YES PLEASE. You can even make it electric. I just want a small truck with a full size bed. I don’t need all the other shit these overpriced monstrosities come with.
But they’re essentially illegal. CAFE standards are based on vehicle footprint since the late 2000s (you know - when they suddenly quit making small trucks). As the standards get stricter they just make trucks bigger to keep from failing to meet CAFE.
Though the benefit of the law is that the standard engine on the Ford Maverick is the hybrid, since having the ICE as the standard wouldn’t meet CAFE.
If the Maverick had been possible to obtain when my Colorado died last summer it’s definitely what I would have bought.
Instead I got an NV200 mini cargo van, and I’m pretty happy with it. Though the smash cargo vans just all got discontinued by all the manufacturers too because of CAFE.
Those are great. Just an engine, wheels, a seat and a truck bed - yet somehow they don’t pass California’s emissions laws, while (insert massive truck here) does?
Is it emissions or is it safety? B/c a lot of them don’t have the power for highway roads and lack basic safety (like seatbelts).
If it is emissions, it’s probably because it’s category-wrecking. They probably get pitted against other cars in a similar weight or wheelbase, and it’s designed to be far more utilitarian than most vehicles in that class.
I’d totally drive a Kei truck, I bet the fuel economy is great too. The big appeal for a light truck for me though is putting a cap on the back and keeping tools equipment back there, or going camping in it. Would make a decent van life experience in a pinch too. I used to have a Mazda B2000 like in the picture back in the 90s, easy to keep running and decent with gas, nothing but happy memories with it.
I vaguely remember some quote from the 1990s along the lines of “if cars had had the same technological growth rate as computers, by now, they’d go bazillion kilometers with a drop of gasoline, had engines the size of sugar cubes, and would cost a penny and a half.”
OP could just compare the E30 3-series and the G20 3-series and there would already be a size difference. Of course, much of it stems from safety features taking up extra space (hello crumple zones, airbags, etc) and there’s also simply a little bit of more space in a modern car.
To truly make a point here, you might want to compare a pickup truck from the 80s or 90s vs the 2010s or 2020s. Those have gotten unnecessarily big with no excuse.
I actually went smaller with my newer one. i am 197cm tall and thus have lather large hands, still the phones were getting too big, went from One Plus Nord 5G to iphone 15 pro.
Euh, no. Used to have a renault clio, which was a lot safer than a car from the 80’s like, lets say, a vw beetle. Lighter too, as back then cars were mostly made of steel, while its a combination of steel, aluminium and plastic now.
Same size of car too, so size doesnt matter either.
We make a 2 ton metal box, cruising at 70mph, and driven by basically anyone. The only way to do this while having a reasonable level of safety is to cram it full of features that make it heavy and expensive. This is fundamentally terrible.
People’s needs for transportation will never cease to exist and there will always be some people that will need individual transportation so even in a world where only those who need a vehicle have one, I think it’s only fair that they should be as safe as possible in it.
This is comparing a 3 series sedan with an SUV though. The closest modern analog to the E30 would be the 1 series, and while it’s larger and heavier it’s also more fuel efficient, faster, and safer.
The closest equivalent to the 3 series would be a 3 series since it showcases how much bigger got.
Though a lot of that size increase is due to better safety tech, better crumple zones, so OP isnt very intelligent with this critique, the ford F150 comparisons are more apt.
It’s a perfectly fine comparison, because people are buying them for the exact same thing. Just because they’ve been sorted into different categories for other reasons doesn’t change that.
No, because all methods of transportation are not used for “the exact same thing”. If it was a 7 seater SUV, it would be a bad comparison, because that’s for carrying more people and must be larger. Same for a motorcycle. But it’s not, it’s a five seater car with a moderate trunk that people are buying for the exact same use case.
You’re right, they’re not all used for transportation.
Yes I’m trolling a bit, one could argue a modern smart phone and the first cell phones are a bad comparison because they “aren’t used for the same thing” but that’s just needlessly pedantic.
In this case, I do think it’s fair to point out a crossover/suv being compared to a sedan is different enough to be a bad comparison, it’s not “Apples to Oranges” (why can’t fruit be compared?) but it is intentionally misleading for comparing cars of the same type when they’re not the same type and pointing at the size difference.
Yes it is very intentional, because the point is not to say, “look at this sedan and this suv”, the point is, “look at cars and how they are becoming bigger”, a major part of which is people unnecessarily buying bigger cars. It’s comparing the “average” car of the past to the “average” car today. In fact, if you were to compare sedans to sedans while trying to make that point, I say that would be disingenuous.
By example, if I was comparing computer storage though the ages, I wouldn’t compare magnetic tape to magnetic tape today, I’d compare it to ssds. And it wouldn’t be disingenuous because they’re different types of storage, because the point I’m making is about storage as a whole.
