Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society” | Hacker News Reader

Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”

kottke.org

296 pointsDemiGuru489 comments

The French came up with a poignant term for this: "Autobesity"[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/paris-charge-s...

Cute but a Chevy Cruze is 27" shorter than a 57 Chevy. Cars are shrinking.

Now do literally any pickup truck, or compare sedan to sedan instead of sedan to compact - a category that didn't really exist in America ~65 years ago.

Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.

We should also ease a lot of regulation from states regarding minimum road width, minimum parking spot sizes, minimum height of parking garages, minimum number of parking spots for residential and commercial development. Much of this problem stems from bad regulation. (Developers generally don't want to have all this unproductive space in their buildings, but are forced to by local and state governments.)

Maybe it should be based on your driving record? The worst driver you are, the higher the cost to society when you are driving.

Isn't this how insurance works?

Unfortunately most EVs are way heavier and cause more wear on roads, so we'd be paying an even higher green tax to reduce emissions and fossil fuel usage.

Compared to other cars, sure but still negligible compared to semis and other _heavy_ machinery

Yeah, it’s basically not a real concern compared to semis.

I think the optics are bad but the logic is sound. EVs don’t pay gas tax like ICE vehicles do, so it should even out in the end.

I have to agree with OP, taxes should be based on weight. If you EV causes 10x the wear that a ICE car then you pay 10x the taxes. If the goal is fossil fuel usage, we cannot ignore the fact that pouring tar and repairing roads is not horrible as well.

If the goal is to encourage usage, then just subsidize it, but eventually it all comes down to wear and taxes, you cannot ignore a car that weights 10x as much as a normal car.

There are ways to make the road stronger if the government really cares about such things. But they don't it ends up being yearly cost = total upfront cost / average life span which in there mind is cheaper than a bigger upfront cost that lasts longer.

Note that suggesting it's 10x the wear is greatly exaggerating

Weight increase is ~30% https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/jun/21/carry-that-we...

Ya I didn't have the figure off the top of my head, it does appear to only be 1.3x to 3x which is really not much more.

Road Wear is related to weight by the 4th power...a 30% increase in axle weight is like 2.85x the damage to the road.

Heavy EVs cause more tire wear. I've seen articles claiming that particulate pollution from tires on EVs is a problem. I can think of a few other reasons to want lighter EVs. But you need a really heavy vehicle to be the dominant cause of roads wearing out.

Great, EV taxes can pay for EV infrastructure and contribute towards road maintenance!

Nothing unfortunate about it at all. Why shouldn't an EV Hummer or Ford Lightning pay up for the weight on the road?

Maybe they should pay more but not because they cause more road wear. They don't.

EVs are not "way heavier". They are a couple hundred pounds heavier than comparable ice cars on average.

And all that extra weight is in the battery. Over time, batteries will shrink to the point where EVs are lighter on average.

That's wishful thinking: battery technology required to reduce weight of EV enough is not in sight yet. It might even be physically impossible.

EVs are not the solution to our transportation problems.

In some states it is. The total price for registering a car in Colorado takes the weight of the vehicle into account (along with the price and the age).

I remember having a minor panic when registering my car at the DMV and hearing the person in front of me paying well over $1000 for the year. Turns out they were registering a brand-new, very large (and heavy) pickup truck.

It does work like that in some states. New York state registration fees range from $26 per 2yr to $140 per 2yr depending on weight: https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-...

Despite being a pretty big difference percentage-wise (the heaviest vehicles pay more than 5x the lightest vehicles!), not sure it’s enough of a difference in absolute dollars to really influence purchasing decisions though.

You don't have to influence decisions though. Just pay for the work in a fair way.

Passenger vehicles, no matter how large and numerous, are a tiny part of road wear compared to heavy trucks. If you want to price road use by what it costs to maintain them, tax the heavy trucks.

If you want to disincentivize SUV bloat, make narrower Lanes and more traffic calming features.

>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.

This came up in another thread and while it's sort-of true, it's not really. Passenger vehicles of ANY size do almost no damage to a road in comparison to semi-trucks and delivery trucks. A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road. The average semi vs. that same 3/4-ton pickup is a 2500x increase in damage to the road on the low end (some studies claim as high as 10,000x).

Unless you're planning on eliminating the trucking industry, shrinking cars isn't reducing the wear on our roads in any meaningful way.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

This should be obvious to anyone with eyes too. Go look at a neighborhood with no or low through traffic and extremely old roads are in good condition. Meanwhile a nearby through-fare, unless constantly repaired and patched, will be falling apart.

Even the low traffic roads in freeze-thaw regions need constant repair. So it's not all weight related. Weight is a factor that really only matters once you start looking at commercial size vehicles.

Also look at your local bus terminals. That asphalt is damaged beyond belief, even though it sees next to no traffic.

A few dozen buses a day braking and accelerating on the same patch of street over and over will wreck it.

Thanks, asphalt!

Yeah - it happens to concrete, too ...but it takes way longer

There's a ghost town in california called new idria. Obviously, very little traffic on the road leading to it. The pavement surface is probably 50 years old and in reasonable shape except for certain areas that make you wish you brought a 4x4

In my area its immediately obvious which lanes and roads have bus routes. A three-lane each way road will have two nearly pristine lanes and one completely beat to hell. Guess which one the bus takes.

I would expect a neighborhood, even where everyone owns a semi to have significantly less wear than a thorough-faire that sees a lot of traffic. But even that didn't tell you everything. A good quality asphalt will out last a poor one pretty much no matter the conditions. We have a stretch of road near us that is always in bad shape, when another stretch, seeing the exact same traffic is in good condition.

> A 3/4-ton pickup vs your toyota camry is MAYBE a 2x increase in damage to the road.

Your source states that relative road damage between two vehicles is the forth power of the ratio of their weights.

The base curb weight of a Ford F-150 is in the vicinity of 4,600lbs. The base curbs weight of a Toyota Camry is in the vicinity of 3,500lbs. So the damage ratio is (46/35)^4 = ~3. The Toyota Camry used to be a small car, but it isn't anymore. The base curb weight of a Ford Fiesta is in the vicinity of 2,500lbs. So the damage ratio between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Fiesta is (35/25)^4 = ~3.8, and between a Ford F-150 and a Ford Fiesta is (46/25)^4 = ~11.5. So a Toyota Camry, being somewhat of a behemoth, should be paying on the order of 3.8x the amount of road tax as a Ford Fiesta.

Even so, unless we're charging the average semi truck 2500x more road tax, and vehicles of that weigh class which cause the overwhelming majority of wear, the roads will continue to be as abysmal as they currently are.

I confess I assume that we do charge trucks an absurdly larger amount of money? Is why they have weigh stations between states?

That depends on what you consider "absurdly larger" - the fee is between $1,000-$2,000 depending on the state. In some states that's not much more than you'd be paying for a nice luxury car or large SUV.

https://www.truckinfo.net/research/license-costs-by-state

I confess I had a mistaken thought that weigh stations were akin to toll booths. That is, that fees were levied based on the weight.

I can think of several problems with that thought, taking it longer, of course. :(

I'm FAR from an expert, but you aren't totally misguided. That was the original intent once upon a time, now it's more about safety. They do weigh trucks to ensure they aren't going to destroy a bridge or damage roads if they're overweight for their route - but they're primarily checking a driver's log book to ensure they aren't over hours, the truck passes safety inspections, the driver isn't transporting illicit goods, etc.

I won't presume that I know how much we're taxing semis et al., but it's clear by the road wear that it's not enough, and most of the damage is not caused by everyday drivers.

Heavy vehicles also include garbage trucks, delivery trucks, and even busses which benefit everyone. Cars have only been widely adopted for about 100 years, and it's not clear that current trends can't be sustained for another 100.

The public rightfully bears much of the burden for truck wear and tear because the trucks aren’t driving around for fun, they’re bringing goods and the public wants things like stocked supermarkets. If we taxed trucks at actual cost we’d either have no deliveries or an extremely regressive cost schema due to trucking companies passing on the expense.

Also to prevent overweight unsafe loading, doing trafic safty inspections, smuggling prevention, and checking cargo especially to prevent cross border invasive species.

Yeah, I mostly knew these other reasons were a thing. I had not realized they were the only reason. I guess I was thinking of them more like a port of entry between states and assumed taxes were involved.

> Your source states that relative road damage between two vehicles is the forth power of the ratio of their weights.

I wonder if that only works for weights that are not too low and not too high?

For example a typical Eastern grey squirrel weighs around 50 times as much as a typical mouse, and a typical chicken weighs about 7 times as much as a squirrel.

Does a squirrel crossing a modern highway really cause over 6 million times as much damage as a mouse, and does a chicken crossing the road really cause 2400 times as much damage as a squirrel?

Yes, this is true. I’m a transport engineer and can confirm that roads are designed for a truck’s weight and cars hardly register in terms of damage.

I think you want both to be included, but yeah something like SURCHARGE = ((WEIGHT-2500)/1000 + (VALUE-30000)/10000) * CONSTANT. Maybe even make it exponential to discourage upper-middle class conspicuous consumption (think G-classes) since it'll cost them $20k to register a $200k, 5klb vehicle. In the US we actually give (federal) fuckin tax breaks (sec 179) on beastly luxo-trucks to SMBs, that needs to be offset by massive reg increases too.

I would think the tax on the value of the car would be better handled by taxing gas much more heavily. It seems to me that all of the very expensive cars have terrible mileage. If we had a good carbon tax, it should do a good job of taxing what we really want to be taxed, which happens to coincide well with luxury vehicles.

Electric cars are heavy, expensive, and use no gas. This tax would be quickly regressive.

The answer to that is to compensate it with other progressive tax credit, or redistribute the benefit of the tax in other means.

As has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, electric vehicles aren't appreciably more heavy than other commuter vehicles, especially given that damage to roads is non-linear. And as for them not using gas -- that's why taxing carbon would handle it. If electricity comes from natural gas or coal, then you pay tax on the electricity accordingly.

Sounds great! I’m glad my family and our disabled daughter will have to pay more because our wheelchair accessible vehicle is so heavy. I really appreciate your opinion here.

After all, my wife is being very selfish to want to get a terrible gigantic minivan so my four year old can visit with friends and so my wife can transport her without literally popping a hernia (has happened once already!) to move our daughter in and out of the wheelchair on a regular basis.

Maybe I’ll encourage her to get a basket to transport our kid on our backs to get around in a convenient world where we don’t have parking spaces, or perhaps we can have a top unloading vehicle to get her out since the minimum width has been reduced when a handicap spot isn’t available (which considering how many elderly people there are is quite often when we go shopping).

I’m glad developers are forced to make the USA handicap accessible, and would encourage you to consider the knock on effects of the less advantaged when heavy handed legislation is passed to ban “wasteful” vehicles. Minivans and SUVs being mass produced and thus relatively affordable (although still quite expensive) are a ticket for people like my daughter to be able to even leave their houses on a regular basis.

If you don't want to pay more, Don't cause more damage.

Heavier vehicles use more fuel. Roads are paid for based on fuel taxes primarily.

I’m sorry my daughter’s equipment for her wheelchair is causing you such distress and ruining the roads. Let me just sling her over my shoulder and carry her everywhere from now on instead of using all this polluting road destroying equipment.

Instead of being sorry, compensate everyone else for the damages.

Wouldn't it be even better if people who have a legitimate need, like you, could get the vehicle and associated taxes subsidised or even free, while people who don't need it do pay more for their choice?

(This was the case for a relative of mine in the UK who got a car paid for by her local council because of her husband's disabilities; organised by the same department/funding as pays for caters for him.)

No.

I wrote a long well thought out response but my browser crashed.

The long and short of it is dealing with bureaucrats seems to increase our chances of getting CPS called on us, constantly wearing us down, they tried to get our daughter a tracheostomy and we had to fight against it.

I don’t trust the government to be competent at all. It’s almost like an AI following programming and sometimes incidentally it produces some good outcomes. But it doesn’t care about anything. And it’s filled with people blithely executing in whatever mandate they’ve been given.

We are looking at a privately funded charity to help us, although we could likely afford it in our own.

Government money always comes with strings attached and they act like they own my child.

The strong interpretation of the GP's proposal is that such a system would include carve-outs for assistive vehicles.

Yeah but that’s not how the market works. Like how there’s effectively no such thing as a market for small trucks because of legislation effectively banning them even if not de facto.

This is just more middle brow intellectuals thinking they can make everything alright and solve the worlds problems when they’ll end up making things worse. If people can afford large vehicles then let them have large vehicles.

For people like us it means a market for used vehicles already exists and I don’t have to rely on the whims of some bureaucrat to approve my vehicle apportionment, comrade.

This is a tragedy of the commons. A tragedy in real terms, that everyone is worse off because of.

You have a perfectly legitimate reason for using a large car, and you should advocate for support. Laws can be designed to discourage things bad for society, while not further punishing the disadvantaged. I realize this doesn't always happen the right way, but using that as a blanket reason for not even trying the reduce amount of tanks off the road also doesn't seem reasonable.

Sure, all those trucks, pickups, vans out there are all for disabled people and of course it is totally unthinkable that disabled people could get exceptions. Sorry, your comment actually makes me want to question if you really have a disabled child.

