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Comment by thallium205 | Hacker News Reader

The US government has mandated that vehicles be large due to CAFE regulations.

Source? I looked into this earlier[1] and so far as I can tell, while CAFE regulations encourage cars to be large, they're far from being "mandated". Subcompacts on the market in Europe that aren't sold in the US would still comply with CAFE regulations, so the characterization is misleading at best.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38799190

The person who stated 90mpg in the linked thread is nuts. The issue isn't the regulation itself but how it's shaped the industry.

Up until very recently it was basically impossible to make a pickup truck style vehicle meet CAFE standards so they stopped making any pickups that were regulated under that standard. Instead they switched to making "trucks", unencumbered by regulations, which had to be over a certain weight (read: huge). Before CAFE, there were tons of tiny pickup trucks like the early gen rangers/tacomas. Once CAFE hit, those same trucks suddenly became huge road tanks.

That was the case for a few years, but its turning back now. It used to be anything over 7500lbs was exempted from mileage standards, plus, they could be depreciated faster on taxes if you owned a small business. that is why so many small business owners had a very, very large SUV. However the high cost of fuel has helped change that, and now the Suburban, and all 1/2 ton pickups are offered with a very small diesel engine (around 3.6L i think) that gets > 27Mpg.

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