[PaulHoule]

Don't forgot to lay some of the blame on trucks, SUVs, and the chicken tax. [1] American car manufacturers aren't interested in making anything that can't be classified as a "light truck" because then they'd have to compete on a level playing field with foreign brands. So every kind of "car" has disappeared.

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

[twoWhlsGud]

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

[PaulHoule]

Auto journalists keep repeating in the same deadpan voice as the brainwashed soldiers from The Manchurian Candidate that Americans exclusively want big vehicles. It's not that there isn't some truth in that but the real truth is that (a) the publications won't get any chance to review vehicles if they don't toe the line [1] and (b) since the 1970s if you went to an American car dealer trying to buy a size S car they would try to sell you an L, looking for a size L they would try to sell you an XXL, etc. I remember going to car dealerships with my dad, there was a brief moment after the 2008 financial crisis that this wasn't the case, but by 2015 the major Japanese brands of Honda and Toyota were doing the same.

[1] One take on the fall of Intel was that they were "high on their own supply" for the last 15 years and journalists were too intimidated to tell them they were wrong with the exception of Charlie Demerjian

[wombatpm]

But the vehicles today are dumb big.

My second car was a 1978 Buick Riviera. 17.5 feet in length, two doors, rear wheel drive, 403cuin 8 cylinder. It weighs in at 3500 lbs, had 15 mph rated bumpers with shocks attached to the frame. Steel roll cage, double steel doors.

The car was a beast. You could fit 7 adults in the car and two dead bodies in the trunk.

My grandmother was t-boned in it. They straightened the door and replaced the glass and it was good as new.

That was a big car!

I wish I could buy a car like that with modern antilock brakes, transmission. Instead it’s all trucks and SUVs because people like my mother feel “safer” and like seeing from up high.

Look at the specs of a modern vehicle. Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.

[kelnos]

That really took me back. In the 80s my mom drove a mid-70s, 2-door Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Itt was just under 17 feet long, also two doors, and I believe rear-wheel drive, with a fairly large engine. If memory serves (sigh, it often doesn't), my mom even called it "the beast". I laughed out loud at your "two dead bodies in the trunk" -- yup, checks out.

I'm torn, though, on your idea to have a car like that with modern (safety) features. I hate all the trucks and SUVs out on the road, and I drive a mid-sized sedan. And I agree with you on how easy it is to damage that car. But man those old cars were so heavy. I can't imagine getting decent gas mileage (or good BEV range) on one today.

[xnyan]

Your perception about the safety of 1970s cars is off - you are massively less likely to die or be seriously injured in a car built in 2025 than any car in any car built in the 1970s.

[potato3732842]

70s and 80s cars were built for the little "whoopsie that's a mailbox", "didn't see you merging there" and "oh golly me, this snow sure is slick, and that's a ditch right there" mishaps that are the overwhelmingly dominant form of vehicle accidents. If you didn't actually care to fix things, many accidents that would be thousands of dollars today were $0 back then because required systems remained functional (that was the whole point of those mandated 10mph bumpers).

If your want to survive hitting stopped traffic at 40mph because you were too busy shitposting in traffic, modern car all the way. Depending on the details you may very well walk away without a scratch. It's really marvelous how good they are at keeping people uninjured, or at least alive.

But the overwhelming majority of people's driving experience reflects the former accident type, not the latter, hence why people have the opinions they do. And you can't really blame them. The odds of any given person being in an injurious accident in their life are low, lower still if you avoid a few key behaviors everyone agrees are bad.

[yourusername]

In the 70s there we about 1/4 as many cars on the road in my country compared to today, but 5 times as many road deaths. People got killed or seriously injured all the time before improvement in safety standards. As a society having to replace 50 $1000 bumpers to save 1 person being seriously injured is a great deal.

[marcos100]

Just search for crash tests of modern vs older cars to see which one is safer.

[user____name]

> Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.

Admitedly I'm not a car guy, but isn't this by design? Crumple zones and all.

[tmerc]

Bumpers from the 80s and early 90s were more substantial and outset from the vehicle. If a 5mph impact did anything to the bumper, it took the hit and the rest of the car was generally fine. The bumper was easy enough to replace because it was external to the vehicle.

Modern cars don't have external bumpers and what you see on the outside of the car is a "bumper cover". The actual bumper is under that and no longer spans the whole front/rear of the car to the sides. Many new front bumpers don't go past the headlights.