If SUVs are replacing sedans, I think it’s entirely fair to compare them.
What? Theywent from portable PC/phone to even more portable PC/phone. The same way they went from shit car for assholes to more shitty car for assholes.
Im my sweet summers there were basically no commercial laptops.
I was trying to say that that laptop isnt just 25 years old. It just seems odd to even put 25 there, where 40 is used for the other two.
I was going to mention that the laptop looks like a “tough-book” heavy duty type thing. The only reason it seems old is because of the video ports on the side. Military laptops for field use still look similar, admittedly a bit smaller
The 2 series is now ~180 inches long (about the same as the first generation bmw x3) and ~3900 pounds (significantly heavier than the first generation x3) (about the same as the first generation bmw x3).
Yep I finally upgraded my 2003 Renault Kangoo for a station wagon that’s bigger, carries more, probably heavier (don’t actually know) but uses much less fuel. It has a tiny 1L ecoboost engine that still packs a punch when needed and barely uses any more fuel than our much smaller hybrid hatchback with the way I drive it, which admittedly I do drive in a particularly fuel conscious manner.
The modern unloaded base 2 is 3400lbs and the first Gen X3 started at 4k and you could load it up when features to 5k. This 3 series in its poverty trim weighs 3k (and functionally represents a different class of vehicle today) Nice try playing fast and lose with loaded vs base vehicles. Also let’s not pretend the 3 series EVER had a short wheel base. In 1990 it was 175.5 inches. My accord from that era is 179, 1 inch shorter than my 2021 outback.
I will admit that I am fully biased against the absurd weight of the new 2 series. I’ll update the post to reflect what I found instead - the new 2 series is of comparable curb weight, powertrain to powertrain, to the first generation x3, not significantly heavier:
2L AWD: 3640 vs 3650 3L AWD: 3870 vs 3902
The 5k weight listed for the x3 seems to be the gross weight (i.e. car + max rated cargo capacity), which wouldn’t be comparable to the 2 series, having no such rated capacity.
Wouldn’t knowledge about crumple zones and need for space for things like airbags, make cars bigger?
Not saying that is the main reason, but size reduction may not be a factor to focus on its own, right?
Nah, we still make compact cars similar in size with the same safety features to econoboxes from 40 years ago. Like houses, people want more room in their vehicles than they had with the smaller cars plus some other misinformed choices like thinking bigger and taller means safer.
Plus along with the older small cars we also had the giant boats that got single digit mpg. It wasn’t like they were all small in the past.
Here is the same thing I posted, but reworded slightly to be more clear.
We make some cars now with modern safety feature that are big and some that are just as small as the econoboxes from 40 years ago. A Honda Fit for example is just as small, but with modern safety features.
In 1984 the smallest Volkswagen was the Polo, weighing 685 kg. Now it is the Up, weighing 991 kg. That's 45% more weight. Now you specifically didn't mention weight, but all that weight has to go somewhere, especially considering most materials mostly got lighter.
No, vehicles have gotten larger because of the same problem as most of the issues in the United States: politics!
You see automobile manufacturers have to meet an average fuel economy across their entire fleet under the CAFE (Corporate average fuel economy) act of 1975. CAFE was a good idea as it forced the auto industry into actually improving on fuel economy year after year throughout their entire fleet or be met with steep fines for ever 0.1mpg off the target.
In 2011 CAFE was changed which directly caused the auto market we have today. See in 2011 the formula on how you’d calculate your fleet’s avarage MPG got changed to now factor in vehicle footprint as a variable which auto manufactures quickly caught on to mean the larger a vehicle is the smaller their entire fleet’s MPG has to be.
On top of that in 2012 “medium-duty trucks” was added as their own category with a lower MPG requirement meaning if your truck or SUV fell into that category then you would have a smaller MPG target for your entire fleet.
Now put yourself into the shoes of an early 2010s auto manufacture, would you rather design small and light vehicles that require you to meet a pretty high fuel economy level across your entire product range or would you inflate the size of your vehicles and move all R&D into finding ways to get your entire fleet classified as a medium-duty truck/SUV with a smaller MPG requirement? Of course you are going to take the latter.
The changes to CAFE in the 2010s killed small vehicles as we knew it. Ensured light duty trucks stayed dead domestically built or chicken tax be dammed. Caused the explosion of crossover SUVs to flood the market. All while making vehicles more dangerous and worse for the environment.
I am not from North America. I’m in India.
Here, the average car has generally increased in size a bit, but doesn’t seem to be going too big. There are larger cars and they are indeed increasing in number, but due to our mixed traffic and high traffic density it is not that popular.
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