So much of what is toxic about cars and car culture could be fixed by downsizing and slowing them. Primarily, less injuries and deaths - but also lower overall energy consumption and less pedestrian and cyclist hostility. I wish north america would fully get on board with these small EVs
It sounds like you speak for the half of the population that lives near and in metro areas. I think if you were used to the scale of the less-populated areas, where a 'short' drive is 30 minutes, you might realize that what you hope for is laughably out of touch with about half of the US.
Only 20% of the US population lives in rural areas[0]. Pre-pandemic, the national average one-way commute time was half an hour[1]. Given typical (pre-pandemic) traffic in most cities, much of that commute time will be spent in traffic congestion and very little will be spent at high speeds.
Rural areas, and locations with severe winter weather, have special needs for which higher speeds and more robust vehicles are appropriate, but smaller, lighter, and slower vehicles are a viable option for most Americans.
It's laughably out of touch to believe the US is even half rural. That ship sailed a very long time ago.
I see this stat come up from time to time in HN discussions but what is sometimes lost is that what the census considers “urban” is pretty far from common parlance usage of the term. According to the census, to not be “rural” you only need a population above 2,500.[1] Having lived in communities this small, long commutes can be a fairly regular part of life. I would venture to say most people would consider much of the “urban” dwellers by census standards live quite a “rural” life.
I found that intriguing, so I looked into it a bit.
The census defines 3 population area groups, urban areas (+50k), urban clusters (2.5k-50k), and rural (-2.5k).
If you combine urban clusters and rural that’s still only 28% of the population, and you’ll be including a lot of people who don’t consider life very rural.
This is a good point and appreciate the leg work. I think the issue still remains that these census definitions are almost too broad to be useful in this regard.
Last year, I took a trip to Roswell NM. This is close to the population cut-off for “urban” at about 49k people. Would Roswell suddenly become NYC-like if 1500 people migrated there? The idea that Roswell and Manhattan can be in the same classification is not very useful in terms of defining policy. The lifestyle for each is widely divergent and I think they each have very different transportation needs.
Cars are made for people who buy cars, not want or use cars.
It could be 28%, or 60%, or whatever. But people who buy cars buy pickup trucks and not small EVs. What more is there to it? If you want to find out why, ask them, or convince people interested in small EVs to you know, actually buy some.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, but I don’t think this take is particularly useful. The GP comment was about the toxic nature of car culture. The parent comment implies this culture is rooted in demographics and geography. If one believes this is a problem to be fixed, those causes need to be understood. As a professor once told me, “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and still wrong.”
I don’t think saying “cars are made for people who buy cars” is helpful unless you are willing to elaborate on why they want those cars. If you don’t think the geography is a main driver, this forum is a good place to discuss counter-examples
In some areas, sure. In others, driving an EV or hybrid provides social status. To the larger point, the US is huge and diverse. Understanding the differences and the reasons behind them is important. It’s hard to make those kind of blanket generalizations for the entire country
Not really. Most people who buy large vehicles just like large vehicles. It really is that simple. They may have all kinds of justifications when pressed, but with few exceptions, it's simply a preference.
I don't fully know if this is the best way to approximate the original posit, which is basically people in the US have to drive super far. However, even in your approximation that is slightly over 92 Million people. Leaving aside the rest of the population that may have to travel in between urban areas and have no rail or reasonable public transit to supplement a car in most situations.
So you need exceptions for those people. Something that has to be considered during implementation, but not a general showstopper.
Sometimes in those discussions I’m extremely confused. It’s as though the concept of an exception doesn’t exist and any counter example prevents some policy suggestion, no matter how minor.
Administering a policy with a ton of loopholes and exceptions almost always becomes a rotting, horrible thing. Look at tax codes.
You need exceptions for 90 million people? How does that get enforced, generally? Even though no one has mentioned a specific policy that we can have a concrete discussion about, I see the abstract problem.
I don’t know. It sounds like you’re just annoyed at the thought of some regulation getting in the way of you and your car, and will come up with random arguments against it.
I was actually thinking of writing "as a non-driver..." at the beginning of my post. Dude. I'm 20 and I don't own a car, I take public transit and bike everywhere. But I also have traveled to rural areas and I see how they use automobiles and it doesn't seem feasible to implement a system like this to me.