So in a 5mph crash in a modern car, the bumper cover (made of plastic and held on by plastic) takes the impact and generally gets destroyed. Replacing it costs several hundred dollars in parts before paint (because they're all painted). There's also more labor involved in replacing it because it's so integrated to the car. Bumper covers now clip into both fenders, core support, and undercladding and removal means working with all of those parts, then lining up body lines after.

I think it's less a comment about serious accidents and more a comment on getting rear ended at a stop light now costing $600+ in repairs even if your airbags didn't pop.

[BizarroLand]

And cars from the 30's-50's were often tank-like by comparison. You get into a high-speed accident in one of those and they would just shovel out the raspberry jam you turned into, hose down the inside, tug on the frame a little to line everything back up and put it back out on the lot.

[potato3732842]

The zone's #1 job is to buy enough time for the airbags to inflate during a crash at speed. Occupants moving forward toward the space the airbags will occupy as the vehicle stops and then being hit by an airbag attempting to occupy that space would be bad.

The degree to which crumple zones attenuate forces felt in a crash is fairly minimal in low speed crashes because in order to have enough time for airbags to inflate in a 100+mph crash they are necessarily quite stiff.

[southernplaces7]

I believe you're misunderstanding the security and safety design nature of modern cars vs. older ones from something like the 70's, 80s or earlier.

I've seen a number of crash test videos comparing modern 21st century cars in collisions with solid, unmovable obstacles at high speed, compared to those old cars, and while yes, the old cars had external features that let them more cheaply and functionally deal with minor accidents, they would be totaled by any truly heavy impact, with lethal results for their drivers.

Modern cars on the other hand may be more externally fragile even for minor hits and easily get damaged in ways that lead to thousands in repair costs for all their interconnected, electronically sensitive alarms and sensors, but for enduring high-velocity impacts, they're often fucking tanks when it comes to fundamentally protecting their occupants. Under that fragile exterior of any decent modern car is a remarkable security construct that isn't easily visible, right up until it shows its mettle after your car slams into a wall, and keeps you alive, at some speed that would have annihilated some supposedly tough muscle car from the 70s.

Go search for these on YouTube, they viscerally showcase the difference in the best (and most entertaining) possible way, by trying to catastrophically destroy both kinds of car.

There's a lot of electronic tracking, spyware, junkware, over-complication pushing that I absolutely despise about the modern auto manufacturing industry (partly because of legal mandates and partly out of general shittiness from the makers themselves) but for safety, they're impressive.

EDIT: Here's just one example. The occupants of the Malibu would have survived this crash with minor injuries. Anyone driving the 59 Bel Air would have been turned into a mangled disaster of broken bones and crushed body parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoShPiK6878

[Bud]

A lot of this is true, but also, look at the safety records of those modern vehicles. They protect the driver a LOT better. A totaled car is just a car. Getting paralyzed or killed is a lot harder to fix.

[seanmcdirmid]

Toyota, Honda, Kia, Nissan make plenty of trucks in the USA, they get around the chicken tax directly. The move to trucks and SUVs seems to be more about consumer sentiment that I can't really understand (I'm a big fan of sedans), it isn't just some hack around the tax system.

[eptcyka]

There’s a floor on how cheap a vehicle can be made to conform to the current safety and fuel economy requirements, the margin is greater for more expensive cars. Manufacturers are incentivising bigger cars.

[eldaisfish]

it is profit for auto makers, not consumer sentiment. larger vehicles have larger price tags and larger profit margins.

Remember that the US auto companies spent billions of dollars in marketing and lying to people that they "need" vehicles the size of tanks.

[harimau777]

Isn't some of it an arms race? I partially have a large vehicle because it's unsafe to be in a small vehicle if I get in a crash with a truck or EV.

[PaulHoule]

They make people think that.

The fact is that modern cars have astonishingly effective safety features that are likely to get you alive out of most crashes regardless of the size of your vehicle. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety publishes data that shows that larger vehicles are safer but it is not like you die in the smaller car most of the time, but rather you are more likely to break your ankle or something.

If your vehicle goes under the tractor pulled by a semi (any size) or if it flips over the guardrail because it's too big to be held by the guardrail you do die.

[arethuza]

If larger vehicles were safer then you'd expect the deaths per unit distance driven for the US to be good - when it's actually quite bad?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[crooked-v]

See also: the excellent safety ratings of the Miata, even though it's the smallest car you can get short of Smart or imported kei trucks.

[harimau777]

My understanding is that safety ratings are relative to the class of car. So if you have a small car with excellent ratings and a large car that doesn't mean they will have the same survivability if they crash into each other.

[hnthroay22312]

but larger vehicles also flip easier, so i'm not sure until we have some scientific paper about this.

