Does anyone make a small car that safely seats 6 people with adequate storage space for doing a week worth of grocery shopping or luggage for a weekend trip?
The explosion in vehicle size over the last 10 years in U.S is off-the-scale absurd, while per-capita fatal crashes have only gone UP over the same period[1].
1. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...
EDIT: You wouldn't believe how many GMC Yukons I see in my wealthy SF suburb that are used to shuffle 8 year-olds from school to soccer practice. For the uninitiated: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/ford-focus-2013-5-d...
Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
> So if they don’t need a larger car they shouldn’t have them?
That's nowhere in what I said or in the OP. The OP did talk about pulling "policy levers" to change incentives.
> Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
That's basically what the OP is all about.
This is what we’re afraid of. Those policies will cause immense harm and suffering to people who cannot simply buy the small EVs that policy makers want us to buy. The unintended consequences would be devastating to many.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183657/average-size-of-a...
Doing a grocery shop with the entire family of 6 sounds stressful btw :)
I wonder how 6 billion other people manage to eat.
https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/what-is-rural
"Micro area (urban core of 10,000-49,9999 people)"
I apparently live in a rural area, Helena, MT. The state capital by the way.
You can look up if you are the 20% Rural or 80% Urban here: https://data.hrsa.gov/tools/rural-health
I say all this because I walk to the grocery store and bike to work. In a rural area no less!
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.
No, but how do they do that without a $50,000 SUV? /s
These are things many people need to do multiple times a year.
If someone made something in-between, that doesn't need to be large overall but at least large enough in the space for the driver to acknowledge we're not all midgets, I'd gladly buy that. It's the same way with airline seating. Granting I'm a little bit of a special case because I'm missing two discs and have ten screws in my spine, but I find myself only flying first class not because I'm wealthy but because if I fly economy, I won't be able to stand up straight for three hours after the flight lands. If they sold something in-between, like say, economy seats as they existed 30 years ago, I'd gladly use that, too.
It is indeed possible - just shop or pack more efficiently :).
Now they look so grown up, pretty much like a Golf.
The new Polo (2018-) is now the size the Golf 5/6 was circa 2009 and thus is priced accordingly.
Their solution for our car market is to still produce the 2017 model and rebrand it as the Polo Vivo.
We have an old Mazda 5 micro-van that hits our requirements, but they no longer sell that in North America. So we either have to get something considerably larger or compromise.