I made a quick grocery run during the lunch hour, and, as usual, noticed that my car was made invisible when I parked it. My little Honda Fit was surrounded monstrous huge pickup trucks — trucks that I could barely see over the hood when I stood next to them, with looming huge intimidating grills, and increasingly tiny beds. This is the consequence of taking the truck analog of testosterone, you become huge in certain ways, but shrink where it counts.
Don’t try to tell me these are work vehicles. These are costly signals emitted to flaunt membership in a club of assholes. It’s become obvious and unsupportable.
This year, the average weight of a new car in the US was more than 4,300lb (2,000kg) – a full 1,000lb (450kg) more than in 1980. It’s not just that people are opting to drive larger models; the same models themselves have expanded. You can see the evolution most clearly with pickup trucks. Take, for example, the iconic Ford F-150, as Axios does in this comparative graphic (see above). Since 1970, the truck has become progressively larger, even as its bed – the fundamental point of owning a pickup truck, one would think – has become smaller.
You all know the Irish Elk went extinct, right?
These are gas-guzzling killers. Out here in the rural US (also, coincidentally, Republican US) the roads are full of these monsters. I just looked out my office window at the university parking lot and didn’t see any F150s or Dodge Rams, but any trip outside our environmentally conscious bubble means you have to share the road and parking lots with something equivalent to a tank.
It should be obvious that bigger, heavier cars are an ecological disaster. Without the trend towards bigger and bigger SUVs, global emissions from the motor industry would have fallen by 30% between 2010 and 2022. And even though a heavier electric vehicle (EV) is still preferable, emissions-wise, to a lighter petrol-engine vehicle, a lighter EV is obviously more efficient than a weightier one. The heavier the vehicle, the larger the battery it requires – and with it, more critical metals, and more electricity required for each charge.
The arms race in vehicle size is also a safety disaster, for other drivers and certainly for pedestrians. The individual logic makes sense: would you want to drive on the same highway as Mr Tinydick’s 7,000lb (3,175kg) Dodge Ram if you’re in a Mini? Of course not – in a collision, the Ram would probably just drive straight over you, like a monster truck rally malfunction. And the driver of a similarly sized vehicle wouldn’t even see a small child in front at close distance. The macro-level effects are deadly. In the US, deaths in car crashes rose by 33% between 2011 and 2021, while pedestrian deaths have risen by 77% since 2010.
Meanwhile, in France…
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has now proposed tripling parking rates for SUVs in central Paris to €18 an hour, and €12 an hour for the rest of the city. The measure, which would include hybrids and electric vehicles over a certain weight limit – though with an exemption for Paris resident parking – would affect roughly 10% of the cars in the city. And beyond Paris, Tesla’s 6,800lb (3,080kg) Cybertruck probably won’t be coming to Europe at all, because at that weight, it requires a trucking licence to drive (I write this with a sigh of relief).
Compare the best-selling vehicle in France with the most popular road-thing in the US:
I swear, this entire country is fucked.
King Series Pickups
For those who need a pickup truck with six doors.
I have an old (gets a senior discount now) car from before the bloat. Many is the time that I have stepped out of a store and wondered if my car had vanished. But as usual, it was hiding behind something else.
The likelihood of it being stolen has dropped over the years since the ability to drive a manual transmission has faded.
There is another reason why that parking lot is filled with trucks and SUVs, which has more to do with evading any sort of fuel efficiency standards, which profits the oil and automotive industries nicely.
https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in-america
I swear, this entire country is fucked.
In the head, sideways.
I remember my Dad’s pickup truck, a Toyota. Slim, low, with a bed that would hold a sheet of 4’x8′ plywood. Great truck. It would be dwarfed by these monstrosities.
If you visit the UK these days, you will be struck by the number of huge, USA-ish SUVs and pickups on the road. It’s insanity, and it’s clearly imported from the fucking Americans. Advertising works across geopolitical boundaries, and without level heads such as the one atop the mayor of Paris, the whole world gets run over by American stupidity. Vive la France.
And most pickups are completely useless for hauling anything without also have a trailer. I have a Honda Passport that has more cargo length (with the seats down, of course) than most of the trucks I looked at. Never mind the just ridiculous prices that trucks command. A Ford Rangers STARTS at $45k and is one of the smaller trucks on the market. And it has a 5′ bed. My niece’s minivan can fit a full 4X8′ sheet of plywood with the tailgate closed. In most trucks, you’d have 3′ of that sheet hanging over the end of the bed, 2′ with the tailgate down. Then good luck when you’re too heavy on the gas pedal from a standing stop.
