[ethagnawl]

I'm not sure why you're being down voted for suggesting a practical and fact based solution. The USA is, regrettably, not making a pivot towards public transportation anytime in the near future. So, lighter cars are one way to address this issue.

You didn't expound upon your point about the unintended consequences of CAFE standards but they're very real. Instead of making smaller and more efficient sedans per the guidelines, car makers opted start making all of their vehicles "light trucks" -- 80%+ of new vehicles are SUVs or bubbly looking "crossovers" -- which are not subject to the same demanding standards. Small sedans also cost less and would require ongoing R&D to continue to meet the CAFE standards. The end result, as this thread is interested, is heavier vehicles with bigger tires and more plastic in the environment and our brains.

[linotype]

Los Angeles would be very difficult to transition at this point, it’s just too low density. It was better 100 years ago than it is now.

[lmm]

Los Angeles is one of few US cities that is managing to build at least some new transit lines. Increasing density in desirable cities is actually pretty easy, all you have to is make it legal (by-right zoning) and then the market will do the immensely productive and profitable thing.

[peterbecich]

I find it interesting that at a certain time in Los Angeles, a segment of society could afford a craftsman cottage house, but not afford an automobile. This was the prime era of the Pacific Electric streetcar suburb, say around 1890-1920. Today, obviously, anyone who can afford a house anywhere in the country can afford an automobile.

The end of the Pacific Electric system was not a conspiracy theory by tire companies or anything like that; the price of the cars dropped and that's what consumers preferred, i.m.o.

[lenerdenator]

Or Kansas City. Or St. Louis. Or Detroit. Or Chicago, even.

Pretty much any major American city is less dense than it was 100 years ago. It was cheaper to build out than it was to build up.

[wongarsu]

From an infrastructure perspective building out instead of up is incredibly expensive. Not just transport but also water, sewage, electricity and internet.

[lenerdenator]

I should specify: it's more expensive for the developers and their home-buying customers to build up instead of out.

All of that stuff you listed comes from tax dollars, and people ultimately care less about that than what's coming out of their pockets for a home purchase. Well, until it's unsustainable, anyways.

[tstrimple]

Yes exactly. Building is cheap in the US relatively speaking. There are tons of grants and government money to help move things along. Those avenues don't really exist for maintaining things that were built with grants and outside funds. So we see TONS of expansion followed up with almost no maintenance and suburbs and less populated places literally cannot afford to maintain the services that they utilize. The burden is almost entirely shifted onto renters in urban areas instead.

In this country we have this ideal of a rugged individualist whose out there living off the land and making his own way. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that he's dependent on 10x as many miles of roads as his urban counterpart. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that providing him with internet access on the state's dollar costs orders of magnitude more than someone living in a sustainable location. Same with delivery costs and literally every other thing this person consumes. They get to pretend to be a self-reliant individualist while leaching off of the tax dollars of urban residents who cost a fraction of the amount to support.

[robertlagrant]

> Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that providing him with internet access on the state's dollar costs orders of magnitude more than someone living in a sustainable location

Thankfully we have Starlink to replace pork consumption with actual services.

[newsclues]

Fires can solve that.

[borski]

You’re right, but the thing that leads us to lighter EVs is solid state batteries.

[cosmic_cheese]

Yeah, I’d expect EVs to get lighter over time as technology progresses. Car bloat is a much bigger problem. Totally insane that little practical city cars like the Honda Fit have gone practically extinct in the US in favor of bigger, heavier cars that don’t even necessarily bring improved cargo capacity for all that extra bulk.

[ethagnawl]

I have a 2018 Fit and it's a fantastic car. It gets 36 MPG and has much more interior space than it would seem. I've had taller people ride in it comfortably and its crowning achievement was fitting a hot water heater in the cargo area with the rear seat split -- without having to remove the child car seat on the other side. Pair a roof rack and you really don't need more -- especially day-to-day.

It's a crying shame that they've stopped selling them in the US. Marketing (the real men need their Rams, thank you very much!) and the CAFE loophole seem to have won the day, though, and we're all worse off for it.

[njarboe]

Marketing does seem to work, especially over generations. I think the main reason trucks/SUVs were marketed so much was because of a 25% tax on imported light trucks and not cars. The so called "chicken tax"[1] was imposed on light trucks in 1964 and is still with us today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

[mrguyorama]

A big reason car companies push trucks so much is that they are more profitable per unit. Demand is extremely limited in terms of quantity, because you can only really sell about 1-2 cars per family, per about 10 years.

That means, all else being equal, a car company makes more profit selling a vehicle that has a higher profit margin. The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X. This means the dealer/manufacturer just outright make more money if a higher percentage of people buy trucks instead of small cars.

Consumers have "signaled" that they will be fine paying three times as much for the same exact feature set (no, they are not hauling anything, and there certainly isn't a massively higher percentage of Americans doing truck things than 50 years ago), even using longer term loans to make it happen.

When the car market has been basically saturated for decades, how else do you "make line go up" than selling the same product (transportation) for more money?

[ethagnawl]

> The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X.

> ... even using longer term loans to make it happen.

I don't understand how so many people are driving these vehicles. Not only are they 2-3x as expensive to buy or lease but they're also 2-3x more expensive to fuel and maintain. (Probably to insure, too?) I don't have any data to back this up but my intuition tells me that these vehicles and their loans could be the cause of the next subprime mortgage-esque financial crisis.

[cosmic_cheese]

It really is difficult to imagine a better vehicle for suburb/city usage than the Fit, unless you have a bunch of kids/people to move in which case I’d skip crossovers/SUVs entirely and go straight to minivans (which are also better than SUVs for most peoples’ needs).