Does anyone make a small car that safely seats 6 people with adequate storage space for doing a week worth of grocery shopping or luggage for a weekend trip?
The original Polo was made by their Spanish arm called SEAT - VW then took the model line further to slot in below the Golf when that became bigger and more expensive.
The new Polo (2018-) is now the size the Golf 5/6 was circa 2009 and thus is priced accordingly.
Their solution for our car market is to still produce the 2017 model and rebrand it as the Polo Vivo.
Do large families only exist in the U.S? Why is this not an issue for people in any other country?
The explosion in vehicle size over the last 10 years in U.S is off-the-scale absurd, while per-capita fatal crashes have only gone UP over the same period[1].
So if they don’t need a larger car they shouldn’t have them?
Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
Your original argument was basically "a small car won't fit my personal situation". So what? In what way does your situation generalize? You're clearly atypical in family size. Other people have pointed out that it's possible to fit a supermarket shop or travel a long distance in a small car. I imagine a sizable number of Americans, sufficient for a robust market, would be adequately served by a small car.
> So if they don’t need a larger car they shouldn’t have them?
That's nowhere in what I said or in the OP. The OP did talk about pulling "policy levers" to change incentives.
> Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
> The OP did talk about pulling "policy levers" to change incentives.
This is what we’re afraid of. Those policies will cause immense harm and suffering to people who cannot simply buy the small EVs that policy makers want us to buy. The unintended consequences would be devastating to many.
The point is to repeal the regulations that encouraged the growth of the car size in the first place. If you introduce more European style car rules - sure, some people will be disproportionately harmed - but that's true of any regulation. It's a tragedy of the commons problem. Currently the growth of car size disproportionately hurts those who don't have a car at all - will someone think of them?
"I fail to see a reason to eat a serving that would be sub-optimal for my personal situation", said the 600-pound man before digging into a meal of 50 flapjacks and a Big Gulp.
In many parts of rural America it’s not feasible to buy groceries and other supplies a day at a time. The stores are too far away to drive to that frequently. Plus it would defeat the purpose of a smaller car as more energy would be required overall.
I think that’s a good point, and one we should acknowledge as we stop designing our cities, roads, and transportation systems to cater only to this small number of rural people.
Thanks, and also 70 million is still a much smaller number than 262 million which would be the remaining population (continuing to use broad number as the OP did) and so the point still stands based on that alone.
I think my small European car is capable of hauling a week worth of groceries for 6 people. It probably wouldn't fit that AND 6 people at the same time, but I don't really see why anyone would do that.
Americans tend to buy with the outlier edge case of Thanksgiving in mind. The big house full of family, the refrigerator size, multiple ovens, the TV size, the car for Black Friday shopping, and even down to the size of the mall parking lot.
They have denser zoning and higher population densities which allows grocery stores closer to their homes.
Especially when you account for the cost of time, it's way cheaper to make a grocery haul to walmart every couple weeks given we cannot just 'pop by the shop' for milk and eggs.
This is also, I believe, why processed food is so popular here. It's shelf stable for weeks at a time whereas fresh fruit and veg are much more perishable.
> I wonder how 6 billion other people manage to eat.
Four billion of the top six billion live relatively very poorly.
Out of the 7.88 billion, the bottom two billion live in such horrid conditions as to have no regular access to fresh drinking water, routine medical care or indoor toilets at home.
The majority of all people on the planet still don't have access to functional indoor toilets at home, or otherwise have sanitary toilets at home.
Nearly one billion people are still open deficating as a routine. Did you know 35-40% of Laos households have no toilets? Information provided by UNICEF.
I'm willing to bet the majority (not all) of people on HN are oblivious to the actual state of the rest of the world, specifically the bottom four to five billion or so, and just how poorly they live day to day.
So to the question, how do they manage to eat? Food insecurity is still a top concern for the bottom half of the world's population. Four billion people roughly. And for the bottom couple billion people, it's a severe day to day concern.
It's such a serious problem on an ongoing, constant basis that a single war between Ukraine and Russia, is enough to put the basic food security of billions of poor people at risk.