Remember a 1996 Honda Civic I was fond of. Maneuverable, efficient little thing. Ended up regretting the car I traded up to, and when it broke down entirely, I looked for a new Civic. The new model was Civic in name only. Currently have a Honda Fit, and even then I wonder if I should have looked for something smaller.
I remember the MSU farm’s Ford pickup I drove in the 80’s. 8′ bed, 2 doors, vinyl bench seat, 6 cylinder engine, manual transmission. A fitting vehicle for a Spartan. And it could pull a trailer with a tractor on it down the highway. That was an honest work truck.
I just saw an article on this, this morning.
It is a lot worse than just giant pickups everywhere.
.1. The average car (I mean vehicles including pickups) now averages $50,000. Those people driving those giant pickups mostly don’t own them.
The bank does and they have a car loan for 6 years to go with their student loans from two decades ago.
.2. The US doesn’t make small pickups any more. Even the foreign makes manufactured in the USA don’t make them.
Toyota stopped making small pickups in 2004. The newer Tacomas are mid sized or larger.
.3. The US car manufacturers don’t make gas sedan cars any more either. It’s all pickups and SUVs. And maybe an EV here and there.
.4. Those giant pickups with the small beds don’t get great mileage either. I drove a giant SUV for a few days on a plane trip as it was all the rental company had.
The tank held 24 gallons and the miles per gallon was dismal.
.5. There aren’t even many entry level econo boxes to buy new. You have to go with foreign makes and their aren’t all that many.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
The USA is getting poorer rapidly in terms of buying power per average yearly income.
You would think cheap compact cars like the old Toyotas or Honda Civics or…Volkswagon Beetles or whatever that get good gas mileage and run forever would be in demand and offered for sale new.
Not happening.
A “War on Cars” starter pack article. Blot, pedestrian injuries, and federal policies that led to it.
The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with ridiculously large cars
Is this ‘autos on steroids’ a psychological manifestation of ego or insecurity? It sure has fully captured the car/truck designers and drooling buyers! Too many people are buying into the ‘safety escalation’ size game: ‘I’ve got to have a huge truck to when a huge truck slams into me I’ll survive’. buttheads in bumpercars syndrome. I’d love to have a station wagon of the size of the early-1950’s models that would have greater fuel efficiency (or better yet, electric). They had great visibility, too. they, didn’t rely on a bunch of stupid bewildering cameras shown on a theater sized dash screen.
I encourage people here to visit the subreddit called cyberstuck for all kinds of stories about this disaster of a vehicle.
The Fit is sorta like Civics once were before they morphed into what Accords used to be. I had a 2001 Civic and before being unceremoniously rear-ended en route to work a 2012 Civic. Now I have a 2022 HR-V which is kinda a model replacement for the Fit and being a smallish utility vehicle a slight step toward the Irish Elk. I do love the higher profile. Being off the ground more is nice. The Civic was killing me scrunching in and out. I love the cargo space though Civics are quite surprisingly capacious in the trunk. For some reason the HR-V gets about the same or better fuel mileage as my 2012 Civic did. I love the backup cam. Other than that it’s a basic feature SUV (???) with no major bells and whistles. Give me Bluetooth and I’m happy.
Those behemoths you complain about, I hate them too. They tend to block my view, though it was worse in the Civic. Add diesel and ability to roll coal to the oversized trucks in the runaway escalation to top asshole.
As for smaller vehicles of yesteryear I was treated to this video in my algorithm last night:
A big block 454 in a Chevy Vega is nucking futs. There has always been a tendency to excess. I’ve long wanted a short bed late 60s-early 70s pickup with a roughly 300 cubic inch (283-302) V-8 maybe lowered a little. That’s just me. Nothing too excessive there.
The kids these days with their weirdly cambered stance cars…now don’t get me started on that excessiveness. But at least the stance cars are usually smallish Japanese cars tricked out.
Cars can be extensions of our ego or persona. Oversized trucks may be compensating, but the crew cabs do have a function that trades off with bed capacity for people who actually use them as work trucks. Older short beds seemed to have more capacity than some of the newer stuff.
I had thought there was a tax incentive driving the popularity of large trucks. Hmm…
https://www.inc.com/dan-furman/the-suv-tax-deduction-loopholeis-alive-well-but-its-not-what-you-think-it-is.html
@11 Matt G wrote about: the subreddit called cyberstuck for all kinds of stories about this disaster of a vehicle.
I reply: there are SOOOO many reasons why I wouldn’t buy one of those. Looks like a dumpster, way too expensive, not enough cargo room for a few bags of groceries, stainless steel that rusts?!?, buying one makes the evil elongated muskrat even more obscenely wealthy, too many ‘recalls’, likely won’t last more than a few years without ending up a piece of junk up on concrete blocks in some rtwingnut redneck’s yard.
