin etc. This thread had some very interesting discussion of those issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645624

Again, there are legitimate use cases for a lot of this. Some people even need a semi ;)

It might not make sense on the macro scale, but it certainly does on the micro scale. Even if you only use the extra size of the car a fraction of the time, the amount of money and time you would spend to rent a larger vehicle the times you actually need one would be much higher than the premium you're paying for having a vehicle with a capacity that well exceeds your average use case.

Also, one out six Americans are over 65 years of age, two out of five are obese, so the "extreme vast majority" being neither old nor disabled is really a question of definition.

Because the average American house is huge.

Regulation requires mass for survivability in crash tests.

I _think_ this was sarcasm, but...

Not as far as I know. Full-size SUVs used to be classed as trucks and (were?) exempt from many safety tests and standards. They used to have the worst safety ratings, actually, despite mass. Modern engineering and production with multi-material crash zones also means the mass is not necessary.

Plus, smaller cars don't kill everyone involved in the accident outside of your car.

People are just like "my car is bigger than yours", aka super-size me.

Survivability in crashes requires mass. It's a race to the bottom (top) unless we figure out how to head it off with better regulation.

I think we are in a loop. All the cars are big, so the only way to feel safe when driving is to have a big car.

Just look at Ford trucks. The current Ranger is as big as the old F-150. Everything is a quad cab, 20 years ago those were rare.

Regulations are less restrictive for SUVs because they are supposed to be used for work stuff

Lot of people are outside the city, and lots of countries are very, very large - the US is a good example. Americans drive double what europeans drive in a year!

For me it's simple: my company ev car came only in SUV version for longer range and I use it only on the weekend for longer trips.

Unfortunately getting into my car is much nicer than in small cars. A critical factor when you are getting older

Can't find it anymore but I've watched a documentary claiming that Henry Ford and other car makers, oil companies and tire manufacturers in US and Europe lobbied city mayors over 100ys ago to get rid of perfectly fine public transport in favor of private cars. It felt ridiculous that we're still falling for that propaganda.

Even Jeremy Clarkson knows rear seats are hardly ever used: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wjnxDSMjh5I

Though I imagine most journeys with children in the back aren't made on motorways.

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