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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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SUVs.
There really is no need to haul 3 tons of steel around with you, and as more and more extreme weather events happen you'll have more and more people looking around for others to blame, and oversized cars which are clearly unnecessary for work (especially the ones with Internal Combustion Engines) make for big very visible targets, with the added factor that in some places they're seen as conspicuous displays of wealth (and flaunting wealth will be another thing that's likely to become frowned upon within the next 2 decades).
Not saying that SUVs are all to blame or even that the rich ride them (in my experience they're more the cars of a certain middle class), but they're in that spot of being abundant enough and yet only a minority of cars, easy to spot, often imposing in a showoffish way and logically more poluting that smaller cars, all this right when the impact of Global Warming is really and properly starting to be felt, something which at the current rate will get much worse in 2 decades.
Also, unlike big oil companies SUV owners don't have PR departments with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget to sway the press and swindle the useful idiots.
This thread title is unfortunately about what "you think will" not "you hope and wish and pray will", so super hard disagree. Electric cars are actually going bigger to account for huge batteries, and heavier because of them. Given that's the upswing I find it hard to predict a sudden shift to smaller cars.
The only way it happens (and 20 years is a very long time, so it's possible) is if cars become so expensive and mostly subscription model based like everything else, that car ownership goes down. If driverless electric cars become fleet vehicles in cities, you'd definitely see smaller cars becoming more common to have more on the road and privately replace public infrastructure because we can't invest in that in the USA. So like Uber just illegally ran taxi services in many jurisdictions until it became too popular to fail, expect the same thing from driverless car fleets, a couple of which will get bought by Uber or Lyft. Young people are driving WAY less, so if they prefer to hail a direct driverless taxi to their destination and not pay to own a car, then the bulk of vehicles on the road could downsize. Private passenger cars though, would start being used for more long haul driving instead of the 99% short trips they're currently used in, so I don't see any downward size pressure on those.
Well, there have been a number of announcements of higher density energy storage technologies and that's the direction things have been moving towards already with electric cars (in less than a decade ranges doubled with similarly sized cars), so I don't think there is at all a trend for larger vehicles in that segment due to such pressures.
From what I read (which was not specifically for electric cars) is that SUVs are simply more profitable for manufacturers, hence their investment in designing and heavilly promoting them.
Because of those battery changes and demands for range, electric vehicle are way heavier than they used to be. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/as-heavy-evs-proliferate-their-weight-may-be-a-drag-on-safety
They also follow the same growth in size as all vehicles, due mostly to consumer demand: https://www.fastcompany.com/90793619/evs-keep-getting-bigger-and-that-could-steer-the-u-s-down-a-dangerous-road
I hope so. I was about to join the smaller end of the SUV crowd, but then I test drove a van. We have a van now. Even more space, better efficiency, and less expensive to buy. Just had to let our pride take a hit and drive the uncool-parents-mobile.
yeah right americans will totally overcome car-based infrastructure brainwashing and learn to hate the thing that they base their identity on totally
just like the confederate flag, totally died out when racism became uncool. and I think you're especially accurate that a widescale global disaster will definitely change people's thinking, that always happens and never redouble their biases with insane conspiracy theories driven by billionaire backed media campaigns
You're disputing something I didn't actually state.
I very explicitly went for SUVs because I actually believe the same as you when it comes to cars in general: 20 years is far too little time for people to completelly turn away from the, especially in car-loving countries with horrible public infrastructure for anything else, like the US.
Sacrificing a minority segment of the car market to appease the masses is not all that hard in 2 decades, whilst completelly changing the transportation infrastructure is damn near impossible.
I don't know. You don't see many electric stationwagons around and people will want big boots after fossil cars are history. I really really hope you're right though.
We bought a crossover earlier this year and love it, but I would have preferred to get a station wagon if they still existed. My parents had a Camry station wagon when I was a teenager and that thing was amazing.
There is also the shitty situation where because everything on US roads right now are big it actually makes smaller cars less safe in collisions due to relative mass with a likely other party. Also being at eye level with headlights kind of sucks.
SUVs are better than pickup trucks.
Current giganto tax-loophole pickups, sure. I drive a 97 standard bed, mostly for hauling (not a daily). It's a great vehicle for the job. There's probably a couple of safety features I wish it had but "be bigger than any potential collision target" isn't one of them.
My concern is the MPG
Most pickups are not work trucks.
Costco trips are the hardest work they do.
My last SUV had the same engine as their smallest pickup truck.
And i bet the SUV got better mpg because of areodynamics.
Not by much, it was a beast. Got around 18 mpg, the equivalent truck gets about 16