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Comment by mupuff1234 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

Because the average American house is huge.

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.

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.

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