Reduce the number of parking spaces by half for every store and make 10% disabled parking only, 2 disabled parkings minimum and you would be fine. Give a 50% rebate on car tax for cars for disabled people and you should be fine overall.

It makes you question it because it goes against your agenda. Also it’s against the hacker news rules to assume I’m lying.

Also it’s a long con since I’ve been talking about her since she was born, here on Hacker News. But thanks for being rude.

In the UK at least, Road Tax has no relation at all to the cost of repairing roads and is just treated as (yet another) tax.

And as a general point, any tax that is intended to encourage a behaviour should be revenue-neutral i.e. if you raise taxes for large cars, lower than for small cars so that the total tax take to government is the same. Otherwise it just becomes one more way for the government to ratchet up the amount of money they take from their citizens.

No, but it does take externalities into account, i.e. road tax is based on CO2 emissions.

It’s also worth noting that in the UK it’s explicitly not called “road tax”.

It’s the snappily titled Vehicle Excise Duty, VED.

That was changed in 1937 to stop drivers assuming it gave them more right to use the road than anyone else.

The roads here were not built for cars, cars just use them.

Minimum road width tends to be set for use by emergency vehicles. Can't really reduce those unless you want to mandate smaller emergency vehicles. Kei-class fire trucks exist, but don't seem popular.

While European roads are far smaller than American roads their fire engines are still based on large trucks and only about 3/4 the size of US ones. Look at the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_engine

I did read of one town in the UK that bought a Kei-class truck but it was an unusual situation.

The standard in the UK seems to be a 3.7m (12ft) wide road to access buildings over 11m high. https://www.ukfrs.com/guidance/search/vehicle-access

Road damage goes up at the 4th power of the axle weight. It would be simpler to just make commercial trucks pay the entirety of road taxes. Easy to collect, and it would spread out the cost to everyone who benefits from commercial trucking (i.e. you really do want roads even if you don't own a car).

But on many city streets a very large percentage of heavy vehicles are... public buses. Not sure it makes sense to shift the cost for road repair to the public transit agency.

Why not, if their buses literally do >99.9% of the road damage?

Buses carry many more people, so the damage-per-user-mile is mitigated.

Also, buses don’t require storage at the destination, aka parking. Cutting parking space allows the city to be more walkable, further mitigating vehicle damage.

And increased density is also good for the tax revenue per square mile, which is also good for the city’s bottom line.

Regular buses (non-articulated, non-double decker) almost never carry more than a few dozen people.

> a few dozen people

still a massive win considering that the F-150 is the top selling vehicle in the US. Not car, not truck, overall vehicle. A few dozen people in big trucks will far outweigh the damage of a bus

Not if the bus does >100x the road damage of an F150 in terms of road repair costs...

Buses are empty (or effectively empty) the vast majority of the time they're driving around

>Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.

It is in most states, the problem is the cost difference is negligible.

Example fee https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/registration-fees-use-taxes-...

I have never heard of car registration by value

Georgia has an ad valorem vehicle registration tax directly based on the vehicle's value.

that explains all of the shitboxes around greater Atlanta

In Ireland road tax (paid annually) are based on engine capacity for (pre 2008 cars) and CO2 emissions for everything after that. (Engine size is a ok proxy for vehicle size)

https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/41c9cc-motor-tax-rates/#mo...

That's unfair. If one person drives 1000 km annually in a big SUV and another person drives 100000 km annually in a small and efficient hybrid sedan, then obviously the latter emits more CO2. And if hypothetically they walked the same distance they would likely emit even more CO2 (assuming they eat mostly western-style heavily processed food), but would obviously pay no tax at all. I believe a better system is to include the CO2 tax in the fuel/food price.

I don't see why that's unfair. Unfair to whom?

The person that drive 1000km on a big SUV emits more than if he had bought a small an efficient car to drive the same amount. So that should be incentived.

> I believe a better system is to include the CO2 tax in the fuel/food price

I agree with that.

Why do you think it's unfair to discourage what amounts to ≥3 hours of driving daily? At that point you should probably switch to trains or move.

Well, not everybody drives alone. Moving one person in a car emits comparable amount of CO2 as a person going by foot and moving only two people by car emits less CO2 than moving those two people on foot. We should discourage driving alone, or driving extremely short distances, but not discourage driving cars in general. Cars are surprisingly more energy efficient than walking/cycling if utilized fully. Also a big car fitting 8 people is more energy efficient per person than a small car that fits 4 people.

Public good benefits are too complex to reduce to a consumption tax.

It is in California. I drive a Ram 2500, which is classified as a commercial truck, so I pay many hundreds every year to register it.

> Car registration shouldn't be based on the value of the car, it should be based on how heavy the car is. Because heavier cars cause more wear on the road, they should pay more for road repair.

Probably the only thing New York State 'gets right' from a regulatory perspective: register a Lotus Elise? It's cheaper than an F-250

Related: "Vehicles and Crashes: Why is this Moral Issue Overlooked?" https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562447

Which argues that because larger cars are more likely to injure/kill someone in the event of a crash, buying a larger car makes you morally culpable for all such harms.

Discussed more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35082315

Morally culpable, but also defensible since you’re defending yourself from others in large cars.

Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. The real moral culpability is in the people that created and support the policies enabling the SUV Arma race.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

I do not blame 60 year old laws. At some point before 60 years, voters and their representatives become responsible for not changing the law.

Detroit appreciates not having the competition so the law stays.

The politicians making these decisions are also just playing a game. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."

This has always been a cop out. When people CHOOSE to play the game because it enriches themselves at the expense of others, they are 100% at fault.

Hate the player. You can hate the game too but if nobody played it there would be no problems.

That's my point. If you take "Hate the player. Hate the game." as a morally valid defense when it comes to driving big cars, it also is a valid defense for politicians regulating the big cars.

My point it is an invalid moral defense in both instances.

It is also fair to hate the player, as often they are making the decisions consciously. They are supporting the game, which would die if there was no demand. Same as the meat industry for example. It's too easy to always put the fault on some higher instance.

No demand for vehicles? Not going to happen in the forseeable future.

No demand for SUVs? That's possible, but hard. Most auto makers have killed most (if not all) of their cars, meaning if you have a family, you're in a sardine can, a muscle car, or an SUV.

I own a Prius, because I don't have a kid. I loaned it out to family who had a kid, and it was a veritable clown car routine anywhere they wanted to go.

Some people also actually need a large car. If you have a 6 person household, the only thing everyone will fit in is an SUV, a minivan, or a full size van.

You just listed 3 choices, which range in size, weight and likelyhood of killing pedestrians. I.e. a minivan fits more people, but is smaller than some of the massive trucks I see driving around.

I knew a family growing up that had six kids, so 8 person household, they had a minivan (Toyota Tarago).

A modern SUV would likely be a) heavier b) have worse blind spots, and c) has a higher front bumper, so worse impact if you hit a pedestrian.

The "I didn't have a choice" argument is almost always a logical fallacy.

> You just listed 3 choices, which range in size, weight and likelyhood of killing pedestrians

One answer is to not have pedestrians. As the suburbs do.

Not everybody wants to live in a city or can live in a city.

> I knew a family growing up that had six kids, so 8 person household, they had a minivan (Toyota Tarago).

Unlike pickup trucks, SUVs are fantastic for hauling both children and assorted cargo. Unlike minivans, they're great at handling a variety of driving conditions: gravel, dirt, ice/snow, inclines. They're also fun to drive and don't make it feel like the next sixteen years of your family's life is just dedicated to the brood.

> One answer is to not have pedestrians. As the suburbs do.

That's such and absurd suggestion I'm surprised you felt it worth writing, not to mention there are still plenty of pedestrians even in the suburbs.

It’s no more absurd than the suggestions in this thread that people only need small vehicles while ignoring the realities of why many people actually do need large vehicles.

> That's such and absurd suggestion

It's not absurd at all, which is why it's interesting to watch people who have never fathomed this try to come to grips with it.

There is so much of this country completely unserved by sidewalks, busses, or cycling infrastructure. And it's fine. It works.

Many people move to the suburbs nominally so that their kids can safely walk, bike, and play in the streets. Obviously the actual built environment of the suburbs doesn't remotely support this supposed goal, but the idea that suburbs "don't have pedestrians" is not true or even desired.

Minivans often have AWD varieties these days and its not like all SUVs have it. Other than "inclines" which I doubt most family cars ever see challenging ones, a minivan probably performs similarly to most SUVs on the market when it comes to gravel, dirt, ice/snow when equipped with the right tires.

I own both a minivan and an SUV, the minivan handles horribly in poor weather conditions, even with the proper tires. Our SUV handles much better in all weather even without switching to 4 wheel drive.

The minivan also has horrible clearance that bottoms out frequently when you drive on dirt trails trying to get to hiking trails and primitive campgrounds.

They each serve their purpose. The minivan is by far the best suburban people carrier we could’ve bought, and it has incredible storage capacity when you stow the seats, but it definitely has its limitations.

I'm trying to understand why the minivan would handle so much worse than a comparable SUV/crossover. Could you clue me into the reasons why? Is it actually something innate with the geometry/weight distribution or potentially more like "this particular van has poor handling"?

The biggest things I notice are less ground clearance, which becomes a problem in heavy snow and the less powerful engine which makes it harder to get traction in snow and ice, particularly when trying to get up an incline, such as a hill or ramp.

I can accept the lack of ground clearance but lack of power is not your problem on snow. I would bet that this is traction control related. Modern traction control are for the road and they suck big time in the snow because they don't allow any slippeage. I currently drive an electric RWD car and live at the end of a 2km mountain road with +20% slopes that can get snowed in for a few days before being plowed. On normal traction control, I don't get anywhere but using sports mode made it work like god damn magic.

A modern van versus that older Tarago would also at least be a) heavier b) have worse blind spots c) probably have a higher front bumper.

If one could only buy minivans these times. If you're in Europe, you're out of luck. There is an outdated Sharan/Alhambra with tech from 2015 and tiny TSI engine with whopping 14s 0-100 km/h acceleration. And a bit more modern Ford Galaxy. Or you can buy a minivan from USA, but 99% of them are after huge accidents. And that's basically it. So people buy SUVs.

Minivans are far more efficient at storing stuff and people than SUVs. SUVs lose so much interior space by being higher off the ground.

The idea that SUVs have good storage space is a marketing myth.

People like to use "what if I need to buy 4x8 sheet goods" as a justification for needing a truck, but once every three years when they actually need to buy a sheet of plywood or drywall they could take the back seats out of a Chrysler Pacifica and fit that entirely inside the van.

They don't even need to take the seats out, stow and go!

Oh wow, I’d just seen photos of the plywood at floor level and assumed the seats were out. That’s some good Honda Fit tier stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=683KzPW4eRU

Yep, and some people actually need a truck bed or towing capacity, but most don't.

Out of these choices, the minivan is the safest and most efficient. Generally has more cargo space than the SUV, too. In olden days, this need could have also been met by some station wagons.

People in this thread almost make it sound like people don't want SUVs, its a decision being forced on them by others.

A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things. They prefer the more upright seating (higher h-point). They prefer the higher entry/exit point. They feel they need all the cargo space. Lots of people which I agree would probably be just as well served by a sedan or a hatchback just don't care for those car styles these days. Even if the sedan was a few grand less than the SUV (they often were when they were still sold), these people probably still go for the SUV if they could afford it. People didn't generally like them in the past because 1) modern SUVs are kind of a new-ish concept which only really started in the 90s where they absolutely exploded in popularity 2) those 90s body-on-frame SUVs drove like trucks while modern unibody crossovers drive more like cars and 3) it wasn't until about the 2000s that car makers started actually trying to make these vehicles appealing to average drivers as opposed to just work vehicles.

These kinds of people are incredibly common from my experiences.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree things like the chicken tax and CAFE requirements drove sedans and "light trucks" closer to the same price points, but generally speaking a ton of consumers want it this way.

> People in this thread almost make it sound like people don't want SUVs, its a decision being forced on them by others.

> A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things.

Classic.

City-dwelling non-car owners projecting their understanding of the world onto the rest of the country. (Or in the case of Europeans, onto Americans.)

American suburbia and rural life is car-centric, and that's not going to change. People are not going to want to move to densify or live in the city because that's what "everyone should want". They enjoy their private cabins, their tall all-wheel drive vehicles, not shared transit and subway.

If you try to force these people to move to cities through taxation or a lack of support for their infrastructure, they'll vote out your political candidates.

There are a lot of people from SF and NYC here. As is the case with /r/fuckcars and their advocating for bikes and "strong cities", these are not the views shared by the rest of the country. If they were, you'd see policies changing overnight.

You're getting downvotes probably because your comment comes across as combative, but I do largely agree with your main points. I think a lot of people here aren't in touch with a lot of suburban people.

I've watched the local town halls in my area filled with people raging about apartment complexes or even owner-occupied townhouses getting built. Voting out the city hall members who approved those developments. The hate for even zero lot line houses as being "too crowded". People questioning why I'd ever even think about taking the light rail into town instead of just driving. Voting against expanding transit access because "the wrong people" would be coming into their town, arguing that having busses run every 10 minutes instead of 20-30 minutes would lead to higher crime rates and make it less safe.

