I don’t know if these graphs, again, I don’t know what the source is, it’s not really provided, but I don’t think they’re meant to make a specific judgment one way or another.
Well, except the note that cars have gotten bigger while also becoming more efficient.
I think a big chunk of that has to do with how cars are designed today though. Some of it is the unintended consequences of safety regulations, which frankly, don’t get me wrong, I’m pro strong safety regulations, but it does mean that cars have way thicker pillars in order to accommodate better crash safety and being able to be flipped upside down.
This also leads to cars having this sort of sitting in a bathtub kind of feel. Things do feel a little tighter inside as well and the window openings are smaller.
It’s kind of funny because I remember when I started driving just an observation from like how cars changed like There definitely was a trend from the 90s to the 2000s where car interiors got a lot more roomy for the size and you had more glass better window to look out of well also getting better safety ratings compared to the 90s
I do wonder how much of it is the just unintended result of having to design a car around certain engineering specifications and how much of it is also a way for the car companies to upsell people to the CUV variant of that model. Because it is just wild how small car door openings can be these days and as a result how much of a pain in the butt it can be to put a kid in the car seat compared to what would have been a much smaller car 20 years ago.
SUVs are still popular and large trucks are just awful. It’s a big problem in this country. But most of the cars sold aren’t actual SUVs. They’re CUVs. They’re built on car chassis. They are heavier, which means they get worse fuel economy than their car equivalent. And they’re less aerodynamic, which means they get less fuel economy than their car equivalent. And that weight means they also erode their tires faster, which of course is just worse for the environment as well as well as their brakes and other components.
That said, the difference in size compared to their sedan equivalent, or even hatchback, five-door equivalent, is not tremendous. Even efficiency, the loss is usually maybe like a couple of miles per gallon on the tests. Though I imagine if you try to hyper mile and you know baby is a throttle you can get more out of the car-shaped vehicle than you can the fake SUV/CUV shaped vehicle.
When it comes to covering pavement, it also starts at like 2008. Which is funny because I can guarantee you just from being around them that cars from the 70s were gigantic. Long hoods, big old protruding trunks.
I imagine the reason why the change is so small and why it’s not quite a linear progression. There is that initial decrease again immediately post recession is just the shift in what’s available for stock in the US.
The height of the SUV boom pre-recession, those cars were big. Like, we have CUVs now. Those are built on car chassis, which means they are about as long as a car is, about as wide as the car that they’re based off of. For example, a Mazda CX6 is just a Mazda 6, but like, fatter. The popular SUVs of the late 2000s were like actually full-on SUVs built on heavy truck platforms. So we had things like the Hummer and of course the Escalade of the day which were gargantuan. At the same time, because those vehicles got like single digit miles per gallon, people tended to also have commuter cars, which were also a lot cheaper back then. We’re talking like low 10,000s or less.
Post-recession though, like we did start seeing a lot more small cars again. For example Chevy brought in the Aveo and eventually the beat in the spark, Honda Fitts became bigger in terms of popularity, Ford brought over the Fiesta. And then gas went down again and because Americans have memories like a goldfish when it comes to gas, car sizes started growing again. When it happened again a few times during the 2010s and of course the big one during the pandemic and now cars had gotten more efficient in terms of their engine engineering and in terms of the prevalence of things like electric cars and hybrid units.
So that mid-sized CUV Is able to get better mile per gallon age or similar mile per gallon age to what someone driving around in a compact in 2007 might have gotten.
There’s also a lot of unintended consequences from safety and computer designed aerodynamic models that have led to cars being shaped a very specific way with very thick A, B and C pillars which make the car door openings smaller which make the taller CUV options a little more appealing as well.
Also, just as an aside, I’m sure full-sized trucks wreck the curve because those have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it’s kind of nuts how big they are and how, despite that, they’re also less practical as work vehicles than ever before. Genuinely kind of stupid.
I’ll never understand why minivans became so uncool when SUVs were able to rise. Now you could make the argument of the soccer mom and mom stereotype of the minivan making it deeply uncool to people who didn’t just want to be known as parents. But then that same stereotype is tied to SUVs.
Many van seat people way more comfortably. The sliding door makes getting into the back seat way more practical. The visibility from out the windows is nice. And on the ones where you can either take out or fully stow the seats, you essentially have the capacity of a truck. They aren’t the ideal solution for everyone’s lifestyle, but like, if you need a big vehicle to haul the kids around and to, you know, bring stuff back from the store that are big, well, a minivan will do the job better.