Cheaper car options in this country will be nice, and I say this as a certified car hater who's yet to own one despite pushing 40.
Its a dependency that I have to think almost all countries/businesses are evaluating. How do you do business and set up long term supply chains in a country can't trust that the economic policy of today exists in 3 months, they are actively trying to undermine their currency and the system of law is under heavy pressure to the point of failure.
It is tough to be supportive of the United States under this administration or that the future state of the US will be more sound. Having their formally closest trade partner looking over to China for trade is a massive signal.
The trade off is the market is large and strong financial (availability of capital) foundation - but I fear thats changing.
Rank and file GOP got rattled with that one.
But in that niche I can really see cheap EVs taking off. I know several people who live in Toronto whose cars have never been more than ~80 KM from home, and rarely been over 100 KM/h. That's a perfect EV user.
And a huge plus would be to get rid of the monster American trucks & SUVs that take four parking spots and two lanes at a time...
No, trucks are useful, but a massive modern pickup truck is much less useful in the urban context than a standard pickup truck from 30 years ago. The bed size has remained the same, the outside envelope of the vehicle has ballooned massively.
> You should get better transit so less people have cars.
Toronto has a very high (for north america) transit mode share
Toronto has good transit for North America, but there are plenty of ways to improve it.
Yeah, so can I - doesn't mean much. The streetcar is not where TTC excels in ridership, the subway and buses are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
It provides a deep-dive video into the history of how we got to the situation we're in today with American cars exploding in size. It actually has its origins in Obama-era legislation for emissions standards that made an exception for "light trucks". SUVs are legally classified as light trucks so the industry has massively pushed these tanks onto the consumer promising more safety.
It has led to a dramatic decrease in public safety and pedestrian deaths that is unique to the US. One contributor to these deaths is literally parents running over their own children in their own driveways. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT IS HAPPENING IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.
The video goes over the visibility issues with these trucks, how our safety regulations fail to account for them (light trucks only need to be tested in collision with other light trucks) and also covers how modern trucks have the same carrying capacity as pickup trucks from 30 years ago (the main thing that's increased is the hull and cabin size) while being harder to use for actual work since the bed is higher offer the ground
Market distortions favoring heavy trucks include:
* The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), enacted in Congress in 1975 under the Ford administration in reaction to the Arab oil embargo, with its tiered structure on passenger vehicles vs. trucks.
* The "Chicken Tax", tariffs on light trucks enacted by Lyndon Johnson as a reaction to French / West German tariffs on chickens. While much of this trade war was repealed, the light truck tariff never was.
* Section 179 tax deductions, which are biased in favor of heavy vehicles. As I understand it, this particular deduction was inserted into the tax code via the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 under Reagan, for the purpose of aiding small businesses that might rely on such.
So it's been, from my perspective, a fairly non-partisan desire from all of US politics, with protectionism as perhaps part of the goal, but perhaps due to other goals that had unintended effects.
Personally, I think that government regulations can only explain so much. Even with the market distortions, trucks tend to be rather expensive compared to smaller vehicles sedans, and that's before factoring in the bad gas mileage. My presumption is that America's vastly more rural landscape contributes just as much to the preference for trucks as government policy.
I do surmise from articles, though, that the above US policies have impacted the ability for lighter pickup trucks to entering the market. I suspect that some smaller pickups, like the small "kei trucks" that seem to have a bit of a following in the US even with all the regulatory hassle, would be much more present if a lot of these protections were removed.
According to this study, most F-150s on the road are not used for work
https://www.powernationtv.com/post/most-pickup-truck-owners-...
Also, somehow other countries in the rest of the world seem to get by just fine without these massive trucks.
Most professional builders drive big Savannah vans, which can not only carry full sheets of plywood, but also keep them dry. Plus, the front blindspot is less than one meter.
I don't disagree about transit though.
This is why the folks I know personally who are actually in the position to need to haul dimensional for work all seem to drive white pickup trucks that they bought from resales of leased fleets.
The _useless_ short bed trucks are driven mostly by young men who were too eager to pile on the personal debt in a show of vanity.
I literally can't buy any subcompact car these days in USA or Canada, since Spark (petrol) was discontinued in 2022, Prius C (subcompact hybrid) discontinued, and Bolt EV (bigger but still small) discontinued and will be replaced with something even bigger.
Looking forward to inexpensive BYD Seagulls flooding Canada and hopefully encouraging dealers to bring in existing subcompacts that they sell everywhere else in the world.
And even then, he didn't lead with "China is!" but wandered his way into offering the assessment.
The context makes his comment on this seem less nakedly provocative (not that it'll matter either way - the headline will be the headline, and the Trump admin will use it however they see fit as usual).