There's tons of Americans who furiously don't want the density. Who don't want transit. Who push to have their lifted trucks with offroad wheels to drop their kids off at daycare and make a 20mi commute to an office job and wouldn't have it any other way. Lots of people here act like these people just don't exist or aren't a significant percentage of the population, but remember, Trump carried 46% of the popular vote. The percentage of these kinds of people is absolutely not a small number.

People act like these zoning laws just appeared on their own. They're made by local governments, some of the easiest people to replace in the end. The zoning laws reflect the popular priorities of the people living there. If the majority of people really wanted dense housing, they'd be voting to change their zoning laws to allow it. But, from what I've seen, a lot of those candidates don't tend to stay in office very long.

I'm reminded of a recent proposed development near me. A developer bought up the remains of an old farm and a cleaned up meat packing plant lot (torn down, cleaned up, empty field at the time). The developer wanted to build a few zero lot line SFHs and a few 3-4 unit townhouses, and then finally a small little commercial spot for potentially like a doughnut shop or cafe or bodega kind of thing. The close neighborhoods instantly fought against it bringing up loads of arguments about increased traffic (the location actually had a couple useful bus lines serving it...needs more frequency) and building too close to the creek (despite the most vocal neighborhood having structures just as close!). The development company tried to make a number of concessions, increasing some of the lot sizes of the SFHs, eliminating some of the construction closer to the creek and instead having a linear park/dog park there, redoing the entry and exit points of the development to adjust traffic patterns, etc. The NIMBYs would never accept any proposal. Eventually the developer gave up as city hall wouldn't risk approving something that so many virulently hated.

In the end, that property was acquired by a different group. Since the property was already zoned industrial, it was quick and easy to get the permits for their tilt wall warehouses to be built. Now instead of reducing the high housing demand and adding a small corner commercial space on a popular bus route, we're going to have loads of semis driving through this overall pretty highly residential/office area. I wonder which was worse for those neighborhood's property values.

It seemed like they were talking about large vs. small vehicles - not have vs. don't have a vehicle at all. And that's a lot different. The US could pass legislation making large vehicles more expensive and fuel efficient vehicles less expensive, but if I understand the situation correctly, it's the opposite. Which seems pretty stupid considering climate change.

As I understand it, they tightened emission regulations for cars and trucks. Which I consider to be a good thing. Problem is, the truck regulations were far more lax, and SUVs over a certain size were considered trucks. It was immediately more economical to make trucks and SUVs which didn't require as much R&D to meet the emission targets.

And so here we are, at a point where most car models have been canceled by the big auto builders while their SUV offerings have exploded.

Those big auto manufacturers didn't cancel small cars because they couldn't R&D the emissions requirements. Sure, those higher emissions requirements did drive up some of the cost to come closer to the SUVs, but the small cars were practically universally still cheaper than SUVs.

The big automakers stopped making small cars because people largely stopped buying them.

The game can't continue if there isn't a steady supply of new players. As a pedestrian, involuntary non-cyclist, and someone who prefers normal vehicles, your excuse is paper thin.

Don't worry, I can hate the players and the game at the same time!

Actually the safest cars are full size saloons. Trucks and SUVs rollover in accidents so your head changes from going straight ahead at 60mph to tumbling at 60mph breaking your neck.

> Morally culpable, but also defensible since you’re defending yourself from others in large cars. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

This might be morally defensible for players making equal trades between protection for themselves and protection for others, but at some point this is clearly no longer the case. For example, most people would agree that killing 1000 people to save your own life is bad. If players aren't even bothering with this calculating the tradeoff between more protection for themselves and less protection for others -- and I think most people who protect themselves with large cars have not done this calculation -- then yes, it's fine to cast aspersions.

According to this post from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety [1] (which I think is reliable?), going from a 2023 Prius (~88 square feet) to a 2023 Toyota Sequoia (~116 square feet) reduces car driver deaths from 47 per million vehicle years to 26. This seems, uh, fairly low down on the list of interventions your median SUV-driver could take to reduce their mortality, and it's made at a cost to other people, since "light trucks" (like SUVs, trucks, and vans) increase pedestrian fatalities by somewhere north of 50% [2, third page].

At some point, you're just being lazy, which you have a right to do, but I don't think it's particularly defensible.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight

[2] https://trforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/138.pdf

The question for me is, what is safer for my family? A huge proportion of the cars I see day to day are full-size SUVs like Tahoes, Yukons, and that QX80 monstrosity from Infiniti. There's a decent chance if I'm involved in an accident it will be with one of those cars.

You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.

If you want to ban vehicles above a certain weight or a certain displacement, fine let's talk about that. But until that happens I'm not going to intentionally make my kids less safe to reduce some wishy-washy definition of my "moral culpability" for accidents and deaths I've played no part in.

> You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.

You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.

You have a moral obligation to your own family though. I think that is the point that OP is making.

Why is protecting strangers a moral necessity but protecting your own family is not?

I'm not even making that claim here, come on.

If being in traffic is so dangerous to your family then your protective response should be to reduce their exposure to it as much as possible.

People in this thread are jumping straight to their right to increase the overall danger of driving, and put more of that danger outside their personal sphere, before taking any other actions to reduce or mitigate it.

They certainly have that right under the current arrangement. And I'm not saying all evaluations or decisions along these lines are immoral, I can approach this with understanding of real conditions and nuance. But along with that right comes being considered morally culpable or even cowardly for exercising it.

Let's take as a given that heavier cars are more dangerous to be around.

An individual who needs to commute by car has two options:

1) put themselves and their family in greater danger by driving a lighter car.

2) protect themselves and their family but increase total danger to society by driving a heavier car.

I am unconvinced that there is an obvious morally correct answer. What are one's moral obligations to themselves, their families, and their society? How are these prioritized?

You can't just say "don't drive lul". It's literally not an option. We should have better public transportation, but we don't.

For example, it's the only way that some means of disease prevention work.

What means of disease prevention require not protecting your own family?

"Make your family less safe to make strangers more safe" is certainly a hard to sell to approximately 99% of the world.

Not to 99% of the world, but to 99% of the people in an egocentric society.

Would you rather raise your family in:

(0) a place where nobody else can have an SUV whose extra size directly increases the danger to your kids, but you also can't own one to keep your kids slightly safer while you drive them; or

(1) a place where you can have an SUV that keeps your family slightly safer while they're in it, but everyone else can also own one and they make your family less safe whenever they're not in an SUV themselves?

Social rules are, at least at their best, a way to do better than a Nash equilibrium of mutual defection.

Since (0) is impossible, the answer is the one already proposed.

Why do you think (0) is impossible? Do laws not exist where you are? Are you not able to change them?

To make (0) happen you have to force 10s or 100s of millions of people to give up their current vehicle and buy a new one. To some people that sounds feasible, but they're a good bit more authoritarian than the average politician in the US.

It doesn't need to be a Fox news black and white argument about personal freedoms. Impose safety regulations that accounts for the people outside the vehicle, and the overall safety of the streets. You don't need to wipe out current SUVs and trucks overnight.

If they took away gas guzzling V8 engines, they can take away unwieldy oversized light pickups and SUVs.

Most people don’t own SUVs, even in the USA; and even if they did, laws can be local, so it would be your city or whatever rather than everyone everywhere.

But in this case if everyone thinks that way and buys an SUV the world in general is less safe for your family and you're in fact to safer from having a bigger car, if you ever were which seems to be debatable.

False premise

"Make your passengers more safe, by making your community less safe" is also a not an easy sell, but Americans are paying the big bucks to do it.

At some point your family is going to be on the receiving end. We don't have to be so shortsighted.

I completely disagree. Your moral obligation to your own family trumps that of your obligation to society at large. Even if you could argue that it should not be so, it is in practice.

The harm/benefit to society would have to be much larger for even the most altruistic people to give it more weight than the harm/benefit to their own family.

That’s not the case here.

These cars are more likely to kill your children by running over them as they cross the street. You are more likely to kill your neighbor's kids by running over them because you don't have visibility 6+ feet in front of you. This isn't some sort of wish-washy definition. These are hard to swallow facts.

Why does an suv not have visibility in front of it?

Because we can safely assume that under normal atmospheric conditions and within the distances we are talking about, light travels in straight lines and the SUV is too high thus blocking some of it from reaching the drivers eyes. I can't pull the sources now, but there was a study discussed here on HN a couple months ago showing an analysis of how this plays out.

Consider the larger vehicle shown in the picture at the top of the linked article; now imagine a child before the adolescent growth spurt standing in front of it — how far away does the child have to be, for any part of them to be visible to a driver sitting in the driver's seat?

This should help you understand the problem of higher vehicles limiting visibility of what's in front of them: https://imgur.com/a/aYbCbyg

Modern vehicles beep like crazy with sensors when something is in front of the car like that though. It is impossible not to know.

To add to this, an M1 Abrams tank and a Peterbilt 857 semi have better visibility than some SUVs and pick-up trucks:

* https://ifunny.co/picture/a-semi-truck-has-better-visibility...

Becauase they are high and tend to have long flat front hoods, creating an extended blind spot for short objects (like children) in front.

Newer models have forward collision sensors that partially mitigate that. (And backup cameras that do an even better job of mitigating the rear low-height blind spot, as long as people use them instead of direct vision when backing up.)

Actually, most of the time it's the parents running over their own children, in their own driveway.

I haven't killed anyone by any means, so I'm not morally culpable of anything. But my moral obligation to protecting my family supersedes any moral obligation I have to protecting strangers.

By this logic, because I haven't killed anyone drunk driving, I should be allowed to drive drunk.

No, it's important to point out hard facts here: by driving a car with less visibility, you become more dangerous to your family and your neighborhood. You don't even protect your family, because you've now entered a vehicle significantly more likely to flip over in an accident-- which you are now more likely to have because you bought a vehicle with reduced capacity to see what is in front of you.

Your choice is your choice-- but it's important not to lie to yourself or others about what that choice entails.

> By this logic, because I haven't killed anyone drunk driving, I should be allowed to drive drunk.

Drunk driving is illegal, having a large vehicle isn't. If it's illegal, I won't do it.

And even ignoring that, this isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths. Which you're not.

If you drive a larger vehicle, you are taking on the increased risk of hitting other children or your own children. Whether or not you've actually hit a child doesn't change that fact and trying to wiggle out of it through that logic is the same as arguing just because an irresponsible driver hasn't killed anyone means they're actually safer than an irresponsible driver who has. The fundamental attribution is their irresponsibility, not whether or not their irresponsibility has resulted in a consequence for them.

similarly, regardless of whether or not you've killed anyone with a larger vehicle, the fact is that larger vehicles pose a greater danger of running over children.

> Drunk driving is illegal, having a large vehicle isn't.

Legality and morality are not the same things.

I'm noticing you are mixing up "legal" and "moral" a lot in this thread. They are separate concepts. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it is morally right. Morals are something that someone can chose to live by to help them pick between right and wrong. Laws are literally the absolute bare minimum to participate in society without have your rights to property or freedom revoked. Ideally a common societal agreement of morals and ethics should play in laws, but that doesn't always happen.

> I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths

This is a weird statement... which I guess is true in the narrowest possible meaning. It's true in the way that it is written, but not in a way that matters.

If you drive drunk but haven't killed anyone yet you aren't directly culpable for drunk driving deaths.... but it is still an immoral action. Just because it hasn't caused the worst possible results yet doesn't mean it doesn't significantly raise the risk.

I think the important thing here is that morals and ethics are a relative concept. It's deeply personal and everyone places there own values on it. You've taken a stance that your absolute responsibility above all else is to your family. If your actions makes things safer for your family at the determent to others then you see that as the moral thing to do. That's valid. You've got the right to the world view but it doesn't change the larger discussion. People will discuss this in a moral lens. Some of them will view your stance as immoral or selfish.

Big trucks, big SUVs, and minivans do in fact have a significantly lower death rate for people in the vehicle than do smaller vehicles [1] so if his goal is to lower the chances of his family dying in a car accident he is achieving it.

[1] https://www.motortrend.com/news/are-bigger-cars-safer/

>my moral obligation to protecting my family supersedes any moral obligation I have to protecting strangers

Surely it doesn’t supersede any obligation you have to protecting strangers. If you’d greatly increase the likelihood that you end up killing a pedestrian to only slightly increase the safety of your own family, I think that is morally wrong.

You're rewriting the GP's argument and then responding to that instead of what the person actually wrote. Try again.

Maybe you should read my comment they're replying to.

I did. They pointed out a fundamental flaw in that argument which you have declined to address - specifically, the increased risk factors to your own family members from accidents that do not involve collisions with other vehicles.

This is the dictionary definition of a tragedy of the commons. You must recognize that regardless of your individual decision making, the fact that vehicle sizes have ballooned has made everyone on the road, your family included, much less safe.

Where does it stop though? Are you fine putting everyone else in danger so you feel safe? Are you buying a tank next?

I'm sure he would if it were legal.

On a statistical macro sense, yes you have.

This is untrue. You have a moral obligation to protect strangers from your car. And a legal one.

Not at the expense of my family, I don't.

It's not moral when all public good is sacrificed for familial benefit.

You are intentionally endangering others to give yourself the "feeling" of protecting your family. That is selfish and immoral.

