this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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I'm in the UK, yesterday I saw some guy with an imported F150 in a local supermarket car park. Even in a parent and child space it didn't fit and he looked like an absolute knob head.
I hope someone said "You can't park there mate" to him.
Imagine that thing coming down one of the many narrow hedge lined country lanes at you.
Whoops, that was me for a while because I was too stubborn to sell it before moving to England. It mostly sat in the driveway because it was such a pain to park anywhere and wouldn't fit through the garage door. I've since shipped it back to the Southwestern US where it's average sized.
Vehicle fuel economy is regulated for all new vehicles in the US. There is a curve that as the vehicle gets bigger, the less fuel efficient it needs to be. So cars in the US will continue to get bigger because it is cheaper than making them more fuel efficient.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame
"But that would hurt businesses who rely on these vehicles to get work done!"
-idiots forgetting that no work will get done if our planet becomes uninhabitable
That was an interesting read. I'm from Europe and unfortunately the trend of bigger and bigger cars has made it's way here too. Not as much as in the US but still. It really encroaches on both space of pedestrians and cyclists when a dozen of them are parked in a narrow alley/street. Also makes it very hard to see children weaving through the gaps. I think consumer vehicles that are too big should simply be zoned out in inner cities where space is limited as is. Every year the cars grow bigger but the streets stay the same.
It's becoming an issue in Australia. Most people drive cars that are twice as big as they need to be.
I was in Tokyo last week and the majority of cars were small. The most common had 660cc engines and weighed less than 1000kg.
It is crazy and undermining years of progress towards reduced emissions and better road safety. I have no idea why these don't attract a massive tax.
I saw a person driving an OG (civilian) hummer when I was in Japan several months ago. The juxtapositions between it and a sea of kei cars was hilarious.
I'm seeing more and more large vehicles in Japan. I don't think it will become an issue as much as it is in the West due to less car dependency, small roads and the weak yen making fuel rather expensive right now, but just around Kyoto I keep seeing those stupid Mercedes G Wagon things and some kind of large Jeep all over the place. There is also a large Toyota Land Cruiser thing that I see from time to time, but it's less popular.
Smaller car SUVs are fairly common though, and just the other day a friend drove me to a barbeque in his SUV thing that he got to replace his perfectly fine and nice previous car. It seemed really unwieldy on many of the country roads he was driving, and he frequently had to pull over to the side of the road in order to pass cars coming the other way. When I asked about it, he said he got it because he often has to drive business customers around, so he mostly just thinks having a stupid big car looks classy and respectable.
Europe also got infected with the tiny peewee syndrome. Or at least Belgium has. I see Dodge Rams almost every day. For years you could buy a pickup in Belgium and pay less road tax than someone with a small hatchback. This year they finally changed the rules but the damage is done. And the pickups that were already registered continue to pay the low tax.
American greed and gluttony can be quite astonishing sometimes.
I love driving my Renault Zoe into a Costco bay. I can swing the door all the way open and not even come close the car next to me 😂
Although I have to say I do see more oversized trucks in the UK than on the mainland.
But then again, many people here would argue they don't live in Europe.
Small trucks were outlawed by the EPA.
that's a weird way of phrasing "the industry took advantage of regulatory capture to carve out a loophole for larger trucks"
If all the regulators are captured, then it seems rather redundant to state that everytime I talk about something regulators did.
...my wife's `97 ranger single-cab was a fantastic utilitarian truck; after the wheels finally fell off we were disappointed that nothing so small + simple was produced any longer, so we replaced it with a glorious mazda 2 hatchback; sadly those are gone now, too, replaced by bloated crossovers...
I know someone who works for one of the American car manufacturers who claimed they couldn’t afford to make small trucks. They are more complex because of the tighter regulations so they couldn’t make them much cheaper than big ones. Who’s going to buy a small truck when a big one coasts only a little more?
I don’t know how much of that is true, but the effects of looser regulations for bigger vehicles are pretty clear
...my wife's '97 ranger cost $10,000 new from the dealership: bare-bones base model, straight four, stick shift, rear-wheel-drive, air conditioning, and crank windows, which adjusted for inflation would be $19,000 today...by comparison, the cheapest, least-bloated ranger you can buy today starts at $33,000, although a base-model maverick can be had $25,000 if you're willing to consider a four-foot unibody a pickup truck...
...methinks that's a lot more about profit margins the manufacturers are willing to accept than what's technically feasible in today's market...
It has been explained that tow and payload capacity is mostly due to regulations by the NHTSA, but the boxy shape and lifted (by factory) of these new trucks are all american stupid machismo.