[lotsofpulp]

No one forced people to buy the larger vehicles when they came on the market. People choose to buy vehicles that let them sit higher and take up more space, when smaller alternatives are readily available.

[murderfs]

People want vehicles the size of tanks. Auto companies are spending billions of dollars to get people to buy their respective tank-sized vehicles, not to turn people onto the segment in general.

[PaulHoule]

I've heard people say "people want vehicles the size of tanks" in discussions like this but I've never heard "I want a vehicle the size of a tank" although that person exists.

It seems like a different world but before the pandemic if you wanted to buy a compact car you would go to the dealer and find out they don't have any new ones, you'll have to settle for used, they say factory washed out in a flood. Well they have 100 SUVs made in the same factory lined up that nobody wants to buy that are $7000 off.

[murderfs]

From a survey of Canadians in 2022 [1]: "We find that SUV drivers view their vehicles as functionally superior to smaller cars in terms of safety, space for lifestyle, handling, and fun. Symbolically, SUVs are seen as a “status symbol” that can communicate a number of images, such as being “successful”. SUV drivers are more likely to see these vehicles as common and “approved” in their social networks, and tend to downplay any negative societal impacts such as increased GHG emissions. Across respondents intending to buy an SUV, willingness-to-downsize to a smaller vehicle was highest under financial incentives (for buying or using a car) or disincentives (for buying or using an SUV)."

I personally don't understand how you could consider an SUV better for handling or fun, but denying people's views doesn't make them not hold them.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...

[dfee]

> I personally don't understand how you could consider an SUV better for handling or fun

This is an imagination problem. There are certain categories of automotive use cases which SUVs are designed to be superior. In those, being in a vehicle designed to handle better at the task is better fun!

For example, taking an SUV off road.

[dfee]

I want a vehicle the size of a tank.

Or at least, a vehicle the size of a Hummer H1. But, would be willing to try out a Marauder, because they look like they’re a blast.

I had tiny sports cars growing from 16-30 years old. They were fun in a different way.

1. https://www.topgear.com/car-news/modified/behold-500bhp-295k...

2. https://www.motor1.com/news/27190/marauder-armored-vehicle-f...

[tstrimple]

I have a family of five and we’ve managed with a single vehicle for basically the last 20 years. So I’ve been in minivan mode a long time now. Recently I went car shopping with my son and it’s crazy to me how much more limited sight lines are in the smaller sedans. You have to be much more active leaning and looking around. I don’t know that I need a tank, but I absolutely love the minivan for driver visibility.

[Spivak]

The data speaks for itself. Honda offers the civic and accord and the CRV outsells them both. SUVs are much higher utility than a sedan for pretty much the same price and same gas mileage.

[eldaisfish]

the data does indeed speak for itself. Honda's Civic and Accord are among the top four selling models for Honda in the USA.

[vostok]

As someone who lives in a city, I'm not sure what I'd do with a car that is smaller than a tank. If it's a small car then it's probably for local trips and super inconvenient to park / re-park / etc. I want a big car to comfortably fit my family, our outdoor toys, and maybe even tow something.

Even if I lived outside a city, what do I gain by driving a smaller car? Going from 35 to 55 mpg? Parking is plentiful and equally convenient for big cars these days.

[hnthroay22312]

most people want all those things but reality they tow something maybe once a year, that's marketing working.

[kanbara]

meanwhile the entire world from japan to the uk to brazil to south africa are fine to go grocery shopping and take their family out in their normal sized car. in the city.

cities are better with fewer cars and better public transit. and you dont need a tank. i didnt know your viewpoint even existed.

[kelnos]

Do they actually want that, or have people been influenced by incessant marketing? Car manufacturers have strong tax reasons to prefer building SUVs over sedans, and their marketing reflects that.

[mc32]

People with families have been fooling around with larger vehicles for some time: station wagons -> minivans -> SUVs -> CUVs. It's not new.

[riffraff]

Most of the time people drive SUVs alone.

I go for walks in the morning and there's a road bottleneck and it's hilarious and sad to see the cars queueing up on both sides, huge ones, with a single person in them, every morning.

I do own a station wagon, and it's shorter than most SUVs, and I use it for long trips, but let's be realistic, that's not what most drives are.

[potato3732842]

>Most of the time people drive SUVs alone.

Most of the time people drive sedans alone.

If people bought based purely on passenger need 99% of vehicles on the road should be 2-seat coupes, pickups and vans.

[user____name]

I think people want tanks because all their neighbours are driving tanks.