It takes would take some strong avoidance of reality and logic to clamp down on people's individual safety (by mandating smaller vehicles) to 'help save' the ~ < 50 children that get run over (BY ALL VEHICLES, incidentally) every year.

Not sure where your number is coming from. A quick search[0] led me to 181 pedestrian and 40 cyclist child fatalities in 2019.

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

The stats I found put it at around 200 per year in the US for children under 13, probably thousands globally. That was from 2021, and since pedestrian deaths in general have gone up a lot since then, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is greater now. Plus some trucks and SUVs have hoods that are so tall now that even 13+ children are occluded.

I'm not saying any of this data is wrong but I'm not sure there's any correlation between pedestrian deaths generally and deaths of children in this way. Most of the children hurt/killed in this manner are probably in driveways, parking lots, subdivisions etc. while I would expect most pedestrian deaths to be in more business district type areas, crossing the street, that sort of thing. I would also expect most child deaths to be a result of not seeing them, and most pedestrian deaths to be a result of speed - hence much fewer [adult] pedestrian deaths in driveways.

So I wouldn't expect a rise in pedestrian deaths (particularly over a very short 2 year period which could just be an aberration in the data) to necessarily mean there was a similar rise in child deaths if they happen in fundamentally different circumstances for different reasons.

Kids need to be taught not to play behind a moving vehicle, the same as they need to be taught not to stick their fingers in an electric socket. "Someone else's kids" who aren't being raised properly isn't enough of a reason to force people to own a particular kind of automobile (At least this was the predominant thinking before we lived in a nanny state).

A plan which makes small children responsible for preventing their own deaths at the hands of adults driving vehicles they personally chose seems at the very least unlikely to produce good results, assuming you are trying to keep children from dying. I suppose if your metric is “nanny state impositions prevented” rather than “children being crushed to death” then it could be considered a success.

Every meaningful action carries some risk to ourselves and others.

In and of itself it is not an excuse to curtail freedoms because nothing would get done. There needs to be an acceptable risk level for things. We need to talk about "unreasonable risks" that are based on evidence and not what might or could happen.

I'm okay with discussing reasonable risks people are taking. I'm just arguing not to bullshit me with what the risks are. I'm okay with motorcyclists on the road. I'm not okay with a motorcyclist trying to say "no, cycling actually makes me safer because I'm more agile and can drive between the lanes, so I'm totally out of the way of cars now!"

Motorcyclist here. A lot of the danger of motorcycles is the rider. The level of danger to a 20 year old man on a sports bike is orders of magnitude higher than that of a 50 year old on touring bike.

Same story with guns: the danger of guns is entirely correlated with demographics. People outside of certain demographics and locales face very little risk from guns.

You're arguing besides my point. My point is that I don't buy bullshit reasons how a riskier behavior is actually safer. A 50 year old motorcyclist trying to tell me "my age actually makes me safer on a motorcycle than if I was in a car" would get a similar wtf.

Motorcyclist here who's in their 50's - you'd better sit down. I have some sobering facts for you.

The fatalities per 100 million miles driven are as follows (NHTSA data):

- 1.1 for car and truck drivers

- 2.3 for all motorcyclists

- 21.8 for motorcyclists over 50

Why is a 50 year old 20 times more likely to die on a motorcycle than a 20 year old? Here are some reasons given by the MSF:

- Decline is physical and cognitive abilities

- Increased risk-taking behavior (20 year olds don't typically do poker runs from bar to bar, for example)

- Riding bigger, faster bikes (as you know, tourers cost a lot of money, money that a 20 year old simply doesn't have)

Now I know neither you nor I are going to park our bikes, but it behooves us both to recognize the dangers in riding at our age and doing what we can to mitigate those risks.

Also, remember this: when those 20 year olds do something stupid on their sport bikes and crash they're pretty much good to go due to the resilience of their young bodies. Us? We're going to the hospital or the morgue. Those are just life's realities.

Keep the rubber down!

I wonder what the break down is on over 50 doing dumb shit/not dumb shit?

I remember how fun riding was after a few beers when I was young, and that's why I don't do that now, but biker gang culture, which is older doesn't care.

I suspect you're a lot like me and wondering how can it be that riding is so dangerous for us. I'm suspecting it's alcohol. They have poker runs all the time where each of the stations is at a bar - and people are drinking up. They end up riding bar to bar to bar to bar, drinking all the way. And they're riding in groups which tends to get things bunched up. I stay away from these events. They're just not my thing.

I don't know a lot of people who've died while riding, but for the couple I do they were riding late at night (wee hours of the morning) and were well over the legal limit for a DUI. One was a buddy of mine who was having a bit of problems in his personal life and went to the bar and got shit faced and left around 2:30 AM. Went riding home on a 4 lane rd here that has a 50 MPH speed limit and winding curves. He failed to negotiate a curve.

So stay sober and enjoy your ride!

A similar argument can be made about gun ownership: in an armed society, is it rational not to own a firearm?

sadly yeah

Considering how gun ownership makes you more likely to be killed by a firearm, I'd say yes, it's very rational to not own one.

The largest threat to gun owners is their own gun.

Considering how car ownership makes you more likely to be killed by a car, I'd say yes, it's very rational to not own one.

You'll have to look at individual crash safety ratings; but, if memory serves me, large SUVs have worse ratings than smaller cars, in general. That could have changed or I could be wrong, though.

Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.

We could make it more expensive to think that way for sure.

Do you have any actual safety numbers? Or are you just going on your gut instinct of "bigger must be better just because"? There was a time when those big SUV vehicles were more likely to kill your family than a mini-van or sedan because the high center of gravity + no rollbar (and other such protection) made it both more likely to roll and more devastating when it did so.

The IIHS has stats on this and it does seem that larger vehicles have lower average death rates[1].

In a world of only smaller sized cars, having a larger car would likely be less safe for the reasons you listed. However, with large cars being so popular, it would make sense that being in a smaller car is less safe as you are more likely to be in a collision with a vehicle that has more mass than yours—not to mention you have less room for crumple zones and the larger vehicle would hit you at a higher point on your vehicles, which is known to be more lethal.

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics

Humans can rationalize anything, thank you for linking actual data.

> You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.

I don't mean to be snarky, but most moral dilemmas boil down to some trade off between what is best for yourself and whats best for society. In an evolutionary sense, our monkey brains see our children as an extension of our self. It seems to fit well.

You might decide that trade off is well worth it, which is a fair conclusion, but you can't deny that moral calculus is there to some degree.

Intentionally putting others in danger is immoral to many. But morality is subjective. Putting the whole community at net negative risk so you can squeak out personal advantage is perfectly acceptable behavior to some.

I suppose this article is lampooning you, then: https://www.theonion.com/conscientious-suv-shopper-just-want...

It's The Onion, so you don't need to read the article to get the point. Its title is "Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident."

If the vehicle weights are equal, both families will probably survive. But if they're unequal, the smaller vehicle will suffer more damage.

A sucky arms race.

Don't SUV have less safety features than normal cars? They are classified as light trucks to avoid safety regulations. Does the increased mass make up less safe vehicle?

> The question for me is, what is safer for my family?

picking up and moving to a location on earth which doesn't require you to own a car to live is the safest bet

it's possible; i'm one (of many many millions around me)

You are describing a prisoner's dilemma where one person's decision to buy a bigger, more dangerous vehicle pushes you to do the same.

This can all be priced in. If bigger vehicles are more dangerous, we could make auto insurance premiums a function of weight (and other criteria).

Also related / recently discussed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37028595 (slate.com) 102 points, 18 hours ago, 139 comments

"If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose" https://slate.com/business/2023/01/electric-cars-hummer-ev-t...

Driving a car makes you more likely to kill or injure somebody than walking or staying home. Is it immoral for anybody to drive a car at all?

We all take on culpability for certain harms to others. It’s just a question of what as a society we are willing to accept.

I don’t think this is an issue of society “overlooking” the morality of this specifically. It’s just that people have a lot of problems to worry about, and the crash safety of large vehicles isn’t high on the list.

Not immoral, just more culpable. Is it immoral not to kill oneself as being alive makes one more likely to kill someone?

Yes, driving a car makes you morally culpable for the harms it does.

If you ranked the harms you are likely to cause, driving a car would be very near the top of the list.

You are exhibiting an aspect of the myopia the article is highlighting.

I guess what bothers me about this wording of how people are “overlooking moral culpability”, even if it’s accurate, is that it sounds very accusatory. Like “How could you buy an SUV? Don’t you care about the kids you’re bound to run over?”

This particularly stings when a person thinks they are doing something normal like buying a car large enough to meet their family’s needs.

Determining the moral culpability of actions and complaining about it is one thing. And it’s by far the easy part. The harder and more important part is to craft a message that doesn’t sound like an attack on a person’s morality.

It's more of a creeping normality [0] problem. Some cars get larger and people get accustomed to it, so it's hard to notice. Someone needs to point it out and from the reaction to this post, it seems that people are interested once it's pointed out to them.

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

I hate the mentality of "bigger car is safer for me and my family". It is safer because you will have more mass and in the event of a collision likely do more damage to the other vehicle. It is a mass/kinetic force arms race when people are using that as a reason for vehicle purchase. Similar logic can be applied to why many US citizens buy guns.

This implies that it’s moral to make a conscious decision to lower the chances of survival for your family in case of crash?

I don't have a log in to read the full paper, but from your description and the preview, I can't help but think that this is just a weird extension of the trolley problem.

You're taking an action that means you're more likely to harm someone else, but that same action also means the people in your car are less likely to be harmed.

> just a weird extension of the trolley problem

Its also subconscious bias of legislators on display, because they typically knock around in said big vehicles. Just look at presidential vehicles or ministerial vehicles, or royal vehicles.

I'd love to see a big wig, knocking around in a Peugeot 106, or mini with a cavalcade. Even better if they can drive it themselves!

Do you think car manufacturers would spend more time making smaller lightweight bullet proof crash proof cars, like you see in Formula 1? Something less likely to kill but bounce its occupants around when it crashes and do less harm, like zorbing.

Nothing against cars per se, I love them, but it would be nice to see more Toyota Yaris GRX's or Polo GTI's which are pocket rockets but with better crash protection. Problem is people now haul around so much guff in their vehicles, they need these bigger vehicles.

Blame it on the complicated consumer based form of capitalism we live in today.

Consumption, consumption, consumption.

When the pope was in the US, he was driven around in a Fiat 500 (!). Granted, it was the four-door version :-)

I didnt know that, was his "pope mobile" vehicle not allowed in the US then?

The photos of the car being dwarfed by the US security vehicles is funny, but a classic example of virtue signalling.

I'd think injuring/killing someone because you hit them would make you morally culpable. The guy driving a semi and never getting in an accident should be able to sleep fine at night.

I doubt this will hold up in court tho

We are likely reaching a point where it is becoming absurd, to have a huge, 4,000lbs vehicle carrying one person most of the time. Feels like an arm escalation, I need a bigger and heavier vehicle so I feel safer.

Not sure what is the best way to bring some sense to this trend. Regulation could put some boundaries I guess. Clearly there is little incentives for car manufacturers to go small & light.

If that trend keeps going, I could see some cities banning cars in some streets (e.g. only bikes or pedestrians) as having foot traffic close to car traffic would become too dangerous.

I'm from Spain and during the last couple of decades cities have experimented a lot with urban planning, including turning streets into one way with broader sidewalks, or turning them pedestrian only.

Anecdotally I can say that every street turned pedestrian has been wildly popular, massively revitalizing the area.

You can also check out Barcelona Superblocks [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=barcelona+superblocks&rlz=1C...

I'm not meaning to take away from what you are saying, but your blocks are some of the very best pedestrian designed and sized the world.

American blocks are by and large, boring, stupid and hugely oversized. Making them pedestrian only would solve nothing when most towns in america are covered it "Stroads"

Since you know about StrongTowns you probably already know this but I'll leave this here.

This is why, in the USA, we need to address the regulations that require us to build houses like this: Offsets, R1 zoning, height restrictions, minimum parking, road width requirements, etc...

A busy road in the downtown area of my city has been under construction for a while recently. It's entirely cut down on car traffic because all the cars are diverted, and what's really cool to see is there's been a significant bump in pedestrians in the area since the cars have left. When the construction hours end, the street is silent and clear and people are crossing between neighborhoods without any difficulty. Of course, because I live in the US, this is only temporary and once the road is "fixed", they'll allow the loud and dangerous cars to take it over once again. I do have some hope with lots of recent news around this topic that younger generations will fight to remove cars in unnecessary corridors.

Pricing in externalities I think and as others here have said. Make it reflect the true cost to drive a gigantic truck.

It's gotten to the point where I feel like I'm being greedy driving my little '09 eco hatchback instead of my motorcycle and how much weight a subsequent fuel is being carried around and burnt to move me through the town on my way to work. 2800lbs vs 366lbs

What is mind blowing to me is how little weight impacts the fuel efficiency in my situation. I get ~58 MPG on my 385lb bike and ~55-60 MPG in my 3,500lb Prius prime. Obviously the regen helps, but still it is crazy how efficient the Prius is.

