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Comment by Axsuul | Hacker News Reader

The Nissan Leaf is not that practical. There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US.

> There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US

Not practicality for sure! The trunks of at least mid-sized SUVs are small and the trunks of mid-sized estate wagons are quite large. SUVs have a raised vehicle floor, which is terrible for driving dynamics, removes interior space, and adds air resistance.

SUVs are staggeringly stupid vehicles, but fashionable. Personally, I like some fashions, and others I ignore and avoid as hard as I can - SUVs are firmly in the latter category.

One funny side effect of pickups and SUVs being sold for suburbanite egos is that some actual tradespeople and farmers have started importing tiny Japanese kei trucks because the cargo volumes are the same or higher than a modern American vehicle.

Most people in the US live in suburbs, which means it's more efficient to carry larger loads due to larger distances. For example, bigger grocery trips since the grocery store is farther away. Bigger home sizes in the suburbs also enable larger families.

But you can do that with a more traditional car. A coupe can have a plenty of space.

And that worked fine for decades (well, as long as your definition of fine includes traffic jams) using regular cars which cost and polluted considerably less. SUVs are bulky but as anyone who’s ever packed one knows they don’t have more usable cargo space unless you’re stacking stuff up to the ceiling since most of the volume is directed vertically to make them look tougher.

I notice this whenever we go to IKEA or Costco where our sub-$30k Subaru is loaded faster and with less hassle than vehicles costing twice as much.

Even a small car can easily carry 4 people and a LOT of groceries. A LOT.

I can easily carry a week's worth of groceries (21 meals plus snacks) for my family of five in my old sedan. Even if the trunk is half full of junk just throw grocery bags in the back seat.

I even managed to fit enough lumber for three 4' by 10' by 6" raised garden beds in there, trunk to sticking out the front window. That was a little hairy though.

By far the biggest issue is fitting 3 kids in back now that they are bigger, especially if one or more are grouchy. I always take the bigger car if more than 4 people are traveling.

Yea it's possible to do it with a coupe/sedan but things are just easier and more situationally capable with a bigger car.

That's what estate cars / station wagons are for.

It is staggering. I live in the UK and we have been moving in that direction. We have lots of small city style cars. But they are never big enough to easily hold a newborn baby with its stroller (ironic when you consider how tiny babies are). So parents tend to get these small SUV's and it is seen as the natural upgrade. I guess this happens again when the family grows and you start doing more DIY.

We are all hoodwinked into believing that space in a car is unusual and needs a special kind of car. When actually a well designed small car or coupe can have plenty of space. And adding an extra couple of foot to the size of the boot probably has minimal effect on the manufacturing cost. But that would break the product skews that car companies want to push.

I thought we already understood that US large car sales was the result of the individualist culture and perceived improvements in safety from being in a heavier vehicle during a collision

A while ago I read somewhere that it was because for a long time (American) trucks were technically nit cars. And manufacturers could save money on a bunch of safety things.

Which resulted in more money for marketing.

It’s not any single factor but a lot of it is due to industry-friendly policies which made SUVs and trucks artificially cheap:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...

It’s important to remember that Japanese car manufacturers weird absolutely slaughtering U.S. companies in the 80s and 90s by making cheaper, better quality, more efficient vehicles. Detroit has a lot of political weight, however, and when they started pushing far more profitable SUVs as the ideal daily driver, nobody in Congress was going to get in the way by suggesting policies intended to help tradespeople should be modified.

That campaign in the 90s made them popular enough to cancel out decades of fuel economy and safety improvements, and effectively started an arms race where people who never go off-road started to think that they needed to pay more for one, too, because otherwise they’d be at a fatal mismatch in a crash.

EVs are generally very heavy compared to similarly sized vehicles.

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