I live in Australia, like America, it's a really big place that doesn't have the European benefit of having the roman empire putting down footpaths everywhere for a thousand years.
Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
I also live in Australia, I'm one of the minority that doesn't live in an urban sprawl ala Brisbane | Sydney | Melbourne | Adelaide | Perth like the overwhelming majority of the Australian population.
"It's a really big place" isn't the reason for many having cars in Australia, it's largely due to cities that sprawl beyond the reach and capacity of public transport, it's due to a love of long weekend trips outside cities, etc.
Smaller cars and better use of suburban space would go a long way to reducing Australian personal use of fossil fuels .. which is a relativel small part of the larger use of fossil fuels here.
That's a more understandable way of living: not requiring a car for most of the time, share one if needed, demand better public transit infrastructure to not depend on a car for most of your day-to-day trips.
As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency.
Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient.
Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0].
It's not so easy to go out in nature and breath when every piece of land is changed to a gigantic concrete and steel wasteland just so people can use 2-3 ton 2x5 metres boxes to get somewhere while somewhere worth getting to gets farer and farer away from where they live.
The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the Tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there... That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it... You just can’t imagine how upset I was.
Car ownership is objectively, measurably bad. Are you pretending it's not?
https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/03/17/suburbs-drive-sacra...