Well, when you decided it's your business to judge what car I should be buying, based on your perception of my needs and wants, it did feel a bit annoying.
Just because 90 million is a minority doesn't make 90 million insignificant. This is a difficult problem to solve. Recognizing that first and foremost will bring you down the path of:
1. We need a solution for actual urban populations
2. We also need a solution for the 90 million that don't fall under solution 1
3. and finally, we shouldn't be forcing people to buy specific cars. Not saying EV are bad, just that the market needs to start being more competetive, and automakers need to care more. People tend to follow the crowd, if lawmakers were serious about the environment, automakers would have a harder time continuing selling new cars every year(waste), and even more so non electric vehicles.
I think there will still be a niche market for ICE vehicles for a very long time, but people who are not "car people" would very easily be driving EVs if they were more popular. Most won't notice the difference.
This is an important pragmatic point that reminded me of a study that tried to change people's behavior as it related to environmental impact. As I remember it, they tried three approaches:
1) Communicating the benefits of the change (e.g., look how much money you'd save)
2) Shaming the current behavior (e.g., look how much damage you're creating in the environment)
3) Communicating that a large proportion of your neighbors have already changed their behavior
The only one that effectively made any difference in people's behavior was #3
I do know that much of Europe is something less than urban by this measure, and they seem to get by fine with a lot fewer cars, and the cars they have are almost always much smaller than ours.
Perhaps this is one of those self perpetuating problems.
I could go into a lengthy explanation on this point, but it boils down to a difference in culture primarily rooted in (1) available space and (2) historical land usage.
And what you're referring to is not a problem, because it is objectively useful to have a large truck in the middle of nowhere. I enjoy being able to move lots of things at once without asking another person for help. Also, have you ever had a tract of land in a rural part of the USA? It's quite nice.
Europeans have a tendency to think they're superior to Americans, but that's just classist crap that needs to stop. The USA has cool things, and so do Germans and Austrians and Belgians and the French and so on. Why divide ourselves?
Actually I’m speaking from personal experience with rural life in several places in the US and in Europe.
While I agree that each has their advantages and disadvantages, transportation is something many places in Europe have something to show us IMHO.
A small village would typically have a train station where you can quickly travel to a populated area and urban cores are often nearly completely restricted from cars excepting deliveries making for walkable daily life.
It’s true that having a personal vehicle is more convenient, but in my opinion that is a bit of a tragedy of the commons. If everyone decides to have one then we all pay the price in needing one to get anywhere.
I’m really not sure where class figures into these two different models honestly.
> A small village would typically have a train station
Having been born and raised in a typical small village in The Netherlands (population then ± 12000) with a lot of smaller and slightly larger villages around, there were no train station in sight for at least 30km. I had to travel to the big city to get to the nearest train station, which took about an hour by bus. And this is the norm rather than the exception.
The problem with trains is that the tracks are put in relatively straight between large cities. If your village is on that line between these cities, you're in luck and probably have a station close-by. Otherwise, you're out of luck and have to hope there is a reasonable frequent bus line going to your closest station.
Of course, because these bus lines tend to follow the more historical routes between cities, visiting each and every village in between, getting to the nearest big city by bus might take up to three times as long as just taking your own car.
Heck, if I'd not mind cycling fast (just over 20km/h) for an hour and a half I'd also be in the city. Just half an hour after the bus would get there. Actually, that was nice in summer as a poor high school student.
Americans, having traveled from center of one city to the center of another on a European train think trains connect even neighborhoods and suburbs of European cities. And that these trains are always running to serve you.
Trains work well when you have enough people to care to use the infrastructure. But if not, you might try buses. I saw a rural village in Hungary (~80 people) which has a bus stop to the nearest town. That's very nice, but the village center is a mile walk from the bus stop on the highway. My point is that a train may not automatically work. (Some rural communities in the USA do have similar bus routes.)
I'm curious: what is your example of a small European village with a train line? I'm asking because I just picked a random American town on the map: Spencer, Iowa. ~11k people, and it's about a two hour drive (~100 miles) in all directions to a larger city. A two hour drive is a decent drive, but it's not much overall, especially if you're comfortable driving. It's quite hard to find a similar scenario in Europe: these vast, sparsely-populated tracts of land. And that's my primary point: Europe's population is distributed more uniformly and densely than the USA. A blanket claim about how x transportation mode must be used in the USA ignores the stark regional variations.
