Okay I get it, you want a big car for that roadtrip or vacation. Understandable, I do too. But for everyday stuff? My hatchback does perfectly fine around town ... hell, it does perfectly well on most vacations and long drives too.
Something occurred to me today regarding Americans and big huge stupid cars... I was watching the NASCAR earlier and there was a throwaway comment about some driver's sponsors being "local". By local they mean 60 miles away. Now to a Brit, maybe other Europeans, 60 miles feels like anything but "local". So, I get the impression that we don't understand the sort of scale of travel there is in the US. Which kinda begins to explain this fascination with big large cars with big lazy engines. These cars fit American geography and scale. I think it also explain what oil seems that bit more important to the Americans.
See, Im pretty sure that if an American came to live in the UK (maybe else where in Europe) and tried to run a big old American car here, it would take about a week before this American when off and bought a little European type car. Equally, Im pretty sure we'd ditch a small Euro type car for a big old American thing is we went to the US.
I too think American cars are a bit silly, but I think they make sense in context. I think American cars will get smaller and more efficient, but I think they will always be designed with those long distances and scales in mind.
Our 2005 Honda CRV is approaching 120,000 miles, and both myself and my fiancée telecommute.
A colleage just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.
A colleague just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.
The idea that most people think that 100 miles is a long way is silly.
What I do like is that even with a small circle of friends it is almost guaranteed that you know someone with a large truck that can help you move large things, such as couches =).
I have a Renault Twingo (3.4 meters long), and before that I had a Maruti 800 (3.2 meters long).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twingo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maruti_800
That's what I consider a small car :) . My father had a Fiat 600 (the original one), and now has a Suzuki Maruti Alto/A-Star
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_600
The current best-selling car in Uruguay is the chinese-made Chery QQ
In the States, a Subaru Impreza is a compact car in size
Part of my family lives in Austria, and what they consider a "small car" is more along the lines of a Volkswagen Golf, which is a little under 4 meters.
According to Wikipedia itself, the Impreza wold be a "Compact" (what North Americans consider a small car)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_car
while the Golf would be a "subcompact" (what I thought Europeans considered a small car)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcompact
and the Maruti would be a "city car" (what we Uruguayans consider a small car)
Yes, the Impreza is a small car, I've seen people drive that in The Netherlands (although Subaru seems to be pretty rare there). Compare it to an Audi A6 wagon for example, plenty of those available.
I guess small is in the eye of the beholder, my car isn't much bigger than my grandpa's Opel Astra for example, and that is considered a small car in The Netherlands.
Given how little I currently commute (2x/week), I am actually considering trading in my diesel VW for an old vanagon -- to facilitate some camping trips and the like. It will mean less milage efficiency, but 2x/week commuting won't take a huge hit.
I would daresay it's more cultural than geographical, or at least it's an isolated case. Distances here in Australia are even larger, yet SUVs/4WDs don't outpace the small-medium car sector in year-over-year growth.
My 8.5 year old car has 31,000 miles on it. I haven't had a job since 2007 where I have to drive to work. My daily commute now is a 1.5 mile round trip walk. I hate traffic and don't understand other Americans who are fine with driving long distances on a daily basis.
But this is exactly why gas guzzling cars are idiotic.
In the US, everyone's driveway is more like something approaching a major civil engineering undertaking, being the size of a tennis court, consuming several cubic metres of concrete, steel reinforcing, etc.
I can't believe how big U.S. houses are. A quick Googling shows they're much larger than the average house in my country:
Average House Size By Country Australia - 214.6 sq m (2310 sq ft), 2.56 people per household (pph) USA - 201.5 (2170), 2.6 pph New Zealand - 196.2 (2112), 2.6 pph Canada - 181 (1950), 2.5 pph Japan - 132 (1420), this year the pph in Tokyo dropped below 2 for the first time (1.99) UK - 76 (818), 2.1 pph
and those are averages, I'm sure median shows a different picture (small flats for Europe and urban Latin America, large houses for suburban U.S. and Australia).
