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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Note to American readers:

The most popular "SUVs" in Britain are small crossovers that are compact or subcompact cars by American standards. The Ford Puma is currently the best-selling car in the UK and while it's marketed as an SUV, it's based on the same platform as the Ford Fiesta. It has big wheels and an SUV silhouette, but the base model has a 1 litre engine with a mild hybrid system and 4 wheel drive isn't even an option.

There's a strong marketing trend towards taller cars with a more imposing road presence, but most of these cars aren't actually very big. The psychology is quite interesting - auto makers are trying to make small cars look tough and rugged without actually making them wider, heavier, less efficient or more expensive; this has in turn led to a lot of people feeling intimidated by cars that are basically just compacts in cosplay.

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As a london, uk resident, I recently got a hatchback-sized lexus hybrid "SUV", the ux 250h. Perfect for the place, possible to go to a motorway, high mpg, reliability. My kid is just fine in the back sit, I can see a second one fitting just fine.

my American friend laughed at me, saying something like "a family needs at least a range rover, you can afford one".

So it's not about reason, not about making a balanced choice or something. No, in many cases it's about "get it if you can".

Hey tell your friend I’m American with two kids and I don’t yet have my Range Rover. Can they throw me a few bucks? :)

How do you deal with the small boot space? Have you taken off the boot's floor and the polystyrene foam underneath it?

Dunno, we never felt the need to damage the car to get some more space :-) It just doesn't make sense to use a jumbo jet to get around Kent.

No damage needed, there's like 2x the boot space if you remove the floor plate that has the spare wheel space under it with some polystyrene filling to hold the tools in place. You can put them back again later. Maybe yours has the battery there? We have the petrol only model. I always thought the boot space was too small, as we always seem to fill it up.

Oh and it's not a SUV, it's a crossover. A pretty low one as well, it's quite confortable on the highway.

Yes, we own a hybrid so some of that space is eaten by a battery. And the rest of it is taken by all the stuff we always keep around the car.

And yeah, it's kind of hard to classify UXs. Wiki says it's a "subcompact crossover suv" so go figure. Don't really care, for me it's just a nice reasonably sized car.

I still can’t get over the Puma. They seem to have swindled the large customer base of the Fiesta in to spending over £5,000 more for more or less the same car. They’ve stopped production of the Fiesta this year.

The "slightly tall hatchback" form factor is also the best form factor for electrification. A Fiesta doesn't have a lot of underfloor real estate.

Although the industry isn't so dishonest as to pretend that "consumers are more resistant to £30,000 hatchbacks than they are £30,000 'SUVs'" isn't a factor.

Yes, it's a real bugbear describing these as if they're the same as an F-150. Although I've seen more of those as well.

But things like Land Rover models are popular, and are SUV sized no?

Larger SUVs do exist on the UK market, but they really aren't very popular because they're very inconvenient on our narrow roads and prohibitively expensive for most people. To my knowledge, the biggest passenger cars on the UK market are the Range Rover and the Hyundai Santa Fe, which I believe would be classed as mid-size SUVs on the US market. If you were to import something like an Escalade or a Navigator, you'd attract an awful lot of attention but you'd struggle to park it anywhere.

F150s and the like are getting increasingly popular.

When I see one actually carrying something in the back I'll let you know.

Yeah not even the handymen use those, they prefer a van

It's cheaper, easier to park and also due to the weather I'd say

The local painter/decorator here has a fleet of L200s, some with open beds, some with covered 'van' beds. Every road he or his employees park on is instantly blocked.

It's irritating af.

There are a grand total of 192 Ford F150s currently registered in the UK, a substantial proportion of which aren't actually registered for road use. Mid-size pickups like the Ford Ranger, the Volkswagen Amarok and the Mistubishi L200 are significantly more common; these vehicles stand out as huge in a UK context, but aren't particularly big by American standards.

Seeing those things and knowing the person bought an objectively worse version of a decent car causes me pain every single time.

But the only thing we can do about that is educate people.

> But the only thing we can do about that is educate people

For that you'd first need to stop the auto industry to actively miseducate them through ads.

Well they've stopped making the fiesta now, so there isn't a car version to actually buy.

That's sad, the fiesta is a fun car to drive. Also very economical, my diesel one uses 4.5l/100km consistently without paying much attention to it.

That bring me to another point: Fuel economy ratings. My car is rated at 3.3l of average consumption. That's possible when hypermiling at night, but BS when considering traffic.

I reckon SUVs are even worse than my 50% increase over the rating because their weight makes engine braking less effective in traffic and aerodynamics tend to be less of a problem at the hypermiling speeds they do during the tests than at real world speeds.

Honda’s CR-V is one of the most popular SUVs in the US. It’s an all-wheel drive Civic wagon.

They also seem to have adjusted the Fiesta. I've had one as a rental car and felt like sitting on an elevated platform - which I didn't like. I thought: "So the Fiesta, of all models, is now a kind of SUV lite?!".

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