Sure, in certain large cities, widespread car ownership may lead to a tragedy of the commons scenario, but it's on a per-city basis. The vast majority of cities in the USA will never encounter this problem because their "commons" are just so big, all cows still find a spot to graze. The cities that do encounter large traffic jams eventually build public transportation infrastructure to reduce the burden on roadways.
Playing out the maximal scenarios, I'd much rather live in a world where everyone drives cars than everyone rides trains. A mix of both is even better.
Walkable downtowns are great, and cities of all sizes should have them.
"I'm curious: what is your example of a small European village with a train line?"
Huh?
We have lots and lots of train lines, also passing through very small villages. But sure, not at all to every village, so there are also enough villages, where only a bus goes. And in some only sometimes. Maybe only on the weekend, maybe only weekdays.
My understanding of rural Germany is that villages are usually are within 6 km of each other. Is this fairly accurate?
I remember seeing a video or article about how towns in rural USA are ~15 miles (24 km) away from each other because half this distance is what a person could walk in a day, handle in-town business, and be home by dark.
"My understanding of rural Germany is that villages are usually are within 6 km of each other. Is this fairly accurate?"
Pretty much. You have to search for places, where that distance is higher. But there is a increasingly number of ghost villages, where only some old people remain.
Your life choices decide if you need a car or not, you can live perfectly fine in rural Europe without a car. Sure I only had 10 km to nearest busstop, 15 km to nearest store and 60 km to nearest highspeed trainstation. So not really that rural, but you do not need a car even if those distances are longer.
Most people do have a car so the pressure is high to get one, it is also cheapin rural areas of Sweden. Parking is free, always available, most of the infrastructure is slowly being erroded by car centric design. So yes soon you will be required to have a car in some rural areas to be able to travel anywhare ot get food.
"Sure I only had 10 km to nearest busstop ... but you do not need a car even if those distances are longer."
And you had those conditions, while having a family? I doubt that can work out, my wife is pregnant, for example. She cannot walk or cycle 10 km to get anywhere.
Anyway, we had the choice and we live in a village with a supermarket and trainstation. But if we had to live in a place you describe, it would not work without a car.
>The largest H-bomb test ever carried out was in Europe!
While technically Severny Island is "in Europe" in the historical continental sense, Russian arctic islands aren't what anyone is referring to as a comparison point with the US in this discussion. Nor Russia in general for that matter.
"It's quite hard to find a similar scenario in Europe: these vast, sparsely-populated tracts of land."
Saying that a part of Europe should be excluded from debate about whether Europe has "sparsely-populated tracts of land" because it is remote and sparsely populated seems a bit circular.
A sizeable chunk of Russia is in Europe - not sure why that should be excluded?
Edit: If people mean the EU or Western Europe when they say "Europe" then that's fine - but it's arguably similar to people from Europe only regarding the US as the two coasts!
>If people mean the EU or Western Europe when they say "Europe" then that's fine
Yep, that's what I refer to. I imagine most Americans do as well. From my perspective, I don't expect Europeans to automatically include considerations of Alaska.
>it's arguably similar to people from Europe only regarding the US as the two coasts!
A well-known term in the USA is "fly-over country." That refers to all the land between the two coasts. Our own "coasties" already view the rest of the country as another world. We already do that to ourseleves!
It's not classist at all. Stop being so defensive about constructive criticism. It's defeatist and the US should welcome good suggestions about how to make life better.
Good god the "cool stuff" that the US has in no way shape or form compensates for the poor lives that the majority of the country leads.
>It's not classist at all. Stop being so defensive about constructive criticism.
If a train is the best solution for a USA community, by all means, make it happen! However, trains are optimal in the USA in far fewer scenarios than either automobiles, buses, or airplanes.
(2) - most "historical" land use differences that can be attributed to the automobile are recent, because the US did not even fully embrace the automobile until after the war. New Urbanism started because architects realized that postwar zoning codes made constructing a traditional New England town center illegal. And most rural towns today even have dead or dying Main Streets caused by the huge shift towards automobile dependent big box stores.