THE USA and now my idiot Gov’t in Canada have slapped 100% tariffs on any EV import from China.
It was actually possible to buy a small, inexpensive EV before that. See https://motowheeler.com/ca/electric-cars/byd/. Scroll down to see them.
Clearly they cannot be allowed into the US or Canada. The automakers still tell stories of the invasion of the Honda Civic back in the 1970’s.
“Don’t try to tell me these are work vehicles.”
Look at the trailer hitch. If it’s not rusted, it’s likely an oversized sedan.
Still perfectly happy with my 10 year old Toyota Yaris.
Great milage, fits easily in my garage with room to spare.
Haven’t had anything that that I couldn’t fit yet. And if I do, I’ll have it delivered.
Looks like a good reasonable car for anyone not towing a boat.
So, of course, they don’t make or sell them in the USA any more.
Oh no, my freedom is under attack /s
I miss my Ford Escort. Small, light, compact car. Got great gas mileage.
They don’t make them any more.
Our 2007 Ranger finally gave up the ghost. We had to buy a Maverick. We lost a foot and half of bed space (but the truck is heavier! Despite being the exact same length) and now are going to have to buy a tow-hitch conversion just to be able to transport plywood. We couldn’t get a longer bed if we wanted to buy new.
I miss the old S-10s and Rangers (The thing they call a Ranger now is a monstrosity). I cannot be the only people who want a light working truck for the city.
I tell you another trend I hate in modern vehicles: making everything controlled via a touchscreen. Dropping all the buttons so that you have to take your eyes off the road if you want to adjust the temperature or change the radio station is not a great design choice.
raven @17
Just looking at PZ’s Fit versus my HR-V may be a microcosm of the vehicle market trend. Like the Yaris, the Fit is no longer made, the latter replaced by my vehicle. I don’t feel guilty about my vehicle at all. It gets decent gas mileage for a non-hybrid. I can more easily step in and out of it. I can’t even imagine trying to climb into one of the supersized trucks.
I guess the US has voted excessively large trucks in alongside fascism. I always scream under my breath at Trump trucks all decked out in their fashy displays.
antigone10 @19
One of my earlier memories is my dad’s late 50s Chevy Apache rustbucket. He later had smaller trucks like a Datsun and maybe a Toyota. My first new vehicle was a mid 80’s Nissan pickup. I liked the smaller trucks. Great for lowering.
The newer Ford Broncos look kinda neat. But yeah the old S-10s and Rangers were a nice smaller size. Hell I recall the days of the El Camino, which was kinda like taking the rear roof off a station wagon.
The Peugeot 208, in the last image, stopped the production six or seven years ago.
Nowdays, the most sold car in France is the Renault Clio: https://www.renault.fr/vehicules-hybrides/clio-e-tech.html
My partner had a used Toyota pickup from before they were called Tacomas. It was a useful size and reasonable in the city. Two people could ride comfortably in it. When it died, we bought a new Ford Ranger. A little bigger but still small enough for around town though only two people could ride in it…or one person and two dogs. I’ll leave it to your imagination who was driving in that scenario.
That guy last over 20+ years but finally it was just too expensive to repair it. So, we’ve been truck-less for several years. Sometimes we think of getting a new one because my partner is a pack rat (for example, we have about a dozen dog beds but rarely more than one dog). But, the new trucks are so huge.
My son explains that it’s because of something called the CAFE (“Corporate Average Fuel Economy”) standards which determine how vehicles are classified for fuel economy. As I understand it, which I don’t fully get, the standard makes it uneconomical for auto makers to sell light trucks because they are treated as autos with poor fuel economy…or something like that. In any case, there’s a disincentive for automakers to build small trucks.
#7: that sounds like my uncle’s truck that he used on his ranch. Half the size of a modern truck, but big enough that we could load it up with hay bales and drive it out over the fields to feed the cows.
#21: The Fit is no longer made? We’ve had ours for about 14 years, it shows no signs of failing on us, but if it did, we’d want another one. Or something smaller.
We’ve made a couple of flights out to Seattle this year, and had to rent cars to get around in. Every time we get the economy car, I ask for one as small as they can get it, and every time my wife refuses to drive it because it’s way too big. She’d probably divorce me if I bought an F150. I’d divorce me too.
I recall an American friend telling me about how her family used to regularly visit their friends when she was a child. When she said that her family’s friends lived three hundred yards up the road, I imagined them putting their shoes on and walking the three hundred yards along the pavement in their residential district up to their friends’ house. No, I was wrong. They used to pile into their car, back it out of the garage and onto the road, drive those three hundred yards in a straight line all along the kerb, and pull into their friends’ drive before all piling put and knocking on the door to see if they were in. If their friends weren’t home yet, they all got back into the car and drove home.