Wind resistance is a lot of it, but also I imagine the power-to-weight ratio of your bike is much greater than your Prius'.

This is more a reflection of your motorcycle engine favoring power, low weight, low emissions, and low cost of production over efficiency. There are people with DIY efforts that can get something like a 125cc 9 horsepower Honda engine to get over 200MPG at around 230 pounds and 55 MPH

What were the total emissions to make the Prius vs the motorcycle? MPG is only post-production.

It's extremely frustrating as a car enthusiast. Even a tiny 2 door sports car like the bmw m240 is almost 4000 pounds!

I want a fast, light car that isn't 20+ years old and falling apart.

As an M240 owner, it amazes me how much it weighs. It’s such a small car, and so lively and well handling.

My ‘05 Mustang weighs less, and if it wasn’t for the handling changes I made to it (sway bars, coil-overs, control arms, and more), the BMW would still handle better.

This is going to come across as bitchy but: Put your money where your mouth is. Stop giving BMR money and buy a Caterham instead.

As I have come to learn, Miata is always the answer clocking in at a measly 2,400lb. The katerham advice is good if you're willing to go kit car though.

We own a Volkswagen GTI. I don't know if it's fast enough for you, but it's no slouch and it's a totally normal sized car.

I'm curious as to why you chose that particular vehicle. It's an interesting choice for someone on HN. What convinced you that this car was right for you?

A Tesla Model 3 doesn't seem "huge" but can weight heavier than 4k lbs.

Long-Range/Performance AWD: 4,072 lb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3

> to have a huge, 4,000lbs vehicle carrying one person most of the time.

For American EV trucks, you can go ahead and double that weight. The 2022 EV Hummer has a 9,063 lbs curb weight. Just imagine the toll that takes on our roads. Absolutely disgusting, and now imagine what happens when one of those T-bones a Corolla. Instant death becomes the best outcome for the person driving the Corolla.

Not to diminish your point, but the GM electric trucks are extra hefty! The Ford variety isn't quite so shameful.

Ford F-150 Lightning 6,015 to 6,893 lbs

Rivian R1T 7,148 lbs

Silverado EV 8,532 lbs

Here's a depressing thought: I'm from the Netherlands. We're dense and have small roads and parking spots. So monster trucks like these are impractical, expensive to own (road tax based on weight) and expensive to drive due to the poor mileage and high gas prices.

None of these things seems to matter. I'm in my 40s and can't remember seeing a single car like this in my entire life until about 5 years ago. Now I very regularly see them, they're on the rise.

Some people just want to have a huge fucking truck for no apparent rational or adult reason. And it seems that as they make an appearance, it inspires others.

It fits in a generic pattern I'm seeing around me. People with disposable wealth will spent it on ridiculous life "upgrades" that make no rational sense. I'm seeing giant houses being built whilst there's 1-2 people living in it, and most of the day nobody at all. I'm talking about homes with so much space that you don't know what to do with it. Just because you can.

In these times of energy transition and ultra high energy prices, I see neighbors investing in an outdoor sauna.

It's not that I want to police what people can or cannot spent their money on, I'm just saying it's way out of bounds. Beyond the reasonable. Excessive resource usage with no immediate purpose by any stretch of the imagination.

But I'll also come to terms with the idea that perhaps I'm not that much better. My guilty pleasure is annual very remote travel, which as we know is a massive contributor to CO2 output.

If taxation or discouragement does not have the desired effect and banning is difficult if not unwanted, my conclusion is that behavioral change is not to be expected much from.

Well this, plus also cities that are designed for cars first.

I would love to see more cities design for people/pedestrians first, with denser multi-zone areas. I wish more people could walk to a neighborhood grocery, bar, library, etc.

It seems to me there is a chicken and egg problem with (non-car) infrastructure and the demand for that infrastructure. Nobody wants to get on a train full of homeless people or a bus that's always late or a sidewalk that has no shade. There is little incentive for city leaders and planners to invest in things that nobody uses.

"Incentive" is a codeword for structural corruption, IMVHO.

It's no surprise that subsidized burning of fossil fuels "generates growth".

The growth of cancerous structures that make the average life worse.

So many issues in society can be quickly, intuitively, and uncontroversially identified as a “tragedy of the commons” situation. But it’s a hard sell to give up a personal advantage for a collective betterment.

Well, it's easy. That's the one of the main purposes of governments.

Poorly designed legislation is the reason American cars are so large.

Do other countries have laws discouraging large cars? I just assumed that people drive small cars in Europe because driving a large car would be a logistical nightmare. You'd never be able to park for a start.

My point is that American laws encourage large cars.

Which laws? I've never lived in the US

Here's one article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-suvs-size...

Europe has significant pigovian taxes on fuel, for starters. More than half the retail price of gasoline. Probably that would be political suicide in the US.

No, you just don't understand, we need more legislation. We'll get it right eventually, I'm sure of it.

On a more serious note, I wonder how much of this is related to regulatory capture in the automotive industry. I could be wrong but I would think the profit margin on something like a Land Cruiser is quite a bit more than something like a Corolla. There are a lot of sunk costs in just getting any one vehicle of any size to the sales lot, so is there an incentive to be able to make bigger cars and therefore a larger profit (either percentage or absolute) per vehicle?

Talk to car salespeople. Large american vehicles have nothing to do with law and everything to do with the american consumer preferring larger vehicles. You can see it in this very thread, they want to "feel" safer.

It's probably a mixture of both, but don't underestimate the impact of laws that make large cars/trucks cheaper and that make smaller cars cost prohibitive.

I want my kids car seat to fit behind me and I don't have to feel like a sardine.

I hauled two kids around in a Toyota Matrix (Corolla station wagon) for years, and never had a problem with the car seat not fitting or making me feel like a sardine.

Ok. I test drove a Rav4 and could not fit with our car seat. I could not fit the car seat behind me in our Acura TLX. I am not exceptionally tall.

Tax vehicles by weight, regardless of powertrain. Maybe charge extra for ICE. Offer tax rebates for professionals who can justify using a large vehicle for at least 120 days in the year.

Charge extra for EV, they shouldn't be excluded either. A Telsa plaid weighs in at nearly 5000 lbs. In the US there are tax benefits to having a car weighing over 6000 lbs like giant SUV's.

I am not excluding EV. I am saying "tax by weight regardless of powertrain and slap an extra charge on top of it if it is an ICE"

Why slap additional charge on top if it is ICE? Some ICE cars emit less CO2 over their lifetime than EVs, especially when driven only in city, on short distances, in which case the lower CO2 emissions from driving don't offset much higher manufacturing emissions of EV. Also ICE cars cause less pollution from tire wear.

Because we don't enact policy based on "some" cases and it's not just about CO2, we want to stop depending on fossil fuels.

> especially when driven only in city, on short distances

In the city and for short distances, cars could/should be banned outright, and force the US to transition to multi-mode and increased adoption of public transit.

Professionals using a larger vehicle for work should already be getting a tax break on the entire vehicle. If they don't, it sounds like it's just a personal vehicle.

Cars in the Netherlands are taxed by weight (combined with fuel type). This doesn't prevent people from buying bigger and bigger cars.

I think in this case it's more likely that the US government wanted to have light trucks be fairly accessible to individuals that needed them, and somehow it became a cultural icon to have a pick-up truck that doesn't ever pick anything up. Now we're here and it's a hot-button cultural issue proxied as "the left is trying to change my lifestyle, not over my dead body."

I don't blame the government for not seeing a need to regulate this decades ago. Really, who in their right mind would want such a difficult to park, more expensive, less economic vehicle if they didn't need it, right?

> somehow it became a cultural icon to have a pick-up truck that doesn't ever pick anything up

This is actually the struggle I'm going through right now. I rarely need to cart around something large, but when I do it's something large. Like a few full sheets of plywood over 40 miles. I really don't want a pickup for the other 98% of the time, but there isn't really a viable option for renting a pickup for a few hours.

I would say optimize for the 98%.

I've used renorun and paid for delivery, but they aren't available in all markets, that would be the #1 choice.

#2 would be a roof rack. renorun stopped serving my area (boston) so I use my tiny hr-v (the old one based on the fit frame.) and I throw plywood and drywall sheets on the roof rack all the time. Only 6 sheets at a time, and you need to have a 3/8 plywood sheet on the bottom so the drywall doesn't snap, but it's been pretty adequate.

I never used the home depot truck rental because you have to drive it back -- not a great option I think.

I never used it because last time I asked they told me I have to be buying something that needs it, like an appliance. Wood didn't count. So maybe that is an option, but....

> By the time you turn 35, you're in a blood feud with either Lowes or Home Depot, and have sworn vengeance against a minimum of two major airlines. [1]

My blood feud is with Home Depot, and Lowe's near me doesn't have a rental program.

[1] https://twitter.com/KBSpangler/status/1551715401033302016

> but there isn't really a viable option for renting a pickup for a few hours.

Really? I did exactly that this weekend and it was easy and didn't cost that much. I figure with how rarely I need one, renting a truck when needed is much cheaper than owning one. Added benefit is that I'm not constantly being asked to have my truck borrowed by friends and family.

Put a tow hitch on your car for a couple hundred bucks. Rent a trailer from Uhaul for $20 for a day.

This is probably the winning move.

My solution is two cars. An efficient commuter a truck for hauling and recreation.

It is a shame that registration and insurance doesn't operate on miles driven, and disincentives this.

Really? Where I am, U-Haul in-town pickup truck rental is pretty cheap.

I think you miss the key ingredient, they are tragedy of the commons where a company profits from amplifying the game-theory of the tragedy.

That is a HUGE difference. In one everyone is playing equally and if recognized can be de-escalated. In the other, there is a major monied player with power attempting to enshrine the tragedy into society.

I honestly feel like my small car is really the advantage. It's so much more nimble that I can easily evade road hazards and stop exceptionally quickly.

It would fare worse in a collision, but maybe I'm also less likely to get caught in one because my car isn't so enormous.

Not being able to see for 12 feet in front of your vehicle should be illegal. The only reason trucks are allowed to have that is because they are pegged as farm equipment. Treat them as farm equipment. Special license to drive if visibility is impacted, special taxation for large vehicle without a business use case, you name it.

I'd love to see that but it will never happen because there's an enormous demographic whose identity is largely wrapped up in "driving a pickup".

Princess of the Pavement

I love trucks. Small trucks (think Datsun 620). But they don't make small trucks anymore.

If there was a choice for a smaller truck, maybe some of us would choose it. Right now I'm driving a small (heavy) jeep.

Wonder how much of this is just due to how massive the us is and how far we drive. I have kids so drive a minivan. It's got 3 rows of seats and storage behind. I genuinely use all the rows fairly often or if not in use I fold them down for larger space in the back. Space I often use.

Not saying I couldn't make due with a smaller car but it would definitely make things more complicated.

I'm not sure a minivan even counts as a huge car any longer. :)

Remember Station Wagons?

I would definitely consider a modern version of those big wood paneled ones

It's mad that the US forgot about those. I drive an estate with a sportspack - it's no sports car, but it handles nicely; it has low drag, so it sips fuel on the motorway; and it carries more than a 4x4 because the load space is a better shape. Between the car and the trailer, I've hauled a metric tonne. Every third car around here used to be an estate, until the shitty crossovers invaded and destroyed all the advantages.

I once put the back seats down in my station wagon and loaded 0.75T of soil in 40lb bags. My suspension didn't like that, but the car did just fine.

If it's so big maybe you shouldn't drive across it so much

People want to visit family, go interesting places and live their lives.

Any solution that requires people to live like it's the 1500s is probably a nonstarter.

Agreed, especially if those people are my grand grandchildren, its my responsibility. And if I need to live in the 70s for some aspects of my life well so be it.

I don't want future generations role-playing Fallout. So I try my best to reduce the emissions. Bike, have less and smaller cars.

Its not the middle ages and you still can have a quality life.

People took a lot of road trips in the 70s...probably in a fairly inefficient station wagon.

Exactly my point, it was not the middle ages, and yet: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/trfvolusm227nfwa (better if those are done is less polluting vehicles) and in the country of cars, other countries were not living on dirt roads

Besides, modern engines get pretty incredible gas efficiency on the highway. A lot of the minivans these days run a 10-speed automatic with a well-tuned V6, netting nearly 300bhp and pushing 30 mpg on the Interstate.

The occasional family road trip shouldn't be a cause for disdain, families with children shouldn't be shunned for wanting to travel and enjoy the various things their region has to offer.

80% of people in manhattan have no personal vehicle and I would not say they are "living like it's the 1500s". The problem is that most of America has car-dependent infrastructure.

In Europe we still have station wagons. They are better than SUVs and these stupid american trucks in the overwhelming majority of cases.

I often wonder how construction gets done in Europe. Everyone in the US who works construction or even has the possibility of maybe one day needing to carry a shovel claims they absolutely must drive a truck with a 3-ton curb weight everywhere they go. How does Europe build anything, without these massive trucks everywhere?

Any option of the following:

  Truck rentals,
  At-home delivery of building materials and hardware,
  Actual trucks with drivers licensed for trucking,
  Using a car with fold-down back seats

Anecdotally I think it's much more common for people in the US to do some work on their house by themselves than in the EU.

Even if that’s true, it’s an absurd reason to own a truck.