It's incredible how everytime anything car / transportation related comes up on HN there is always an objection the boils down to "but that won't fit my niche use case!!1!"
I don't know what counts as a "small" car here, but I drive a sport SUV because I don't need the storage or seating capacity of a full size, but I do at least need enough space to fit myself. I'm not huge, about 6'2.5" 180 lbs, but I have to find a sedan I can drive without hitting my head on the ceiling and feeling like my field of view is seriously impeded.
If someone made something in-between, that doesn't need to be large overall but at least large enough in the space for the driver to acknowledge we're not all midgets, I'd gladly buy that. It's the same way with airline seating. Granting I'm a little bit of a special case because I'm missing two discs and have ten screws in my spine, but I find myself only flying first class not because I'm wealthy but because if I fly economy, I won't be able to stand up straight for three hours after the flight lands. If they sold something in-between, like say, economy seats as they existed 30 years ago, I'd gladly use that, too.
Rather than 6 people AND cargo, our requirement is 6 people OR 4 people + cargo. Kind of an annoying requirement. A tiny hatchback will do 5 people OR 2 people + cargo, so it's close but not quite. 5 people + cargo is also well served and seems to be the sweet spot but those vehicles don't have a way to accomodate 6.
We have an old Mazda 5 micro-van that hits our requirements, but they no longer sell that in North America. So we either have to get something considerably larger or compromise.
With six people plus a week’s worth of groceries for six, forget small cars—-there aren’t that many vehicles period. I’d think expanded length sport utility vehicles (e.g. Chevy Suburban) is going to be about it.
and also make it so smaller cars are also tax deductible and not just cadillac escalades (6000 lb+ vehicle tax deduction for small business). Or just remove that deduction entirely.
I pretty sure you can buy any vehicle you want you just are going to have serious roadblocks getting it registered and legal in the US for driving on government roads.
That wasn't a generic anti-government rant, that's an actual thing. Regulations have unintended effects, and many regulations aren't written very well to begin with, and then function even worse later as time changes the environment but not the regulation.
And the emissions standards (in the US) have essentially caused the market to produce all stupidly large trucks.
They've also caused other undesirable things like vehicles that are supposed to be rugged now all getting turbos, and ordinary cars that weigh more than large trucks thanks to batteries, and actual large trucks being utterly bonkers weight in ev form.
The problem isn't that there are any regulations, it's merely that they are out of alignment and producing bad results.
The government absolutely dictates what cars can be on the road, and therefore what cars you can close to buy. I would love to drive a tiny little affordable thing, I can't because emissions or some other sorry excuse for protectionism.
Cars are huge because MPG regulations get easier as cars get larger. I'd say repeal/rework the MPG regulations, but that's a California law so the rest of the country doesn't get a say.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), states can make regulations about MPG that are more restrictive than the feds, but not less. If my understanding is correct, then it makes little sense to prevent states from doing so as the feds could address this issue regardless.
Does the RAV4 count as a "small car"? What about a Toyota Corolla? Because those are the two best-selling cars outside of the desert states (source: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ ).
It still blows my mind that a RAV4 is considered a "compact SUV". To me it is quite large. It is just that what is considered a "large SUV" is what I think of as "schoolbus size"...
pretty much impossible as long as huge vehicles are sold. it sucks to drive a tiny car surrounded by much larger suvs and trucks. it feels like you’re driving a go-cart and is hard to be seen.
Forget small cars, Americans should embrace (and demand more) public transit. Switching everyone to small cars is putting a bandaid on a gaping open wound.
I have no desire to do such a thing. Being harassed by mentally ill people on the subway is not something I want to subject myself and my family to. If you've ever tried riding a bus or the train in LA or San Francisco, you'll know what I'm talking about. It can be a scary experience.
If you've ever taken a bus or train in ... most places in Europe...you'll know it's not a law that public transport = dangerous and full of meth heads.
Public transport _can_ be good if you have a society that treats its poor well and highly respects and desires clean and good public transport and is willing to fund it.
I lived in LA for almost a decade (leaving in 2020) and, despite hearing these horror stories, never once had that experience. And I rode the light rail at least 3-4 days/week. Instead what I saw was a largely unused public transit system that passed by hundreds of thousands of cars sitting in traffic on the 10 and 101.