The median for a flat here in Montevideo is about 60 square meters (the one I rent is 55 square meters, and most new ones are even smaller), and the median house is about 100 square meters (and forget about the humungous driveways and stuff the U.S. suburban house has).
http://notbuyinganything.blogspot.com/2012/03/average-house-...
Your hatchback is perfectly fine around town, but it can't tow a boat, and most people don't like to have multiple cars.
So, what winds up happening is people buy the most car they think they will need. It's totally overkill driving to work, and plenty of people never actually tow that boat, but this is why it happens.
Europeans would do the exact same thing, I figure, if they lived in an economic climate with similar gas prices and car taxes and such. With the possible exception of people living in old cities whose roads are just too small.
It's more the rule than the exception. European car makers have a specific car category named "City cars", big enough to host 4 to 5 people but as small as possible to be easy to park etc.
Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful. This is why he don't understand.
American cities are modern and built for cars, most big european cities have been built for walkers and horses, so now we got a tons of oneway streets and a general lack of space to park cars.
This is a very important distinction! What a European considers a huge SUV is a small town car in the US. At least judging from what I've seen on my visits.
Some of those cars are just uncomfortably big.
Parking on main street, for example, is nigh impossible. Parts of it aren't wide enough for many cars to go past one another while the streetside parking is in use (and it always is, the town has no parking since... who needed parking in 1800?). And then there is a big state university in town, so you end up getting delivery trucks to the campus all the time and some drivers don't have the experience to know not to try taking an 18 wheeler down main street.
It probably could and where the hell would I even put a boat. Silly americans :D
This "aspirational" angle to buying big cars actually explains a lot, like a fat kid drinking Gatorade or out of shape guys wearing tracksuits to the mall, "just in case". After all, if you're driving a big car, no-one will be able to definitively say you don't own a boat..
Granted if, you want to pull a 22' boat that's another story. But, for lake fishing it's fine.
Second, there are more issues than power. Towing 1500lbs behind a Corolla puts a lot of strain on the car that it wasn't particularly meant to handle on anything other than an occasional basis, especially with things like automatic transmissions. Also very important, a Corolla is 2700lbs. 1500lbs of trailer starts to get sketchy, and the trailer can start yanking around the tow vehicle.
Edit: yes, you are right, lake fishing in a rowboat, you don't need a dedicated tow vehicle. Thing is, people dream they will get that 22' boat in a few years, so they buy the F-650 or whatever.
Anyway, sure there are limits, but a nice 14 foot boat at 1,000lb plus 500lb for the trailer is still a decent boat IMO.
While the engine can handle it, that's generally not the issue with towing anymore. Like you said, todays engines are powerful. It's the rest of the car that needs to be beefed up for towing. Particularly the transmission and breaks.
My 4-runner had plenty of power to tow my boat, but over time the wear and tear on the rest of the vehicle would destroy a perfectly good car. I now have a Tundra that is build to pull the load. FYI, my boat ready to fish plus trailer is ~7k pounds.
To the original poster wondering why people want such big cars. Personally I would love a smaller car, but I enjoy my boat more :)
For the "everyday" commute, I'm proudly on the bus and noticing as of late that this is getting more and more common with younger age groups who want to live in urban areas, where mass transit is most convenient. I would bet this trend continues for the next few decades in the United States.
[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/d...
- My wife wants to get a boat as well as we were gifted jet skis by her family.
- I anticipate moving at least three times over the next 10 years (the lifetime I give to the car barring any accidents) which the pickup will be great to be able to move things as well as being able to hookup a UHaul and go.
The biggest plus for me though is that I'm 6' 3" and 250lb and don't necessarily fit into some of the cars that are economical when it comes to fuel. My previous car (Toyota Corolla) actually would hurt my knees when driving more than 30 minutes because I had to angle my legs in a weird position in order to drive.
"According to Polk's data, the large mainstream sedan segment has plunged from a 5.8-percent share of the US car market in 2008 to just 3.5 percent in 2012. That sales drop is enough to put this most American of car bodystyles behind the minivan segment, a market whose own sales slide has been comparatively well documented."
http://www.autoblog.com/2013/03/24/large-car-market-witherin...
It's OK for other people to have a bit of fun. Really, it is.