Here's what they drive: https://www.byggnadsarbetaren.se/test/har-ar-bilarna-som-vis...

Seems like these weigh 1.8-2.0 tons

I realize you're being sarcastic, but taking this a bit seriously: I feel like a minority of "serious working professionals" (in my area, Seattle) ever actually drive "consumer pick-ups" as their working vehicle. The majority of tradespeople I've known all drive vans or specialized trucks, not consumer pickup trucks. It seems to be several reasons:

- Few tradespeople are moving large loads of loose material or goods around e.g. debris or lawnmowers. If you do move dirt or lawnmowers around regularly, you're not buying a consumer Ford F150 for the purpose, you're going to buy something like an F250 with what's called a "work body" or "landscape body" (hilariously, strongly implying an off-the-shelf F250 is not equipped for work): https://cmtruckbeds.com/truck-beds/lb-landscape-body/

- A fully enclosed van means less risk of casual stealing, and less concern for tying down every little thing during transport

- Vans are generally a bit narrower than the big trucks so you can squeeze them into the strange city job sites much easier.

- They don't have to worry about protecting their cargo from the elements

- If you get the right van, you can stand up inside that van

- A van is going to have a pretty low floor that you can generally step into and out of. A large pickup you may need to literally climb into. A tradesperson is going to have to do that like 10+ times a day

It always seems like the foreman or project manager is the one you see driving the pickup truck, all the other working stiffs choose vans though.

I'm a European living in Greece, I drive a 2009 Suzuki Swift and have a wife and kid. It's a bit of a challenge to set it up to go for a trip on our island house during summer, and I seldom do any construction work more than simple stuff around the houses. But it is super easy to park around, has OK mileage, and the ferry ticket is cheaper than a big car and it is OK to park. It has a laughable boot, but if you fold the passenger seats it can be useful to move some bigger stuff.

There are trucks in Greece, just not that many twin cabs, mostly you will see them outside the city in the country.

Construction workers use mostly vans, and flatbed versions of vans (Like the ford transit) also called cab-over pick-up trucks. There are lots of small light cab-over trucks in the islands by Piaggio and Daihatsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck#/media/File:PiaggioTruck... which are pretty hand and often provide a pretty big flatbed for stuff. There are some construction workers like electricians, plumbers etc that love to use panel vans or their passenger versions using folded seats like the Fiat Doblo (Similar to the Ram Promaster City).

We are actually thinking of buying a mild-hybrid version of the passenger version of a panel-van to cover our family needs.

Trucks are not stupid, they can tow. I don't want to be a european pod dweller, I want to have an RV, a boat and get the most of my life.

You do know that Europeans also have a ton of trailers, RVs and boats? Maybe ask yourself how we managed to do it?

Parts of Europe actually have more reasonable towing regulation, for example, in Europe, my VW GTI can legally tow a thousand pounds or so, but does not have a recognized towing capability in the US system.

Do you have any data to support your claims?

I couldn't own a basic car, let alone an RV, when I was living in Stockholm. I was trying to figure out if I could buy a large enough trailer for my bicycle to transport my inflatible boat somewhere (and there are basically no public boat launches!), I couldn't dream of RV, it seems those things are only for very wealthy people in Europe.

Now I own a normal 18 foot boat with a trailer and an RV camper even though I work in the same field. My life quality significantly improved since I moved to the U.S and I will never look back.

Looking at Sweden and thinking it represents Europe is like looking at Utah and thinking it represents the whole US.

Those American trucks are an emblem of freedom and sovereignty! /s

I chuckle at the weird and ridiculous things people do with their trucks. The lift kits, and the widening, and the heee-yuge tires. I cannot imagine what kind of mileage they make.

They're also the first people to complain about gas prices and vandalize gas pumps with Biden stickers.

I like the Biden stickers. :D Shutting down the pipeline out of Canada during his first week in office and promising to be hard on oil companies made all the oil related businesses go into turtle mode. It's basic cause and effect.

There are many factors. The minivan itself is dying, and it's almost a "perfect" car for many use cases - can hold 8, can get car-like mileage, can hold as much as an SUV, is easier to get into.

But they're dying because people ain't buying, because the costs are so high and those with the money to buy new vehicles don't like them.

There is NOTHING preventing small SUVs that hold 5 people and cargo, get really good mileage, and are cheap(ish) - but they don't exist used because they don't exist new.

(It's sad, because I'm buying a new minivan, and I could not make the PHEV Pacifica make sense no matter how I finagled the financial numbers, the Sienna is simply unavailable at reasonable trim levels, and nobody makes an EV minivan.)

Minivans are mostly dying because the designs all look like they came from junior designers who hope to one day grow up and work on a real car. Not that it's their fault. They manufacture these things on set platforms and none of them do any justice to the shape of the vehicle.

They're half-heartedly trying - the Kia Carnival kind of looks like an SUV from a decent distance.

The Toyota Highlander is just a minivan with SUV doors.

VW is coming out with the EV. Honda and Toyota are the only minivans worth buying, but good luck finding anything.

Kia's coming in fast and is what we went with. Everyone's promising hybrid and EV but that doesn't help when the baby arrives sooner than the vehicle can ship.

Honda's really dated now and needs a strong refresh. Toyota's king of the market and it shows they know, I wish someone would light a fire under them a bit.

How about the VW Id Buzz?

It's hard to load the kids into a render :D

Once it's available, that might be very nice.

I was supremely disappointed that the Transit full-size van is NOT available in passenger in the EV version. Might have almost stretched the budget for that.

The VW Multivan Hybrid is great! The electric range is quite small (60km I think?) compared to a full EV but still sufficient for some daily trips. And smaller batteries charges fast.

I'm quite interested in looking at this when it comes out in the US. Not sure I want a car payment but I'll take a look. It looks fun

"There is NOTHING preventing small SUVs that hold 5 people and cargo, get really good mileage, and are cheap(ish) - but they don't exist used because they don't exist new."

I have a chevy silverado with a crew cab. I put my 6 family members in it regularly. I get 20-25mpg on the highway because the engine shuts down 4 cylinders when I'm cruising. I have had hondas, toyotas, BMWs and I have to say in my opinion, american full-size trucks are the greatest cars on the road today in terms of trading-off size, efficiency, reliability, range, price (maybe not now) etc. I never thought of myself as a "truck guy" until I got one. Its a hard pill for many to swallow.

The truck market in the USA is pretty darn competitive, and people don't buy them because of "penis issues" as many seem to think. If they sold the six door version, I might go with one, but you can't load tiny kids in the front bench. https://www.kingseriespickup.com is a bit beyond me :D

They're damn usable vehicles, especially if you consider the entire market from the Maverick up to the super-duty.

Someone should do the math on the environmental aspects of one largish vehicle for a family vs a largish + smaller (e.g, when does the fuel savings of the smaller finally out run the cost of acquiring said smaller).

20-25 miles highway is absolutely appalling. Like shockingly terrible. A conventional ICE minivan would get 10-15 extra mpg with additional room for passengers, and would cost less. A reasonably sized hybrid would easily get double the mileage.

In my opinion, full size trucks are the absolute worst vehicles on the road in terms of those trade offs. You get pitiful gas mileage, a tiny cab, high prices, and the thing is absolutely massive despite most folks only generally using a tiny portion of it at a time.

IMO the only justifiable reason to drive a pickup is if you tow or carry extremely volumes of stuff on a near daily basis.

I'm not sure what ICE minivans you're thinking of, except maybe the Sienna?

> The Carnival matched its EPA combined rating during its stay with us, averaging 22 mpg. https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a38417315/2022-kia-carn...

> No matter which trim you select, the 2023 Honda Odyssey mpg will be 19 city/28 highway/22 combined.

These are not 10-15 extra. Maybe 5-10 extra. The Sienna might pull 15 extra.

I sure am glad no one needs to justify their car purchases by you. Daily use of a pickup with extreme volumes sounds like an unreasonable high bar for justification. What if it was every other day?

Yea, I also carry stuff in the bed alot of times.

I don't need extra room for passengers, I need extra room for other stuff, lumber, pipes, etc. I've had a van before, and I think the tradeoffs are better in terms of the truck. Not all folks that have trucks are soccer moms that use it to drop off the kids like you think.

> There is NOTHING preventing small SUVs that hold 5 people and cargo, get really good mileage, and are cheap(ish)

Like the RAV-4 Hybrid, Ford Escape Hybrid & Plug-in Hybrid, etc., yes.

> but they don't exist used because they don't exist new.

Except they do exist, both new and used.

Yeah and a new RAV-4 delivery date is 2-3 YEARS after you put a deposit down and the used market is in a stranglehold by the dealerships.

Most carmakers don't sell most of their new cars on the order it and it shows up model. They send to dealers and you buy them. Our local dealer has 2 on the lot right now. I live in a small city surrounded by much larger ones. We don't have some exceptional line on new Toyotas.

Have you gone in to buy one? They often show as "available" on the website but have been spoken for months/years ago.

I was in line for a Sienna for 20 months before I finally bailed.

I drive by the dealer everyday. 2 currently there. Personally, I've found dealers don't honor lines. One salesman told me that when they got the car I was looking for in stock they start calling people and the first person to physically show up AND sign the sales papers gets it. I ordered a Tesla after that experience.

Yeah, dealers are notorious for "whatever gets me my cash".

You could find those RAV4s here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12fx6j51iiA7q1Wm3keDu... (or the hybrid or prime) if you were bored.

Often the manufacturers allocate vehicles to dealers on somewhat of a random lottery, so if you need one fast you're often best traveling to the dealer that's as far away from a big city as possible.

> There is NOTHING preventing small SUVs that hold 5 people and cargo, get really good mileage, and are cheap(ish) - but they don't exist used because they don't exist new.

How much cargo you want? I think the mid-size sector favorites (CR-V, RAV4, etc.) come pretty close to this, especially if you are willing to use a cargo box.

The RAV4 looks big to me (almost minivan sized?) - but I see it's shorter than the Camry at least.

I'm thinking of something more akin to the old hatchbacks, but that may be getting close.

(Comparing the RAV4 to the Camry really shows the Camry's weaknesses, it's a bigger car with less room).

Both are IIUC substantially smaller than the typical minivan, and the recent CR-V redesign especially looks bigger than it is. Honda also has the HR-V, which is a smaller crossover thing with much stronger classic hatchback vibes; not sure if Toyota sells anything similar.

I got my Sienna about 3 years ago. 21k miles and paid $20k cash for it. It's got 40k miles now but seems like it's easily going to cruise for another 125k miles. I'll drive it until the kids are done with school so probably another 7 years. I work from home and the kids school is 3 blocks away so only real driving is to vacations.

Besides the "cool factor" it's really the perfect vehicle.

You got it at the perfect time, now they're impossible to find and cost $60k if you DO find one available.

yup, I really hit the jackpot on that. Timing wise, it cost me ~5k on my trade in but it was well worth it in the long run.

To the extent that large SUVs were a thing in the early 2000s, perhaps, but the US isn't bigger than twenty years ago, yet our cars are.

Emissions standards changed in a way that benefits larger vehicles, and the size of cars exploded.

Funnily enough, actual seating capacity maxes out in the minivan class and all the bloated SUVs out there walk that metric back.

SUVs are purely about status and, for many people I've asked, a feeling of greater security at high speed on secondary roads from being higher off the ground. It's pretty problematic that people seek out a vehicle specifically so they can falsely feel more secure driving in a less-safe manner.

Many roads in rural areas are unimproved and the extra clearance is a necessity. Towing moderately heavy stuff like boats also work better with the higher frame of an suv. So, about the same internal size plus these benefits makes it the best choice for me. Mine is 20 years old though, so I suppose I’m in negative status territory.

Near-zero chance of SUVs in my city being used for towing or on unimproved roads. We must live different places. Like the difference between a Hummer in NYC on the one hand, and in War Zone XYZ. Different contexts.

Funny enough, the modern consumer Hummers were built on Chevy Suburban chassis for a long time. I have no clue what they're using now, but for the H2 (and I think the H3?) its just an uglier suburban.

While that’s true, a relatively small portion of Americans live in an area where that’s a serious concern. Yet go to any suburb and you’ll see huge numbers of SUVs.

Once upon a time I lived in the suburbs, but on the weekend I’d head up to the north woods and need the clearance and towing ability. Hard to understand someone’s use case unless you know them and their lifestyle.

I've considered one of the heavier duty Sprinter style vans. Good towing capacity. All the cargo space you'd ever need, all the seating you'd ever need. Does it look as good as a new Dodge Ram? No, not really. But it has way more utility.

SUVs usually also have less cargo space than minivans. SUVs are a worse choice in almost all situations.

>Wonder how much of this is just due to how massive the us is

It has nothing to do with this. The US was settled, and most cities were developed before the introduction of the automobile. It's just that after WWII we bulldozed most of the country for highways and decided that cars were the only way to move around.

> most of the country

I invite you to visit N. Montana or either of the Dakotas, or that stretch of highway in Nebraska that seems to go in a straight line for several hundred miles.

Why is the Montana strawman always an example here? Almost no one lives in Montana and no one cares about vehical sizes in Montana, except _maybe_ in Bozeman proper. Let it go, no one is talking about Montana or the Dakotas.

