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Comment by stalfosknight | Hacker News Reader

That line is particularly frustrating to me because I'm an American who has never liked or wanted an SUV or crossover. I don't have anything against people who want those kinds of vehicles but I've always been more of a fun coupe kind of guy.

There's already an endless array of electric SUVs and crossovers to choose from. Why can't there be other classes and sizes of vehicles for other needs and tastes?

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> Why can't there be other classes and sizes of vehicles for other needs and tastes?

Because U.S. tax incentives for business strongly favor bigger, heavier vehicles.[0] This includes people who use a vehicle less than 100% for business.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MACRS#Special_allowances_and_b...

It actually isn't just tax incentives.

All the EPA rules set MPG targets based on historical "fleet" averages of the car model + factored in the wheel base of the car.

Basically, the last 1.5 decades have encouraged automakers to keep increasing the size of cars because it keeps reducing the MPG target they must meet.

As an American who drives a subcompact, I kinda do have something against people who buy an unnecessarily big SUV/truck -- when they hit me, I die and they walk away -- so they feel safer and drive less cautiously than they should.

Because a big company cannot afford to cater to every little taste, because the shareholders will be upset that they didn't just get to pocket that money.

If you want more variety, break up large companies. Hard to do when Toyota, Honda, etc aren't american companies though.

I too hate large vehicles and prefer my tiny hatchback. It's fun, cheap, efficient, easy to drive, easy to park. Why would I ever get something gigantic? If I need to move something big, something that somehow doesn't fit in my car with the seats folded down (people have fit entire bedroom sets in there somehow) I can go rent a truck from home depot FFS.

Investors have been spoiled rotten with hyperbolic growth for several decades.

They feel entitled to very large returns. The executive leadership's job is to give it to them.

Gone are the days of expecting a stable, life-long dividend.

Now if you're not cutting labor costs to the bone and impoverishing your workers, applying shrinkflation strategies, or monopolizing markets and fixing prices, then you aren't able to satisfy your increasingly greedy investors.

Investors have also been allowed to be the tail eating the head of the snake in the US. Since the earliest days of the American car industry many of the biggest, most vocal shareholders have been the car dealers. Ford v Dodge is such a fascinating tale of broken expectations: the Dodge brothers were some of the largest dealers of Ford at the time (before they founded their own car company), as well as some of the bigger shareholders in Ford, and in that court case created the modern notion of "fiduciary duty" to shareholders because they wanted higher dividends from Ford (presumably to help fund their eventual competitor).

Ford v Dodge is a key court-case that still has so many terrible repercussions in modern America, and all because the biggest shareholders in Ford had a strange conflict of interest (that has never been fixed; dealers are still some of the biggest "activist" shareholders of both GM and Ford) and won the battle in the US courts to give themselves more power over company profits (than the company's board and interests like, you know, employees or customers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

I clearly remember the 90s when there were all sorts of fun smaller vehicles from various carmakers. Now that I'm old enough and able to afford to buy a nice car for myself, all of those fun quirky choices have been replaced by this endless sea of crossovers. I have to admit that maybe I am starting to resent crossovers and SUVs at this point.

Moreover, the array of choices in cars (and houses and similar things) is limited by oligopolies able to impose the most profitable form of a commodity rather than catering to a moderate range of tastes. A notable example was when quotas were imposed on Japanese cars, giving the Japanese a strong incentive to increase costs and profits per car - and thus allowing American companies to go back to this approach also. And the size requirements that zoning imposes on houses naturally has to be considered.

Yeah, "it's what 'we' want..." /s

> I don't have anything against people who want those kinds of vehicles

Well you should! Makes life more fun :)

-Hugh Laurie (https://youtu.be/c-WO73Dh7rY?t=141 @2:21)

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