During that same time period I used to commute to SF for work 1 week per month and used BART and public transit almost exclusively. Also never had that experience.
In both, I definitely SAW homeless people, some of whom were likely mentally ill, but seeing them and being harassed by them are totally different things. The latter is mainly fiction. By contrast, I’ve been harassed (at gunpoint) by middle-class “sane” drivers in a bout of road rage.
This is a Hard Problem. In almost all parts of the US, mass transit is just awful, which is a huge part of why people don't use it. But people not using it means that there's no funding to make it no longer awful (which would require massive amounts of funding).
Why not do both things? It will take a long time to undo the awful urban planning of the 20th century, and many people will still drive cars in the meantime; better that they are small and efficient.
Dunno why they had to go on about the "obsession with range" - range is not a function of smallness; indeed, smallness helps in that regard.
We have a Chevy Bolt in the Colorado front range area...it's nominal 238-mile range (increased a bit after the battery recall) is good enough for almost everything, but I certainly wouldn't want it to be less than that. As-is, that range makes it risky to use that car to visit family in Wyoming. I don't think we are wrong to pay attention to range.
I love the idea of cars vs trucks, and tried to spend my money accordingly recently. My newest vehicle is a Hyundai IONIQ 6 which is a 4 door sedan, and is certainly better in a vehicle-pedestrian or vehicle-bike accident than most other vehicles on the road. The problem is that, as a nice electric car, it is heavy. At 4500 lbs it is probably within a few pounds of our Honda Ridgeline (pickup truck). I could not figure out how to get around the weight problem and still get an AWD vehicle.
stop thinking about weight like that. think of weight as mass in physics sense like F=ma. the higher the mass, the more force/energy at play in terms of collisions. the more mass, the higher the energy to +/- the acceleration parts of those equations.
Weight carries many penalties. If anything it should cost more but doesn't.
More weight costs more energy overhead to move whatever your actual payload is, so although electric motors may be more efficient than gas, it's still true that with batteries you have to accelerate and decelerate a lot more mass in addition to the payload (merely yourself many times). That is overhead. Regenerative braking and collecting energy on the downhill make enough difference that they are worth doing, but still don't come close to erasing what it cost to get going or go up the hill.
Weight increases road wear. A lot.
Weight is harder to stop or steer in an emergency. EVs are highly computerized and so they have excellent traction control which hides this problem in normal conditions, especially when comparing any EV to any older car with only basic or even no traction control. But put two vehicles with the same traction control including the fine conrol afforded by the electric motors, in the same situation, but one merely weighs more, and the heavier one will do worse. And "emergency situation" is really all day every day driving multiplied by millions.
Weight increases tire wear. So much so that now tire rubber in the environment is a thing.
Weight increases the wear on all mechanical parts, most apparent in brakes and engine, but in an EV those are both so much better than an ICE that the effect of weight is masked, but it's still there and actually applies to almost all parts of the vehicle. You don't see it individually but it's there worsening the overall stats on repairs and lifespans. It's like the energy overhead. It's just there making everything work harder, and that costs more of essentially every resource, not just energy but wear & tear, manufacturing, engineering, materials, and performance. "performance" doesn't mean boy racer stuff, I just mean performance of it's job. If a bearing needs to support more weight, it either needs to be made bigger, or made better, or made out of better stuff, or fail sooner, or a bit of all of those. It's a systemwide overhead like with the energy.
"Mere" weight is not free, even though it's on wheels.
Weight of a vehicle is one of the main risk factors for people in another vehicle in an accident. When you hit a pedestrian their weight is negligible, so it doesn't matter as much, but when another vehicle is involved, it makes a significant difference because you are largely doing a conservation of momentum problem.
It would be possible to restore an older car (late 90's to early 2000's) which have much lighter chassis, and convert it to electric power. Unfortunately it wouldn't be very cost effective until you break even on not buying gas, and I'm not sure how well insurance companies would like it.
