Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com