I figured the statement "most of the country" applied to most of the country. If we mean "the most population dense parts of the country" I'd gladly concede the point.

Most of the population density of the country doesn't live in dense areas either.

> most of the country

The negative effects of vehicle size and dependence on infrastructure and society are intimately tied to where people live.

> Urban areas make up only 3 percent of the entire land area of the country but are home to more than 80 percent of the population.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america....

The issue isn’t with people owning big vehicles in rural area… it’s that we’ve built out _urban_ environments for cars instead of for people.

I live in the Dakotas, specifically in a town that was, get this, founded as a railway town. The towns and cities here are actually smaller than in other parts of the country because we have more of our prewar infrastructure.

If you need a bigger 3-row vehicle for carrying people, a minivan is by far the most reasonable choice since they tend to have good visibility and crash-compatibility with other vehicles. Low hood height also means they can have pedestrian safety features that are impossible to implement on e.g. pickups with 5+ foot hood heights.

A minivan is a lot better for society than an SUV! It's a far more efficient use of space and weight, and isn't unnecessarily lifted so your visibility is better and your vehicle is less dangerous in a pedestrian collision.

You have a practical vehicle for your situation and location. We would all be better off if a lot of urban/suburban SUV purchases were minivan purchases instead - like they were 20 years ago, and like your more recent purchase was.

People spec their cars for the biggest usage case they can imagine, not their average trip.

Cities could combat this by setting up a rent a big f off truck for 24hrs program I suspect. For that one time in the year when you have to haul some lumber.

The male ego part is a little harder to solve.

> Cities could combat this by setting up a rent a big f off truck for 24hrs program I suspect.

Doesn't uhaul already fill this niche?

Having used uhaul recently I could be convinced it is itself part of a conspiracy to get people to buy bigger personal vehicles. I can't remember dealing with another business whose contempt for their own customers is so clearly communicated through every part of the process.

I am a heavy UHaul user, and at least here, it is crucially important to know which location to use. Where I am, some locations are consistently fine, others are okay but busy, and some are busy and atrocious.

I've had much better experiences renting a truck on Turo than Uhaul

No, they mean actually having the vehicle available when you ask for it.

Lowe’s and Home Depot also offer this. It’s good enough and the reason I’m not going to buy another truck after my 2005 Ranger finally blows up.

Probably more practical to rent from your neighbors using something like Getaround or Turo.

Already available at most Home Depot stores. https://www.homedepot.com/c/truck_rental#load

$1000 for a one week camping trip. lol. I could never ever swing that. I get my money back just buying my own truck after 3 years.

Dudes in the US got a pickup but that can't do a pull up.

Part of the challenge is that everyone wants a large vehicle at the same time, i.e, for the long weekend road trip.

The average full use of a large vehicle is low, but peak usage is quite high.

You can already rent a truck any time you want from Home Depot, Lowe's, and UHaul.

But you have to travel to the location and go through all the paperwork hassle every time you do the rental, which means either going there with another adult or leaving your car unattended in a parking lot until you do what you need to do.

You can rent an SUV for when you actually need it from any major rental company, I don't see the issue (and it should be able to take the heavier things, right?!?)

> People spec their cars for the biggest usage case they can imagine, not their average trip. > For that one time in the year when you have to haul some lumber.

WFH is my secret. The only time my truck comes out of the garage is when something needs hauled. The utility benefits my whole immediate family as well, whenever they need something transported.

I find it to be the best of both worlds.

The biggest driver of SUV purchases in my social group is mothers who are keenly aware that more mass = more protection for their children in the event of a collision.

Of course, this makes things worse for the other party in the collision and leads right back to the same arms race in car size, or worse since a hollow shell can win an ego display but only a wrecking ball can win a collision. We should probably tax this, but I expect that people with big cars will kill the tax before the tax kills big cars. The eventual answer will probably lie in city centers or neighborhoods that ban or heavily disincentivize big cars within their borders.

> The biggest driver of SUV purchases in my social group is mothers who are keenly aware that more mass = more protection for their children in the event of a collision.

It sounds like car companies have successfully sold that idea to parents. So maybe the answer is to advertise how much easier it is for someone to accidentally kill your kid in an SUV.

>Cities could combat this by setting up a rent a big f off truck for 24hrs program I suspect.

Nearly every Home Depot has rentable trucks, very affordable too.

This is probably the biggest problem I was hoping for a YC-style solution for.

Motoring is absolutely subsidised - by motorists, who pay 90% of the cost before a single wheel is turned.

And Jesus, with a apologies to one Jeremy Clarkson, I have twice, debatably thrice, in my life needed to make a journey where the stakes were "this might be the last time you see them" (good news, it wasn't). No other transport option was vaguely credible. What the hell am I going to think of someone telling me "no, you can't do that"?

Cars are bigger now because emissions rules are stricter for sedans and other reasonably sized vehicles, it's a yet another cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of government regulations.

It was intended by the car companies. As usual, the regulatees understood their business much better than the regulators.

They bribe them.

They don't usually have to. They just lobby for something that sounds like it will be good for the public, but is actually good for them in the long run. They can bamboozle well-intentioned regulators because they understand their customers, their operation, and the future of the market much better than the regulators.

> unintended consequences of government regulations

Sounds more like a(n intentional) lack of government regulations to me

Moved to the UK from the US in 2017. Visited my hometown with my new family in 2022 for the first time due to the pandemic. I was blown away at how massive the trucks had become in that span for no useful reason. Europe is on the other end of the spectrum, granted, but it didn't even seem out of the ordinary to see F150s that are essentially F350s from a few model-years back with a single occupant wrapped around the double drive-through lanes of the local Chick-Fil-A and backing up traffic all the way into the main thoroughfare. It's so obvious how ruinous this is for even the basic civil engineering.

As you might expect from such a polarizing issue and thread, doing some research shows that the JD Power and Associates stat (80% of sold cars are trucks and SUVs) is extremely misleading, and probably meant to just be a headline-grabber. It includes glorified hatchbacks (that might be raised by 1-2 inches) like the Kona, CX-3, C-HR, HR-V, Crosstrek, Mercedes GLA, BMW X1, and Infiniti QX30.

Isn’t it still a problem as all these cars classified as trucks no longer have to meet car emissions and safety standards?

I'm not sure what you mean. In California, at least, they do. But different states have different laws w.r.t. emission standards.

The poster you are responding to is referring to misdesigned Obama-era CAFE efficiency standards, which created an incentive for companies to build bigger, heavier cars and classify them as light trucks or SUVs, because the customers did not like the cars that met the norms for the “car” classification. This is very much a federal issue.

They're all sold in Europe, where they're legally cars, meet car safety standards and fuel consumption is usually only slightly worse, about the amount you'd expect from raising a hatchback body 1-2 inches.

The layout also has obvious advantages for EVs, although Tesla does manage a sedan form factor. They are meaningfully different from "Jesus Christ I may have just killed a child whilst parking, because I am driving something doing a decent impersonation of the industrial equipment normally associated with an open-cast quarry".

Yeah my Kona EV falls into the comically silly class of “sub compact SUVs.” Also known as: this is a hatchback, but we know Americans won’t buy it unless we pretend it’s an SUV.

Previously I owned a proper hatchback, and the dimensions are extremely similar. The hatchback was even a little longer.

I've been living in Europe for many years. Never needed a car, and moved around cities on a bicycle, public transportation, and sometimes a cab. On a train/plane for longer distances. Safe, healthy, pleasant, loved it.

Moved to the US last fall. One can't live here without a car anywhere outside NYC (and maybe Boston/Chicago?).

The reason is not just the car-centric cities design. It's the individualism culture, the severe income inequality, and the crime levels. I'm not advocating for or against the US culture to be clear, just pointing out the slightly less obvious causes of the car use.

Do you own your home and if so, how much land do you own?

If Europe is so great, why do you suppose Americans are not emigrating there en masse?

> why do you suppose Americans are not emigrating there en masse?

One still needs to know the local language to get a job in most European countries.

It's also not specific to the US. Canada has identical car culture. And even the utopias in Europe have lots of cars. And suburbia, too! It's fascinating how perceptions are manipulated on HN to fit a narrative.

Please link to the original source:

https://mastodon.social/@davidzipper/110843841107933007

In cases like this, I'm not sure whether a social media thread or blog post about the social thread is better. Neither is great.

At the opposite end if the size spectrum, the Citroen Ami is enough for a majority of everyday needs in cities. So much space saved.

https://electrek.co/2021/05/04/citroen-ami-small-electric-ca...

so if you get in an accident in this.. you get completely crushed right?

The kids will get some nice fresh air and sunshine while riding on the roof. The older kid will get some exercise while running alongside it. I bet with some practice they can beat it in a race too. /s

Not Just bikes made an excellent video about it: https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-stupid-trucks-ar...

It is an arms race.

There is a video floating around of a pickup truck who needs to use his front camera to see a Miata in front of him

Ironically this is almost entirely due to US enviromental regulations punishing smaller more effeciant vehicles. The standards force larger gas guzzlers becuase the MPG limits are based on ft2 size of the chassis therefore you have to make them large to meet standards.

You can't find small trucks anymore due to CAFE standards as automakers upsize trucks in order to lower MPG requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy There is alot of small light duty that the US is missing compared to the rest of the world due to how the standards work.

For example a small pick up truck like an S10 would need 50+mpg but add 20 ft2 to increase it to the size of the standard american trucks you see it mpg requirement becomes 32mpg. Hence why trucks like the S10 has completely vanished. Mind you the automakers lobby for this becuase it prevent affordable truck from being sold forcing only the high profit large gas guzzler trucks as the only option.

On one hand, the local governments are deciding to not enforce road laws, so I don't blame normal folks deciding to get larger cars to feel safer.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/11/sf-police-watchdogs-set-to....

[2] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/person-shot-while-drivin...

The problem is they don’t make full-sized cars anymore (the “land yachts”). To get a comfortable car, you need to buy a truck or essentially a truck (SUV).

Why wouldn't a minivan fit this purpose?

But then you’d have to drive a minivan

And?

Lol, this is true. I drive minivan and it's incredibly convenient but I often think of getting a third car just for non kid related events.

The stigma attached to minivans.

Modern minivans are crossover SUVs with sliding doors.

How? They are just as low as when I was a kid, and do not seem any bigger.

Look up the numbers!

Best selling minivan: Chrysler Pacifica... 203 inches long, 80 inches wide, 70 inches tall The larger version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, already one of the largest crossovers?

204 inches long, 78 inches wide, 71 tall.

The weight in either case is about the same, 4400-4900lbs depending on options.

It's not that minivans have gotten bigger... it's just that they were already HUGE, to the point where even SUVs are smaller.

How many crossover SUVs come with 3rd row seats? How many of those are comfortable for a average size adult? How many are easily accessible when parked in a tight space? None of these are issues with popular minivan models.

What would constitute a full-sized, comfortable car?

As others in this subthread have indicated, the sedans on the Ford panther platform (Crown Vic, Mercury Grand Marquis and Marauder, Lincoln Town Car) are in this category. I wouldn’t think twice about asking 4 adults to ride in my Crown Vic with me. I would definitely feel a little bad doing the same in some of the mid sized sedans that have been mentioned here.

They do, they just don't sell them in the US

No, they don't. He's talking about traditional American body-on-frame sedans. The last one of those was the Ford Crown Vic, and it's been out of production for the better part of two decades.

There are not Audi A4s or Honda Civics.

https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/a1707441/who-really-benefi...

My mid-size sedan is plenty comfortable...?

You may be underestimating the size of the average American these days...

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/04news/americans.htm#:~:t....

So many big boned people these days

I fear that you (and others in this thread) may be underestimating the size of the driver/passenger seat of an American make's sedan (e.g. Ford, Chevy, etc... IOW, the same people who make these trucks.)

Certainly, having owned multiple Mazdas and Hondas, Japanese cars tend to be smaller.

It seems like being fat is uncomfortable then, rather than cars designed for human bodies.

Interior layouts have come a long ways, especially with EV designs where the geometry isn't constrained as much. As a big guy, the actual space I'm sitting in is more roomy and comfortable on many subcompacts than full sized cars used to be. Since people have gotten taller, there's also more emphasis on leg room. I remember big 1970s cars where the drivers seat just wouldn't go back far enough for me, whereas even the smallest subcompact modern cars do.

"They" don't make many non-trucks at all, at least for general sale to consumers. Perhaps rental fleets still get some?

Ford stopped their Focus, which seemed to be one of the last 'us-based' sedans. My next car will probably be some Toyota or Honda camry/civic/accord/etc.

Ford still makes the Focus and other non-truck cars, they just don’t sell them in the U.S. anymore.

Figures...

Doesn't help folks in the US who just want small/light cars. :/. Such a shame. I routinely get north of 30mpg - careful driving, and long hauls get me north of 40mpg. That's with E85. Regular 87 octane I get more (35-44ish?)

Pretty sure the Camry, Accord, etc. are still available.

And the Current Corolla is the size of yesteryear's Camry, and the Current Camry is the size of yesteryear's Avalon, and they all grow so much I don't think anyone buys avalons anymore.

Actually, Toyota replaced the Avalon with the international model Crown for some reason.