> I'd like more people to buy smaller vehicles, but I'd also like more people to take public transport instead of driving
It seems that easy car rental could be the solution to both: use public transport / small car for day to day needs, rent a bigger car when you need to go with friends/extended family somewhere.
And yet it is only getting worse: in the recent years, it seems that Zipcar has very few cars available and a long queue; and no car rental agency in my area offers 6 or 7 seat cars. I wonder if this is a business decision because of lack of customers or some sort of government regulations thing?
> Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic EV market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that EVs can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.
I keep shaking my head at how people keep downplaying the range problem and explaining it away with average-based arguments. It's not psychological, and if people wanted the small cars the market would show it. This just reads like moralizing.
How would you explain it better? I've done 4 1900 mile road trips in an EV, and have found that a 250 mile range would be sufficient. We stopped for bathroom breaks, food, sleep, etc. more often and longer than was necessary to charge the car.
Anecdotally, in my wider circle of people I interact with either online or at work/family/neighbors etc. and talked about this with at least half would not be served by the current charging infrastructure and charging UX, including myself. This is maybe a small sample size but I am very skeptical that this ratio would be much smaller at large. This is why when people come in saying that "250 miles is fine" and "we were going to be in the bathroom and restaurant for an hour anyway" it comes off as moralizing.
It would be much more honest to just acknowledge the above and then state that for the good of the planet the more wasteful of us should adapt and maybe not demand dense 5-minute refuels, be more mindful planning roadtrips, work on supporting charging infra rollout, etc.
I've had those conversations. But when you dig further into those reasons the justifications often don't hold up.
They'll say "I can't get an EV because I need to be able to drive from X to Y". So I punch that route into abetterrouteplanner, and >50% of the time the route is quite feasible on a 250 mile EV.
If you've tried that and it doesn't work for you, fine. But many haven't.
I have three kids, and sometimes drive the carpool for swimming or hockey. So we have one minivan and one Nissan Leaf. The small car is the day-to-day car and the minivan is the expedition/carpool car. Works great for us. I have no idea why everyone else buys SUVs.
While I'm inclined to agree, the incentives have just never been right.
Take something like the Honda Fit - its price point meant that you could spend something like a thousand more and get a Civic. In order to go with the Fit, you either needed that small margin to matter a lot, or you just really had to want a cheaper car.
Economies of scale don't work here because of the chicken-and-egg problem, and possibly because size simply isn't as big of a driver of cost as labor and mandatory features. And you never really pay a non-monetary price for having a larger vehicle. We have a minivan and I never hit height maxes, never feel like it's too big to drive anywhere (except for Manhattan, haha).
Cheap interest and long terms probably shrunk the cost difference quite a bit too.
Safety of the passengers will be a battle you have to fight, particularly for people who spend significant time on the interstate.
The civic was only a little more thirsty than the fit when it was here in the US. It also has significantly higher performance (~7s 0-60 vs 9s for the fit). Acceleration doesn't matter much in the city but being able to safely complete a pass on a two lane road is a major concern for a lot of america.
Overall, for a few thousand more, the civic is just simply a nicer car. If you went with the fit, you made significant sacrifices for those 'magic seats'
Been awhile since I was fresh on the numbers, but a quick search says in 2020 the Fit got 33/40 MPG and the Civic got 32/42? Definitely not enough to move the needle for most prospective buyers.
Maybe it's different in Europe, dunno if it's a supply or demand thing but the US market notoriously does not offer the weaker, more fuel efficient motors. I just looked it up the other day; the Camry offers motors under 170HP for some markets but nothing under 200 in the US.
Make regular sedans exempt from CAFE, and make SUVs and non-work trucks follow them. Add absolute limits to fix the loopholes that were introduced EPA guidelines under Obama that resulted in vehicles getting larger and larger.
There's no reason to make every little passenger sedan engine turbocharged, with GDI fuel injection, with cylinder deactivation, and with auto-stop just so they can sell more behemoths.
Sure, politics plays into it but if you live anywhere in the US outside of inner city a large car is very practical and people want what they want. Also, Americans are willing to spend a lot of their disposable income on cars.
Until we pass restrictive laws to force people to buy smaller cars they will not. Even high gas prices had a limited effect on consumer behavior.
