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Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

economist.com

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Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#211

Post by PaulHoule »

gruez wrote: post #199
PaulHoule wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be the opposite. Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America. Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular. For instance I think electric vehicle adoption is stalled because there aren’t many people who can affo…

>Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America. >Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular. Consumers may claim they care about rising costs, but the fact that more expensive SUVs are outselling sedans makes me think…

Try buying a sedan. Most of them have been discontinued by the manufacturer as of 2024 or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t have power windows or they’ll have some excuse why they can’t sell you one.

They did it to my dad when he tried to buy a small car in he 1970s and it was a policy of American car dealers except around a short period after he 2008 financial crisis. What is relatively new is that Japanese car dealers started doing the same after the 2008 crisis abated.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#212

Post by energy123 »

veggieWHITES wrote: post #98
kpmcc wrote: post #21

As impractical as it may be, I think the only answer is to limit the size of vehicles, either through taxation or an outright ban. Larger vehicles are worse for pretty much everything and many of the costs are externalized.

A tax would make it even more dystopian. Imagine the rich paying for the right to murder people on the road.

I don't care about your ideology. Tax works as a solution to deter behavior you don't want and raise revenue which can be spent on good things that make society function.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#213

Post by [deleted] »

michaelt wrote: post #37
morkalork wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subaru Impreza and Crosstrek are a good example of that. Same engine, same electronics, same everything except a slightly differently shaped shell on the outside. Even the interior volume is practically the same!

Isn't the Impreza a famous rally car? With a spoiler and an air scoop on the hood? I can think of worse things for a crossover to share an engine with.

[deleted]

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#214

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

blibble wrote: post #193
erikaww wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car makers would adjust but road freight would fight this tooth and nail

the freight has more axles, and you could set the baseline weight by vehicle class but maybe this would just incentivise the sort of person that buys an F150 to drive to the shops to simply to upgrade to a big rig (for the tax saving?!)

Segregating regulations by vehicle class is how the CAFE laws failed. Make your vehicle a “light truck” and now you can give it much worse mileage.

No, you just have to charge in proportion to damage done and let the economics work out how they will.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#215

Post by swarnie »

bradley13 wrote: post #95

Easy fix: If you want less of something, tax it. The race to ever bigger vehicles has many costs, from road wear to (now we know) human lives. You pay an annual registration fee for your vehicle. Make that fee go up dramatically for heavier vehicles. If you pay, say, $100 for a car under a ton, make it $1k for up to two tons, $10k for 3 tons, etc..

Cool, do what lots of places do and tax based on emissions.

It wont penalise EVs while also encouraging people and makers to produce less ridiculous cars. You dont need a 5.3l V8 which does 16 miles to the Gallon to sit in freeway traffic.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#216

Post by nradov »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #183
xwall wrote: post #15

Key Ideas: Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. The heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save: Analysis of crash data shows that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost…

What about the internal organs of people in big cars? IIRC, a long time ago, after a serious collision, paramedics were at first puzzled as to why the seemingly unharmed person behind the wheel was dead. Later it turned out that their internal organs had been ripped out of their arteries because big cars have/have much worse impact zones than smaller cars.

You have that story confused or backwards. Occasionally vehicle crash victims will suffer such internal injuries, mainly the elderly who already have weak blood vessels. But big cars don't have worse crumple zones, rather the opposite.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#217

Post by PaulHoule »

jeffbee wrote: post #202
dnadler wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center, if they even have a town center at all. Cycling simply isn’t viable to large swaths of the US. There isn’t an easy answer to this either, given that you’d probably need to tear down entire neighborhoods and rebuild a more dense town

> People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center It is not the responsibility of the citizens of the central city to accommodate suburban drivers.

In that case all the retail will go out to the suburbs and they’ll lose the jobs and have to drive out to the suburbs to go shopping. Or just lose the jobs to AMZN warehouses even further away.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#218

Post by skhunted »

sarchertech wrote: post #177
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but there are plenty of roads that don't see much, if any, traffic of that type.

There are very very few paved roads where the largest vehicles on them are large SUVs. I live on a mountain near a road where commercial vehicles are banned and we still get a few large commercial vehicles per day. One of the roads up the mountain has switchbacks near the top that are so tight that nothing longer than 18 feet is allowed up, but at least 2x a week a box truck gets stuck. Heavy cars have many negative…

There are vehicles that do more damage to roads than large pickup trucks. It's still the case that large pickup trucks do more damage to the road than small cars. Owners of pickup trucks are being subsidized by pedestrians and small car owners. They do not pay enough for the privilege of driving their vehicles in relation to the damage they cause.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#219

Post by Bloating »

imglorp wrote: post #36
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I hate sounding like a broken record but my belief is that car makers are more excited about XXXXL cars in American than car buyers are. The media is consistently complicit in covering this up, sounding like the brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate It's not to say that we don't like big cars because we do, but walk into a car dealership looking for a small car and they will tell you they are out of stock…

Some of us actively hate big cars for daily use and are angered at the "SUV" (usually neither sport nor utility) unithink forced on us, and are frustrated how hard it is to find anything different. I want basically an electric Miata for around town, can't get one. I also want an actual utility vehicle with a long, solid, roof rack to haul a canoe or sheet of plywood. SUV roof racks are usually token, if at all. A pla…

They have meds to help with multiple personalities

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#220

Post by Bloating »

wtetzner wrote: post #162
globular-toast wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment shows how bad car culture is. You think you're the enlightened one, but you want an electric sports car for getting "around town"? People should be walking or cycling around town. Cars are actively harmful to towns. Cars have led to generations of people who don't realise they are capable of walking further than a few steps between car and building. A kind of learned helplessness. When you step outside o…

This us making some pretty big assumptions about what the town in question looks like.

its all like San Francisco
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