[saiya-jin]

Car manufacturers are not cargo-culting Apple as much as Tesla. People in industry saw touch screen and went meh, but then people voted with wallets and opinions (Tesla has one big touchscreen, so modern, so much wow, lightyears ahead of everybody else! - heard it gazillion times in the past, no matter how much I tried explain to folks how utterly shitty and cheap that approach is in cars).

In similar way as current/recent SUV cargo-culting. For premium performance manufacturers like Porsche or BMW it didn't make sense, why have bulky car with shitty driving characteristics, slower, much higher roll risk, much higher center of gravity, much smaller inside space than usual family wagons, that costs more to run and buy it from premium brands... thats what you have Fiat Peugeot etc for. Especially for people who drive on paved roads 99/100% of the time, ie typical soccer moms.

I know that inexperienced drivers enjoy higher seating position and feel safer, but I would suggest taking some driving lessons if thats a problem for a given driver, much better results and resulting real safety.

Yet Cayenne and X5 and whatnot sold like hot cakes for premium money because footballers and other celebrities bought them, so eventually every manufacturer jumped on that bandwagon, screw any logic if people buy it. The more performance the brand, the longer it took them to pick this trend up, and thus Ferrari is the last (from what I gathered, not following this topic seriously). And so folks today buy crossovers and god knows what other names are in vogue these days, which are tiny short cars with high ground clearance. To drive in cities.

[pandaman]

Even an experienced driver can appreciate not having the view completely obstructed by the clouds of droplets from the wheels of other cars in a rain and no amount of driving lessons can make one see through the water. On top of better visibility in all weather conditions, SUV offer easier loading/unloading, easier access for setting up children in the child seats and, even though not an off-road vehicle, still much better in the adverse weather (snow, floods) because of high clearance. If you're are not racing the only reason to choose a wagon is the few more cubic feet of room are more important to you than anything above. This is why SUVs displaced wagons IMHO, I doubt people buy so many RAV4s and CR-Vs in the US just because of some footballers who bought Uruses.

[grog454]

> Even an experienced driver can appreciate not having the view completely obstructed by...

Couldn't agree more. I have ~50 hours of seat time driving a high performance mid engine car on a track but in any amount of traffic I prefer my truck. Better visibility, and (imo) better safety due to weight.

It's rarely brought up but even an elementary understanding of physics makes it obvious that less massive things are more fragile and susceptible to deformation than more massive things, all else being equal. Sadly that last point involves a zero sum game: the safer a heavier vehicle is to its occupant the more dangerous it is to others. Even more sadly its a game many people are forced to play.

[pandaman]

One needs to be careful when analyzing safety. NHSTA and similar orgs abroad have conditioned people to only think of safety as the chances of survival in a collision but if you were to look at the actual traffic fatalities [1] you could easily find that some cars with higher fatality stats have also a higher "safety star" rating and vice versa. Likewise, some heavy trucks score higher fatalities than lighter cars. It might be that some cars are better at avoiding collisions than the others.

1. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

[illiac786]

>better safety

Worse safety for everyone but the driver I would argue. Same for most heavier cars, such as SUVs.