The sad part for people like me who would like a nice smaller car, perhaps an EV, is the very limited selection.
I am really not a car person (just need to get from a to b). But as I see large families (3+ kids may be?) minivans and SUVs start to look pretty appealing. Is there a way to address them while not fetishizing size alone? Now large families may not be the norm but Id worry about laws/tariffs penalizing them, no?
For example, to address the front blind spot issue would mandating extra radars and front cameras (and the ensuing cost) be ok? Yes it is still penalizing large families but they may at least be getting a safety feature?
Thankfully minivans and station wagons do not suffer the same enormous blind spot problem the modern American truck is presently facing. That, and the standard five-seat arrangement can accommodate both parents and three kids, which is already a rare degree of occupancy.
If you’re committed to 7+ seater vehicles after birthing a platoon I think the financial penalties of that decision were already understood at child number 4.
Minivans aren't a problem. Part of the "mini" of the van comes from the manufacture. A van is built off a "truck platform", a minivan is built off a "car platform".
Father of eight kids here. I wouldn't really speak of SUVs and minivans in the same breath. SUVs really aren't very suitable for transporting a bunch of kids. They generally don't have extra side doors so kids will have to climb over seats. And despite being so huge, they often hold a shockingly small amount of cargo, unless you add a cumbersome cargo container to the roof rack. We had a Tahoe with a painfully small third row seat and could not even bring a whole load of groceries home in the space remaining in back. It was not possible to use it for camping unless we brought a second car (a Honda Element) to actually hold the stuff. Older minivans like the (now radically redesigned) Dodge Grand Caravan were far better and had far better visibility. I have really not kept up with current minivans - a lot of the models which would hold more passengers have disappeared - but I do think they are designed with better safety features, not to mention better mileage. It's easy to say "just get a Sprinter," but they are shockingly expensive even on the used market.
IMO, the problem is price. The price difference for a small car is almost not worth the tradeoff, utility-wise. We need small city cars that cost < $10k.
An article about this topic that doesn't address the fact that emissions standards on small cars are prohibitively high, which is why they just make them bigger, is not worth reading.
Beyond time. The parking spaces are not designed for your freaking Hummvee. Everyone wants me to get rid of my small 2007 sedan but the same make and model car today is much larger. I can park anywhere and I will give this up when the car absolutely dies for good.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadIt is indeed possible - just shop or pack more efficiently :).
Now they look so grown up, pretty much like a Golf.
The new Polo (2018-) is now the size the Golf 5/6 was circa 2009 and thus is priced accordingly.
Their solution for our car market is to still produce the 2017 model and rebrand it as the Polo Vivo.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183657/average-size-of-a...
Doing a grocery shop with the entire family of 6 sounds stressful btw :)
The explosion in vehicle size over the last 10 years in U.S is off-the-scale absurd, while per-capita fatal crashes have only gone UP over the same period[1].
1. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...
EDIT: You wouldn't believe how many GMC Yukons I see in my wealthy SF suburb that are used to shuffle 8 year-olds from school to soccer practice. For the uninitiated: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/ford-focus-2013-5-d...
Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
> So if they don’t need a larger car they shouldn’t have them?
That's nowhere in what I said or in the OP. The OP did talk about pulling "policy levers" to change incentives.
> Small cars are available, even in the US, but most people aren’t interested in buying them. There are lots of reasons for that. Unless you plan to get draconian about it, people would need a reason to favor small cars.
That's basically what the OP is all about.
This is what we’re afraid of. Those policies will cause immense harm and suffering to people who cannot simply buy the small EVs that policy makers want us to buy. The unintended consequences would be devastating to many.
I wonder how 6 billion other people manage to eat.
https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/what-is-rural
"Micro area (urban core of 10,000-49,9999 people)"
I apparently live in a rural area, Helena, MT. The state capital by the way.
You can look up if you are the 20% Rural or 80% Urban here: https://data.hrsa.gov/tools/rural-health
I say all this because I walk to the grocery store and bike to work. In a rural area no less!
These are things many people need to do multiple times a year.