Lazy, wasteful, and near pointless. Like switching all the house lights on in the evening regardless of which rooms are being used, then only drawing the curtains once the lights are due to be switched off (if at all). The only viable conclusion is that the people who do that have more money than sense.
#24
Atleast in Europe, the Honda Fit/Jazz is still sold: https://www.honda.co.uk/cars/new/jazz-hybrid/overview.html
I saw this today over lunch. It explains a lot.
Most of the time I drive a Hyundai Accent. I hope that by now (I’m almost 77) I’ve learned enough good defensive driving and whatnot to survive here in rural Vermont at least. But its sobering to be reminded every time I go to a parking lot that most of the recent pickups parked next to me have hoods higher than the roof of my car!
I do also have a “mid sized” pickup some years old, which is only moderately oversized, which is to say tiny by current truck standards.
Long ago on a job our vehicle was a 1966 VW pickup truck, same base as the microbus. It had a flat cargo bed larger than any full sized pickup made in the US, and a true carrying capacity of a ton (and I can vouch for its being able to carry a ton and a half, if a bit squirrely). Of course you can’t get one of those any more.
PZ @24
I definitely misspoke. My US-centrism acting up again. The Fit is no longer available in the US:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Fit
For us it no longer exists.
Nissan Versas are still available in the US. Maybe other makes that are equivalent to the Fit.
Wait. What the hell?
https://fortune.com/2024/08/07/mitsubishi-discontinues-mirage/
Ughh!!!
Hey, you might like the HR-V or similar small crossover down the road.
And let’s not forget the oil problem caused by heavier EVs, either. Leaving aside lubricants (which can be economically synthesized from plant oils, even if you reallyreallyreally don’t want to know about the pollution that emits and dangers to workers at industrial quantities), just consider all the plastics and above all the tires. They’re all synthesized from petroleum… and the tires, especially as a vehicle gets heavier, are a bonus source of uncontrolled and probably uncontrollable damage to watersheds and even air through particulate emission as they wear down.
I drove a pickup truck (a Dodge Ram 1500) for the first time in my life earlier this year, simply because that was all Hertz had left when I came to pick up my rental car.
Not a great time to be learning how to drive a honking great big truck on unfamiliar streets at 11pm after a long day’s travel, and one of the first things I noticed was that you can’t even tell if there’s a car behind you (at night) when stopped at traffic signals because you can’t see their lights.
I also didn’t trust myself when changing lanes to the right. Is there a car next to me? Maybe, maybe not.
Everyone in line at the car rental had booked a car, so I couldn’t help be concerned that they were unleashing dozens of rookie truck drivers out across the city and into the night…
What #23 robro’s kid said. It’s CAFE standards.
That’s why station wagons were replaced with minivans and SUVs. That’s why the “dick car” changed from Corvette and Camaro/TransAm/Firebird to a truck, which was previously anything but posh and comfy.
Want that to change? Lobby your Democrats to relax CAFE standards. Republicans live to relax standards. It should be an opportunity for some hot bipartisan action!
Some years ago, I worked at a place where I could see the parking lot in a nearby strip mall. There was a dry cleaners near me. I was always amused when a massive SUV pulled and parked and a small women clambered down from the beast to take a hand full of laundry in to the dry cleaners. Then made the big climb back into the massive SUV.
I was at my local hospital early in the morning for some imaging, and happened to be leaving around shift change. All the nurses were driving up in their F-150s. For all the hauling nurses need to do.
And now winter starts. We have all seen pictures of the rusting Tesla cCyber Trucks. This will be the first year Tesla Cyber Trucks will face winter in Northern states with snow and ice. And sand and salt. I predict a lot of very unhappy Cyber Truck owners come May 2025 in these Northern states.
From my link @3
Agree on car sizes, not so much on the Irish elk analogy.
[1] “Within male groups, winterkill was the chief cause of death and was highest among juveniles and small adults with small antlers.”
[2] “…because antler mass is expected to have been evolutionarily labile, nutritionally sensitive, and ontogenetically variable and male mortality is expected to have had limited impact on population growth, the large antlers of Irish elk probably had little to do with the extinction. We focus on the reproductive energetics of females as a possible contributor to extinction, and model the nutritional demands of producing precocial cursorial young. Our model shows the reproductive output of females being reduced by 50% due to changes in the length of the growing season at the end of the Pleistocene when most populations of Irish elk went extinct.”
wow
“screwcab” was an Alberta thing????
This brings to mind the Top Gear episodes concerning the ‘Indestructible Hilux’. check it out.https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/The_Indestructible_Hilux
So the current Ford F-150 is basically a small minivan with an exposed trunk added on, right? It’s not a truck at all.