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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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