Especially when you account for the cost of time, it's way cheaper to make a grocery haul to walmart every couple weeks given we cannot just 'pop by the shop' for milk and eggs.
This is also, I believe, why processed food is so popular here. It's shelf stable for weeks at a time whereas fresh fruit and veg are much more perishable.
Four billion of the top six billion live relatively very poorly.
Out of the 7.88 billion, the bottom two billion live in such horrid conditions as to have no regular access to fresh drinking water, routine medical care or indoor toilets at home.
The majority of all people on the planet still don't have access to functional indoor toilets at home, or otherwise have sanitary toilets at home.
Nearly one billion people are still open deficating as a routine. Did you know 35-40% of Laos households have no toilets? Information provided by UNICEF.
I'm willing to bet the majority (not all) of people on HN are oblivious to the actual state of the rest of the world, specifically the bottom four to five billion or so, and just how poorly they live day to day.
So to the question, how do they manage to eat? Food insecurity is still a top concern for the bottom half of the world's population. Four billion people roughly. And for the bottom couple billion people, it's a severe day to day concern.
It's such a serious problem on an ongoing, constant basis that a single war between Ukraine and Russia, is enough to put the basic food security of billions of poor people at risk.
No, but how do they do that without a $50,000 SUV? /s
If someone made something in-between, that doesn't need to be large overall but at least large enough in the space for the driver to acknowledge we're not all midgets, I'd gladly buy that. It's the same way with airline seating. Granting I'm a little bit of a special case because I'm missing two discs and have ten screws in my spine, but I find myself only flying first class not because I'm wealthy but because if I fly economy, I won't be able to stand up straight for three hours after the flight lands. If they sold something in-between, like say, economy seats as they existed 30 years ago, I'd gladly use that, too.
We have an old Mazda 5 micro-van that hits our requirements, but they no longer sell that in North America. So we either have to get something considerably larger or compromise.
And the emissions standards (in the US) have essentially caused the market to produce all stupidly large trucks.
They've also caused other undesirable things like vehicles that are supposed to be rugged now all getting turbos, and ordinary cars that weigh more than large trucks thanks to batteries, and actual large trucks being utterly bonkers weight in ev form.
The problem isn't that there are any regulations, it's merely that they are out of alignment and producing bad results.
Its a small SUV, but not a small car.
In the UK, Compact is considered slightly more towards 'family' sized, and we have a lot more subcompacts and minis,
The 1990s RAV4 was small. The current one is almost 18 inches longer and 6.5 inches wider.
Public transport _can_ be good if you have a society that treats its poor well and highly respects and desires clean and good public transport and is willing to fund it.
During that same time period I used to commute to SF for work 1 week per month and used BART and public transit almost exclusively. Also never had that experience.
In both, I definitely SAW homeless people, some of whom were likely mentally ill, but seeing them and being harassed by them are totally different things. The latter is mainly fiction. By contrast, I’ve been harassed (at gunpoint) by middle-class “sane” drivers in a bout of road rage.
We have a Chevy Bolt in the Colorado front range area...it's nominal 238-mile range (increased a bit after the battery recall) is good enough for almost everything, but I certainly wouldn't want it to be less than that. As-is, that range makes it risky to use that car to visit family in Wyoming. I don't think we are wrong to pay attention to range.
More weight costs more energy overhead to move whatever your actual payload is, so although electric motors may be more efficient than gas, it's still true that with batteries you have to accelerate and decelerate a lot more mass in addition to the payload (merely yourself many times). That is overhead. Regenerative braking and collecting energy on the downhill make enough difference that they are worth doing, but still don't come close to erasing what it cost to get going or go up the hill.
Weight increases road wear. A lot.
Weight is harder to stop or steer in an emergency. EVs are highly computerized and so they have excellent traction control which hides this problem in normal conditions, especially when comparing any EV to any older car with only basic or even no traction control. But put two vehicles with the same traction control including the fine conrol afforded by the electric motors, in the same situation, but one merely weighs more, and the heavier one will do worse. And "emergency situation" is really all day every day driving multiplied by millions.
Weight increases tire wear. So much so that now tire rubber in the environment is a thing.
