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.”
What I’m about to type might come as a nitpick and missing the point so let me say this upfront: This post is very much true. Cars have gotten way too big and the loopholes in government laws and environmental regulations that allow this shit to happen need to be closed. Consumers should also be smarter and more diligent with their purchases.
With that said, there’s a small disparity with the car example. The car on the left (BMW 3 Series E30, I think) would be classified as a sedan. The car on the right (BMW X series, don’t know which specifically) would classified as an SUV, more specifically the (abysmal) crossover category.
Because there are still a lot of cars being made and sold. They’re a big part of every manufacturer’s product line. How many new dumb phones were released in the past 2 years?
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.
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 can cram into my ancient 80s civic hatch almost the same stuff my friend’s dad can put in whatever model giant suv he has. my friend has a small pickup that can carry more. The bigger vehicle is not any more comfortable, smells like plastic and fake leather, and it’s a mystery how that man makes the jump in and out of the vehicle with knees worse than mine because I have a hell of a hard time when I help them move stuff. Its also so damn high so getting heavy stuff in sucks big time. Not everyone wants a forklift to load their car.
not only does it have a larger battery… it also uses up that battery 10 times faster while doing 100 times less work :')
I would really like to have modern laptops at like double/triple the size for more battery space though, why can’t we have a normal laptop that lasts like a week on a charge?
I would really like to have modern laptops at like double/triple the size for more battery space though
Mainly because that would violate airplane regulations. You aren’t meant to go over 100 Wh because of what most Li-Ion cells do when damaged, overheated, and ruptured.
why can’t we have a normal laptop that lasts like a week on a charge?
Maybe because that’s impossible without using some really low power parts. Do you like having a black and white screen running at maybe 30 FPS with no brightness to speak off? That’s what you would end up with. Okay actually with modern eInk and transreflective LCDs we can do limited colour, but it will cost a fortune.
Even with triple the energy you are going to struggle powering a modern fast machine with a modern display for that long. Higher resolutions, better colours, brightness, and frame rate all demand more power.
Is that actually on and working for an entire week or in sleep mode? Obviously sleep mode uses less power. No one is disputing the fact that you can have long stand by times, even if modern laptops have actually gotten worse in this regard.
If it can manage 8 hours of screen on time everyday for a week that would be closer to what I mean and probably what the original commenter meant.
Definitely not 40 hours use, but I get about 20 out of it, unless I’m doing something particularly heavy. Like, I tested BG3 on it for shits and giggles, and got better performance than my 2070 machine, but it drained my battery by over 50% in Les than an hour
Not only are modern cars huge, they’re fuckin’ ugly as well. I can’t stand the “aggressive” look every car, truck, and SUV has nowadays. Sorry, but Mom’s minivan does not need to look “aggressive”. That thing is lucky to even reach a high speed to warrant such a look. The shapes of cars nowadays look like hideous blobs, especially most SUVs. Taillights taking up the whole rear end, weird headlight placement (who the fuck designed the Nissan Juke?) and other design choices that make the car look uglier every generation.
I know it’s because of studies showing people like “aggressive” cars (because people are fucking stupid, it isn’t aggressive if every car is aggressive) and aerodynamics are why cars look like blobs, but I sure miss when cars actually looked like cars. That died out in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Aggressive is definitely the current trend. Rivian is an interesting exception, imo. The front end has a lot of rounded features even though they are on trucks and SUVs. I hated the headlights at first but they are growing on me. They are a tiny player of course, but they have a lot of buzz at the moment.
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.
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.
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