Those are mid size

Maybe if you're over 6'5" and weigh over 300 pounds. By historical and international standards, they are huge.

I think Corollas and Civics (or maybe the higher end models) fit the bill for regular sized cars that are still sold. And I think those who want the land yatchs went for SUVs already

They do, but they're not as common. I can really only think of higher end vehicles - BMW 7/i7, Audi A7/A8, Lexus LS, etc, but I'm sure I'm missing some.

Some midsized cars of today have grown to the size a full-sized car from 25 years ago. For example, a BMW 3 series is roughly the size of a 5 series from 1998 (185.9" vs 188"). A 5 series from today is the size of the 7 series from 1998 (195.8" vs 196.2").

All your examples are mid sized cars smaller than Crown Vic / Mercury Grand Marquis. I own 2009 Grand Marquis and I don't want anything smaller and less reliable which means I want to have a V8, body on frame and normal transmission (not a CVT). So nowadays my only options are large SUVs

They may not have the extra requirements you added, but they're roughly the same size. BMW 7 series is slightly larger overall.

   2009 Grand Marquis: 212″ L x 78″ W x 56″ H
   2024 BMW 7/i7: 212″ L x 77″ W x 61″ H
   2024 Audi A8: 209″ L x 77″ W x 59″ H
   2024 Lexus LS: 206″ L x 75″ W x 58″ H

The land yachts were only barely lighter than modern SUVs or trucks. The weight difference between Crown Vic and a new Ford F-150 is 2 extra passengers worth of weight. F-150 gets better gas mileage and lower emissions too.

Link should probably be replaced with the direct link: https://mastodon.social/@davidzipper/110843841107933007

I'm from the UK and don't understand the desire for massive cars, absolutely nothing seems designed for vehicles this wide. Does it not just make life a whole lot harder?

In London we still have streets and river crossings that were built for horse drawn carriages, but every other car is a giant. Almost no parking seems suitable either.

The Ford Ranger is the most comically out of place, love the colours and looks but the fact you could fit in a few sheets of 8x4 plywood whilst doing the school run can't possibly be applicable to many.

It's the sight-lines that are driving me nuts. I'm 6', and I can just barely see over the hoods of the new trucks and SUV's. When did all the automakers get together and agree to make them as stylish as a brick? I've almost gotten hit in parking lots twice this year, because I can't see around them in the car. We need to rewrite the rules on how much space a car park slot takes, because these new vehicles have to turn in their mirrors automagically just to fit in them now.

… and try crossing the street when to your left is a large SUV/truck—it's like peeking out of foxhole: you see nothing until all of a sudden 6000lbs of metal are inches from your face.

Fun fact: An M1 Abrams battle tank has better sight lines than a Chevy Silverado!

An analysis by Twitter user @FreckleEars: https://twitter.com/FreckleEars/status/1624137853872574475/p...

It's striking looking at the "commercial" vehicles—all of which have better sightlines-per-scale than their consumer relatives.

I'm going to guess that commercial use / insurers are very worried about liability in a way that Jimmy is not … so when he mows down a neighborhood toddler in his SuperDuty, it's a local "tragedy," and not seen as macro-level negligence.

I recently got a new vehicle and went to great lengths to find a smaller electric that would fit my needs. My wife argued that this was a bad move, however:

> Tall vehicles have bigger blind spots and are more likely to strike a person’s torso or head.

New vehicles have a billion sensors and cameras that eliminate blind spots and warn you aggressively if you're about to do something stupid, so it's a moot point.

> US automakers offer no alternative, and car bloat pushes buyers to upsize – if only to avoid being at a disadvantage on the road b/c others have big cars.

This is a reason why it's _better_ to have a bigger car. If you're in an accident and you're the smaller car you're going to be worse off, and since so many people are driving tanks these days you're putting yourself at a much higher risk if you don't also drive one.

And while it's true that the roads and planet are worse off, until _everyone_ around you also starts downsizing their cars, it's a matter of balancing the minuscule amount of environmental good that you as an individual driving a slightly smaller car might achieve versus the additional risk that you're putting yourself in by driving a smaller car.

Fleet economy standards are based on the footprint of the vehicle. The bigger it is the lower the MPG has to be. It’s an unintended side effect of regulation.

Isn't mpg also a factor in terms of emissions? A lot of these tanks are gonna be more thirsty. SUVs also account for much of the increase in co2 emissions although when I read that stat it didn't breakdown where in the world those SUVs are being bought (I imagine some are being bought in developing economies that are adopting an American model).

Unfortunately small trucks have pretty much disappeared in the US and partly due to government rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azI3nqrHEXM

I haven't yet seen this proposed on this thread: require larger vehicles to have passive braking and a high level of driver assist and cameras with machine vision that warns drivers of cyclists and pedestrians.

I feel like the perspective is off. Sure people are trading cars for SUVs and trucks. But does anyone else see that they don't really make full size cars anymore? Cars have been shrinking for decades. Even the "full size" cars today have cramped interiors. Perhaps if consumers had better options for cars, then they wouldn't be buying larger vehicles. Cars like my 89 Caprice were a nice size.

HN seems kind of obsessed with this topic. I wonder why it's a pertinent discussion point right now. I remember discussing the subject 20 years ago so it's not a new phenomenon. I've managed to not own an suv in that time but most of my peers seem to think they're a requirement as soon as you have a kid.

Everything is getting bigger. Not only cars and trucks, but motorcycles too! It doesn't end there - our houses are also getting bigger. Our portions of food are getting bigger. As a result of all this we're all getting bigger.

None of this is any good for us, but I don't know what needs to happen to reverse this trend.

It's hypocritical trend. We talk about reducing emissions but produce and buy cars that are 20 times or more heavier than our bodies and ratio increasing every year.

Also we talk about lack of parking places at cities and again... We produce bigger cars.

Obviously its just a game for some.

I have a big car, i have kids and its great for trips. I also pull a camper on occasion so its useful. I think for those purposes it works great. Once my kids are out of the house, i will easily down size and even possibly sell the camper.

A lot of car bloat is response to regulatory measures. Every time we add more safety features to a car, whether for drivers or those the car might collide with, they get bigger and more expensive.

I see huge size as a red herring. All of his problems have existed for 100 years, and will continue to exist for 100 more.

Problem 1: endangers others on the street

Problem 2: worsens climate change

Problem 3: shreds tires

Problem 4: destroys roadways

Problem 5: makes cars expensive

People just absolutely love buying huge cars though.

Not much to do about it unless the government is willing to get involved (and it doesn't seem like they will, at least in the US).

There's a lot of low density population in our country, and it really adds up to a lot of people given just how much land we have. One person in five lives in rural America. For a lot of people living among poor infrastructure, these kinds of cars are the most practical available for the lives they lead.

I'm not a huge car apologist, but I believe (especially on HN) there is a bias towards seeing the problem only through the lens of urban or suburban life. Meaningful solutions won't occur by leaving rural America behind or minimizing their issues.

In Turkiye stupid tax rules make pickup trucks (e.g. Toyota Hilux) cheaper than more efficient 2 row SUVs (e.g. Toyota RAV4).

I find it interesting how cars and athletic shoes have both enlarged.

Modern SUVs have become oversized and even look like the oversized basketball shoes.

What's interesting is WHY cars have become bigger.

The driver (heh) is the way the federal car mileage legislation formulas work.

Simply, the large the vehicle, the worse the gas mileage can be. This is a reason why pickup trucks are large (not just F-150s, but "small" trucks like Toyota and Nissan). The overall area that the vehicle covers is part of the equation about what the minimum gas mileage can be.

Smaller cars have to be very efficient compared to larger ones. So, cars and trucks have been drifting larger, longer, and wider in order for the automakers to cope with the demands of the CAFE standards and the market.

I feel like the increasing obesity epidemic in the US is certainly not helping with this... larger cars for larger people.

I think aerodynamics and the social importance of stature are bigger problems. When I was younger, as a reasonably tall person, often there was still good leg and headroom as a driver in boxy (or at least, less streamlined) compact or even subcompact cars. Now its rare in anything not an SUV (and even compact SUVs often aren’t great.)

Yes. I literally couldn't fit into some of the smaller cars.

I'm 201 cms, there are no comfortable small cars (~VW Golf). In most cars you can only lower the driving seat and pull back the front seats. But once I'm not in the driving seat I'm so cramped it's not fun. Literally hit the ceiling with my head.

My partner has an Opel Combo which is comfy but it's a family car, personally I'd not buy anything like that.

I knew a super tall guy who had an old VW Golf. He removed the driver's seat and was able to sit comfortably in rear seat while driving.

Well that’s obviously BS.

I drive a C-Class Benz in the US. It's tiny compared to the rest of traffic.

Sure, but you’re in the 99.9+ percentile for height. The vast majority of people do not have human height as a reason for selecting a large car.

At 6' 8" (in freedom units) you're taller than average and most "lay down" cars aren't going to work. You need something where you sit upright (like a minivan/SUV).

Nothing really prevents a "taller car" besides some worry about tip-over, but they don't really exist.

By lay down I mean if your legs are NOT bent at the knee, you're gonna have a hard time.

You are literally less than 1 percentile of the US male height population. Are you saying all cars should be built to your comfort standards?

i have a friend (two of them, randomly) who are 203 cm, and one drives a VW Jetta. But it IS a tight fit, to your point.

Cars are bad for society, huge cars just exacerbate it.

gigantic vehicles ftw, why would i want a tiny little vehicle my family can't fit in?

Now do the maths for jets, especially private ones.

Yes also bad. Two things can be at once.

Yet it seems to me (from my limited sampling) that cars are overrepresented in this kind of articles.

(only) High population density is also terrible for society. Cars offset this and provide good medium and low population density living. A good balance of people in high, medium and low density living situations are needed to be sure.

A lot of things are 'terrible for society' but are extremely convenient or desirable.

Cheap flights, high volume international shipping, social media, alcohol and other addictive substances, high sugar food.

For those of you with comfortable, white collar, first world jobs with strong opinions about large cars--you could reduce your personal carbon footprint by 10-20x by moving to India or Vietnam, etc. Are you going to do that?

Terrible logic. And it isn't "just" comfortable middle class people who are part of the problem.

The solution is collective action through government at all levels. Governments should be promoting Neighborhood electric vehicles and e-bikes. Modify regulations that promote 5000lb behemoth vehicles through knock-on effects. Tax heavy vehicles more. Tax tires more. Require safety inspections to ensure tires replacement is not neglected.

What makes you think it is up to every individual with a six months savings cushion to move across the planet to a foreign land so they can marginally impact their consumption?

>The solution is collective action through government at all levels.

Government intervention is great when it works.

There are two issues.

This gives the government too much power to make unilateral decisions.

These decisions are not always going to be the right one.

And the government is not always going to be ideologically aligned with what you believe.

>What makes you think it is up to every individual with a six months savings cushion to move across the planet to a foreign land so they can marginally impact their consumption?

You have just advocated for government action at all levels.

What makes you think the 'government' is not going to relocate people at a whim given enough power?

History is full of examples where this has happened, sometimes because of direct government action, sometimes indirect.

> You have just advocated for government action at all levels.

Got to love that central control and planning. Next up social credit scores in the US and CA.

Putting pancake syrup on waffles instead of maple? Minus 200 social credits.

Gotta love these takes that think "government regulations on massive corporations destroying the planet means I'll be monitored for my maple syrup intake".

Next you're gonna equate the 17th amendment with Prima Nocta.

This is not regulations on only companies. Posters are also proposing regulating consumer demand and market offerings.

Central planning and control is the only way to get that done.

Im just not on board with this at all. Ive driven for 35 years WITHOUT an accident, and I dont look at my phone while driving. IF EVERYONE DROVE WITHOUT A PHONE deaths by car would DRAMATICALLY DECREASE. Yet we are yelling that cars are too big, completely ignoring the design decisions made when building the cars. Even "small" cars like the BMW 3 series have grown into large cars now mainly so that they will pass crash tests. Cars are markedly safer now than in the 1960s and 1970s when cars were enormous boats, look at the 2005 impala vs 1955 impala video for a great example.

I cant drive even a small trip without someone on the road causing extra traffic because their IG or whatever is too important to ignore, but big cars are the problem... OK...

Are we really out of news cycles right now and large cars is where we landed? Can we focus the hype train on literally any other problem that has actual consequences?

Treat the disease, not the symptoms. Large cars are a symptom of overcrowded cities and unsafe, unclean transportation. Replacing them the 3x small cars isn’t going to fix anything.

counterpoint: yes it will

> Are we really out of news cycles right now and large cars is where we landed?

People with no real problems, have to make up problems. Last week it was Canadian Wildfires and the summer heat. It's cooling down now, since it is becoming fall. So let's complain about something else. :/

Large cars suck, but the USA and CA do not have a market for small cars. Unless the government forces the market down that road.

That's wildly incorrect. How do you make such a silly claim? Is this satire?

Bad public transport may drive up car usage in general, but not specifically large cars.

City density is much higher in cities outside the US but they don't have car obesity like you do.

No. Large cars are the consequence of questionable tax regimes, marketing, and Americans' psychological insecurities.

Replacing them will solve the problems listed in TFA. They are not contentious points.

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