Look, give us come kind of civilized measurement. Like how many pygmy marmosets is that?
The size of vehicles around me in the US is absurd. I live in a pretty white & republican area, with a mix of rednecks in their compensators and temporarily embarassed billionaires in their 2-3 ton $100K luxury grocery getters.
I’m a big guy and I drive an old Mazda3 sedan that we’ve had for almost almost a decade and a half. It’s what some Europeans might call a family car. It has fun driving dynamics which I care about and enjoy, though that seems to put me in a tiny minority. It’s even practical enough that I have hauled home 8-foot lumber dozens of times with the back seats folded down, because I actually build shit unlike most of the truck drivers.
It sucks knowing all the SUVs with their rushed & distracted drivers weigh 50% more than my vehicle, sure. But the pickup trucks have become caricatures of themselves. I’m sure most folks in this community have seen the charts showing how terrible the forward-looking visibility is in modern pickups versus everything from older trucks to heavy construction equipment. It’s like the number one feature driving sales is how fucking high off the ground they can get the hood/bonnet.
It’s like driving around mobile buildings. The front grilles of these vehicles are just a vertical wall. And even for how large and high the entire bodies of these vehicles are, the new look seems to be having the hood/bonnet in the front sitting even higher than the edges of the bed in the back. I might think that automakers were in competition to see who could get the most customer’s children run over, but I am all too familiar with our garbage culture where everything is a competition and every other person must fall on a spectrum somewhere between rival and mortal enemy.
There are a few different stories going on here.
One story is engineering success. The engineers squeeze out so much more performance per amount of gasoline burned, that the cost of extra weight from a fuel economy standard is significantly less than 25 or 50 years ago. If you chart the fuel efficiency over the same time period, the fleet average fuel economy went from 20 to 34 mpg, even as vehicles were getting more powerful and heavier. A 2026 Camry Hybrid has a 232 hp drivetrain (184 hp from the gasoline engine) that manages to push 3700 lbs 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Those are sports car stats from the 80’s, and yet the modern Camry manages to get 44 miles per gallon in fuel economy. Charting emissions shows an even more pronounced improvement.
Similarly, the rise of electric vehicles has increased the average vehicle weight. Batteries are heavy, and the whole chassis needs to accommodate that.
Another story is unintended consequences from dumb regulations. The fuel economy standards were updated for the 2011 model year to allow a sliding scale where vehicles with larger footprints were allowed to be less fuel efficient. Naturally, smaller vehicles were disincentivized, and compact trucks and compact cars all but disappeared. These regs need to be updated, and we’ll see the return of smaller vehicles for those of us who prefer them.
And another story is shifting consumer preferences. For a whole bunch of reasons, Americans have expressed a preference for taller and taller vehicles, where crossover SUVs are much more common than the old wagons, the relative balance of sedans versus SUVs has shifted entirely in favor of SUVs.
Did you change the first graph from weight to horsepower?
My wife and I purchased a new Japanese car last year. Nobody makes small cars anymore, except maybe Suzuki with the Swift? Our small cheap car is bigger than we had anticipated. Good car though.
When I get in some of the newer SUVs it feels like driving a boat.
No they do make small cars (maybe just a bit bigger than 30 years ago for saftey). They might just not be sold in the country where you live.
Right-sizing cars is the cheapest, most rational option for space and public money. There is no reason not to do it other than wasting precious public and private resources into building more parking spots and repairing road infrastructures more often.
Meanwhile, the average parking stall is smaller than a 1978 Honda Civic.
Just the empty cars and not with an average American inside, right?
So does the average American.
That’s vehicles classified as “light duty” — pickup trucks.
All other vehicle classes are down in curb weight over that same period.
Another issue is that more people are buying “light duty” vehicles…
It’s infuriating. The number of trucks with their ass hanging out of driveways and parking spots is a legitimate public safety emergency.
And it’s probably worse than that graph seems to show… Since people are moving to a larger vehicle class mostly due to marketing rather than use case…
Yeah, show us the average numbers for all vehicles used for private personal transport then.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/average-car-weight.html
The average weight of passenger and commercial vehicles has varied over time. The pickup truck, which is America’s best-selling vehicle style, has bulked up considerably since the mid-1970s. As of 2024, the pickup truck has an average weight increase of 30% from 1975. Other vehicle styles, such as sedans and wagons, have slimmed down by 10%.
You know, eventually you’ll need to learn how to use a search provider on your own.
You know, eventually you’ll need to learn how to use a search provider on your own.
Watch it. The only reason your comment didn’t get removed is that @Jiral found your link useful.
soft
Ah, ad hominem. Always nice.
Your quote does not answer my question, but the source you linked to actually did.
Average vehicle weight by year
2014: 4060 pounds
2024: 4419 pounds
deleted by creator
But those searches don’t tell me what I want to hear!
The 5 square meters are no accurate display of the pavement covered by those cars, because they’re much longer than just their wheelbase.
Has the average ratio changed over time?
I would’ve expected the ratio to actually shift the other way, where the wheelbase represents a larger percentage of the overall length/width of the vehicle, because American fuel economy regulations actually rewarded vehicles for having larger wheelbases. This killed small cars like the Honda Fit and small trucks like the Ford Ranger.
Also, it seems to be much easier to park vehicles whose front wheels are as far forward as possible. The greater the ratio of wheelbase to overall dimensions, the easier it is to maneuver, and anecdotally it seems easier to maneuver modern cars than cars from 25 years ago.
