It’s time for Americans to embrace small cars

It would be much more honest to just acknowledge the above and then state that for the good of the planet the more wasteful of us should adapt and maybe not demand dense 5-minute refuels, be more mindful planning roadtrips, work on supporting charging infra rollout, etc.

And the emissions standards (in the US) have essentially caused the market to produce all stupidly large trucks.

They've also caused other undesirable things like vehicles that are supposed to be rugged now all getting turbos, and ordinary cars that weigh more than large trucks thanks to batteries, and actual large trucks being utterly bonkers weight in ev form.

The problem isn't that there are any regulations, it's merely that they are out of alignment and producing bad results.

More weight costs more energy overhead to move whatever your actual payload is, so although electric motors may be more efficient than gas, it's still true that with batteries you have to accelerate and decelerate a lot more mass in addition to the payload (merely yourself many times). That is overhead. Regenerative braking and collecting energy on the downhill make enough difference that they are worth doing, but still don't come close to erasing what it cost to get going or go up the hill.

Weight increases road wear. A lot.

Weight is harder to stop or steer in an emergency. EVs are highly computerized and so they have excellent traction control which hides this problem in normal conditions, especially when comparing any EV to any older car with only basic or even no traction control. But put two vehicles with the same traction control including the fine conrol afforded by the electric motors, in the same situation, but one merely weighs more, and the heavier one will do worse. And "emergency situation" is really all day every day driving multiplied by millions.

Weight increases tire wear. So much so that now tire rubber in the environment is a thing.

Weight increases the wear on all mechanical parts, most apparent in brakes and engine, but in an EV those are both so much better than an ICE that the effect of weight is masked, but it's still there and actually applies to almost all parts of the vehicle. You don't see it individually but it's there worsening the overall stats on repairs and lifespans. It's like the energy overhead. It's just there making everything work harder, and that costs more of essentially every resource, not just energy but wear & tear, manufacturing, engineering, materials, and performance. "performance" doesn't mean boy racer stuff, I just mean performance of it's job. If a bearing needs to support more weight, it either needs to be made bigger, or made better, or made out of better stuff, or fail sooner, or a bit of all of those. It's a systemwide overhead like with the energy.

"Mere" weight is not free, even though it's on wheels.

Maybe it's different in Europe, dunno if it's a supply or demand thing but the US market notoriously does not offer the weaker, more fuel efficient motors. I just looked it up the other day; the Camry offers motors under 170HP for some markets but nothing under 200 in the US.

Overall, for a few thousand more, the civic is just simply a nicer car. If you went with the fit, you made significant sacrifices for those 'magic seats'

Public transport _can_ be good if you have a society that treats its poor well and highly respects and desires clean and good public transport and is willing to fund it.

During that same time period I used to commute to SF for work 1 week per month and used BART and public transit almost exclusively. Also never had that experience.

In both, I definitely SAW homeless people, some of whom were likely mentally ill, but seeing them and being harassed by them are totally different things. The latter is mainly fiction. By contrast, I’ve been harassed (at gunpoint) by middle-class “sane” drivers in a bout of road rage.

Especially when you account for the cost of time, it's way cheaper to make a grocery haul to walmart every couple weeks given we cannot just 'pop by the shop' for milk and eggs.

This is also, I believe, why processed food is so popular here. It's shelf stable for weeks at a time whereas fresh fruit and veg are much more perishable.

Four billion of the top six billion live relatively very poorly.

Out of the 7.88 billion, the bottom two billion live in such horrid conditions as to have no regular access to fresh drinking water, routine medical care or indoor toilets at home.

The majority of all people on the planet still don't have access to functional indoor toilets at home, or otherwise have sanitary toilets at home.

Nearly one billion people are still open deficating as a routine. Did you know 35-40% of Laos households have no toilets? Information provided by UNICEF.

I'm willing to bet the majority (not all) of people on HN are oblivious to the actual state of the rest of the world, specifically the bottom four to five billion or so, and just how poorly they live day to day.

So to the question, how do they manage to eat? Food insecurity is still a top concern for the bottom half of the world's population. Four billion people roughly. And for the bottom couple billion people, it's a severe day to day concern.

It's such a serious problem on an ongoing, constant basis that a single war between Ukraine and Russia, is enough to put the basic food security of billions of poor people at risk.

Now they look so grown up, pretty much like a Golf.