Weight increases the wear on all mechanical parts, most apparent in brakes and engine, but in an EV those are both so much better than an ICE that the effect of weight is masked, but it's still there and actually applies to almost all parts of the vehicle. You don't see it individually but it's there worsening the overall stats on repairs and lifespans. It's like the energy overhead. It's just there making everything work harder, and that costs more of essentially every resource, not just energy but wear & tear, manufacturing, engineering, materials, and performance. "performance" doesn't mean boy racer stuff, I just mean performance of it's job. If a bearing needs to support more weight, it either needs to be made bigger, or made better, or made out of better stuff, or fail sooner, or a bit of all of those. It's a systemwide overhead like with the energy.
"Mere" weight is not free, even though it's on wheels.
It seems that easy car rental could be the solution to both: use public transport / small car for day to day needs, rent a bigger car when you need to go with friends/extended family somewhere.
And yet it is only getting worse: in the recent years, it seems that Zipcar has very few cars available and a long queue; and no car rental agency in my area offers 6 or 7 seat cars. I wonder if this is a business decision because of lack of customers or some sort of government regulations thing?
American cars have dangerous front blind zones that it took 13 kids in a line for an SUV driver to spot them:
https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0)
Also:
https://kmph.com/resources/media/08519543-f29c-43be-8ea2-c4f...
Imagine if the car manufacturers being forced to display that pic on their brochures or as as a decal on the side of the SUV in the showroom
I keep shaking my head at how people keep downplaying the range problem and explaining it away with average-based arguments. It's not psychological, and if people wanted the small cars the market would show it. This just reads like moralizing.
It would be much more honest to just acknowledge the above and then state that for the good of the planet the more wasteful of us should adapt and maybe not demand dense 5-minute refuels, be more mindful planning roadtrips, work on supporting charging infra rollout, etc.
They'll say "I can't get an EV because I need to be able to drive from X to Y". So I punch that route into abetterrouteplanner, and >50% of the time the route is quite feasible on a 250 mile EV.
If you've tried that and it doesn't work for you, fine. But many haven't.
Take something like the Honda Fit - its price point meant that you could spend something like a thousand more and get a Civic. In order to go with the Fit, you either needed that small margin to matter a lot, or you just really had to want a cheaper car.
Economies of scale don't work here because of the chicken-and-egg problem, and possibly because size simply isn't as big of a driver of cost as labor and mandatory features. And you never really pay a non-monetary price for having a larger vehicle. We have a minivan and I never hit height maxes, never feel like it's too big to drive anywhere (except for Manhattan, haha).
Cheap interest and long terms probably shrunk the cost difference quite a bit too.
Safety of the passengers will be a battle you have to fight, particularly for people who spend significant time on the interstate.
Overall, for a few thousand more, the civic is just simply a nicer car. If you went with the fit, you made significant sacrifices for those 'magic seats'
Maybe it's different in Europe, dunno if it's a supply or demand thing but the US market notoriously does not offer the weaker, more fuel efficient motors. I just looked it up the other day; the Camry offers motors under 170HP for some markets but nothing under 200 in the US.
There's no reason to make every little passenger sedan engine turbocharged, with GDI fuel injection, with cylinder deactivation, and with auto-stop just so they can sell more behemoths.
Until we pass restrictive laws to force people to buy smaller cars they will not. Even high gas prices had a limited effect on consumer behavior.
The sad part for people like me who would like a nice smaller car, perhaps an EV, is the very limited selection.
It's not like they can't do anything about the highly profitable situation they lobbied themself into.
For example, to address the front blind spot issue would mandating extra radars and front cameras (and the ensuing cost) be ok? Yes it is still penalizing large families but they may at least be getting a safety feature?
If you’re committed to 7+ seater vehicles after birthing a platoon I think the financial penalties of that decision were already understood at child number 4.
In most of the world, small nippy sporty cars are more desirable than lumbering 'Yank Tanks'.
That's the difference between https://carsales.pxcrush.net/carsales//cars/private/at3q087e... and this https://www.speednik.com/files/2023/04/that-was-then-this-is...