About double. American cars tend to be bigger so 5m long and 2m wide is probably a fair approximation. Hell, even in Europe the average car is probably something like 4,5m by 1,7m
The true measure is dick to floor.
After swimming or before?
America needs to make its own KEI car standard. at least they wouldnt be as dangerous for pedestrians, or as disastrous for the environment as the fucking rolling city blocks we have now.
Especially since we’re never gonna get a functional public transit system.
I’d settle for at least legalizing Kei trucks across the country
It’s beyond frustrating that I can’t even drive my own Kei truck on public roads where I live
legalizing Kei
No can do. That would be one letter away from legalizing DEI.
I wonder if also legalizing 4 wheelers on public roads would improve the odds of it passing
I thought kei cars/trucks/etc were legal if they were over 25years old due to antique car laws?
That’s a federal law to get them into the country at all. Each state can have additional restriction when it comes to driving them on the road. There’s a whole FAQ about importing into the US.
Oil is too cheap
In the US? Definitely.
Worldwide, slightly less so, but generally agreed.
More expensive oil won’t help oversized EVs that much.
Large vehicles being expensive (both to buy and operate) also results in them becoming status symbols and then you get conspicuous consumption.
American cars cover more pavement than they ever have
Then goes ahead and shows a change from 48.9 to 51.8
Whoever made those charts wanted to make the change look bad, no matter what.
Where is the chart of the average heavy injuries per passenger? Or the average energy efficiency of engines?
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.
injuries per passenger
The fact that you phrased this so specifically to not mention the corresponding increased danger to other road users and pedestrians, suggests you’re a shill pushing industry talking points.
to be somewhat fair to the auto industry pedestrian habbits probably changed, but they probably changed to be more afraid of cars.
Maybe I am just Mr. Ford
The graphs are terrible but come on, a 10% increase in weight in 10 years, doesn’t sound bad to you? Especially when the base value was anything but low to begin with? And an increased space consumption of 6% is a huge additional space consumption in absolute numbers, given the huge numbers of cars.
The weight gain could theoretically be explained by the simple fact that electric vehicles are heavier than their combustion counterpart.
Though I’m well aware these are american cars so probably just means more bigger pickup trucks that will never ever be used to actually pick things up.
Yeah, electric versions of American monstrosities are part of the same problem and completely offsets any EV benefit. They just shouldn’t exist.
Hardly, the EV adoption rate in the US is pretty poor and even if we ignore that, the share of EVs among existing vehicles on the road is way to small to be the dominating factor for the increase in weight. That said, yes, EVs will lead to an increase in weight, a necessary evil. However, that can be compensated by downscaling vehicles to actual needs. People are currently buying cars far larger than what they actually need for partly irrational and partly egoistic reasons (increasing threats to life and well being towards others in the hope to slightly decrease it towards oneself).
The graphs doesnt say “cars on the road” it says “new vehicles”. As in, new vehicles sold. Today. Are heavier than new vehicles sold, 5 years ago.
Or plug in hybrids. Even a 20kwh battery is quite hefty.
Yea this looks misleading as fuck. Weight graph starts at 3000lbs too. Also no mention of the cars polluting the nearby environment a lot less despite getting heavier. And why measure acceleration instead of measuring brake distance, or pedestrian survivability, or crashes per million miles etc.
yeah axes should start at zero.
“A lot less” is something I’d like to have a source for, especially as the switch to SUVs and trucks is done to a large part to evade the much stricter emission norms for officially classified “cars”. Emissions could be a lot lower if the SUV loophole for many of the car norms had not been invented.
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.
Pedestrian safety, especially for children, is however much worse, luckily no one cares about that in safety tests in the US. In Europe you get downgraded for it.
i think this is about toxic gases emissions vs CO2 emissions. while CO2 emissions have probably gone up somewhat (my guesstimate is +30% since 1970), the toxic gas emissions have almost completely gone to zero. there was a whole lot more toxic gases around in the 20th century industry and machinery, you had to cough constantly, we just don’t remember it because it’s comparatively clean now.
Toxic emissions have absolutely not gone down to zero. High respiration activities next to a highway still get you a solid dose of toxic stuff. Yes, it would be much worse with 1970s vehicles but it would be much better if the majority of vehicles sold today would not be able to use the regulatory SUV/truck loophole to be able to pollute more. This loophole is not just about CO2.
I witnessed myself what a huge impact on air quality it had on a street to see heavy two lane traffic gone and that had nothing to do with CO2 and it was even without that loophole you have in the US.
do you have any numbers how much toxic emission there is today compared to 1970?
No but I have a nose and lungs and I can smell the difference next to roads with jammed heavy traffic, it ain’t the CO2 and I am not simply imagining pollutants.
“almost completely zero toxic emissions” is a fairy tale. Respiratory issues remain to be a bigger issue in cities for a reason.
Toxic emissions from road traffic remain as major health problem in the US: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107402118 (not the newest data but you are not claiming that in the 10 years since, everything has changed ro the beeter,are you?), even if progress has been made. I can’t wait to see those dirty combudtion engines (no matter how much you purify the exhaust) vanish from the streets. In Europe we are on the way at least even if China will ve likely faster
well sounds to me like deaths from toxic emissions sank by roughly 60% from 2008 to 2017. it’s not “almost down to zero” in that time frame but a lot has happened between 1960 and 2008 too.
square metres
US-americans will get a stroke
I guess that will lessen the number of insanely sized cars and drivers then…