This sounds like the rhetoric around gun rights, where any amount of regulation on guns becomes an absolute seizure of the right to have any gun. No one is talking about an absolute zero automobile society; even societies that deprioritize the car still have cars available, just not as the first choice. Cars don't have to be dominant to be available and usable.
>most "historical" land use differences that can be attributed to the automobile are recent, because the US did not even fully embrace the automobile until after the war
No disrepsect, but did any country? Trains were used extensively, but the double-whammy of automobiles and airplanes did do a number on the attractiveness of trains.
>And most rural towns today even have dead or dying Main Streets caused by the huge shift towards automobile dependent big box stores.
Mmm. I feel that's a case of "correlation != causation."
- The decades-long export of jobs (avoidable or not) depleted available capital in the community. With little money and work, supporting businesses (mostly those in town centers) greatly struggled, and many folded.
- Big box stores use economies of scale to undercut Main Street prices, which further accelerates the collapse of small business. Dollar General is an interesting example, where they (in my view) have tried to fill the gaps these collapses left.
- Big box stores are inherently large, so good luck finding a tract of land big enough in a rural downtown. If a rural community has a bus line, I'd wager good money that the Walmart has a stop.
>This sounds like the rhetoric around gun rights, where any amount of regulation on guns becomes an absolute seizure of the right to have any gun.
Gun rights are constitutionally protected, whereas no law says "the right to own vehicles, being necessary for the operation of a free society, shall not be infringed." Some people really, really love the law if it makes them feel more secure (and that's okay). Also, bear (heh) in mind gun rhetoric in today's age is manufactured for political purposes.
>Cars don't have to be dominant to be available and usable.
Agreed. If cars are less optimal than other transportation modes, people will chose otherwise. But in the vast majority of the USA, except for commuting, cars enable more liberty than trains at lower levels of efficiency. Not the worst thing, in my opinion.
This seems to be the point missed. It’s almost as if many commentators assume everyone is trying to optimize for the same thing in all cases. Some are talking about optimal access and freedom of movement, some for cost, some for efficiency etc.
I agree - the media constantly posts these “other countries look at USA in bewilderment” articles as if anyone in the US should care what others think. I’m constantly amazed that Europe has insanely high taxes, low growth, and tiny innovation yet no one every speaks of my bewilderment.
Everyone has cool stuff, but there are bad things to say about every country in addition to good things.
Well, not everywhere in Europe has insanely high taxes and for a fair comparison I’d add what Americans pay in health insurance anyway.
As for high growth, Europe doesn’t have the space to engage in pump & dump real estate and the same scale of military subsidies that made the fortunes of many US industries.
Germans don’t care what New Yorkers think about Germany. A news article about Americans taking pity on Germany would never land in Der Spiegel but we don’t call that German exceptionalism.
Germans may not care specifically about New Yorkers' every thought about their country but they do compare their results internationally. Here's a Der Spiegel article about how the German PISA results are good but could be better: https://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/pisa-studie-der...
Ah yes, the “true happiness is simply moving to another country” argument. The truth is that life is what you make of it - the happiness you seek cannot be provided by any government. Plenty of people are happy and plenty of people are empty, sad, unfulfilled, and depressed in every country on earth.
That said, I will prefer to live in places that give me more choice - more economic choice, more living choices, more everything choices. I am by any global metric a wealthy person and my US tax rate is very low compared to every other western nation except for tax shelter countries. And I prefer to have less government mandating where my wealth is spent and retain more control over my life.
What’s so wonderful is that apparently anyone (just like yourself!) can so easily uproot their entire lives to experiment living in two different countries! Although research tells me that Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, and France have very difficult requirements for immigration. I need to learn Dutch? Huh? In the USA it’s so much easier!
I'm a bit unclear about your ending. You want to move to the Netherlands but don't want to learn Dutch?
Are you one of those Californians who are desperate to escape California but then try to change all the rules of your new home to match what you had in California? Just so you know, this is very irritating to your new neighbors.
I live in the USA. I like it here. But you say it is better because it has lower taxes and doesn't make you learn Dutch. Others point out that your taxes + your health insurance premiums + doctor fees are not less than Netherland's taxes that include healthcare.
When I lived outside the USA I made a significant effort to learn the language. I've never understood why one would not.
If these are your main reasons for preferring the USA they seem pretty weak. Your first paragraph is a much stronger position.
The healthcare situation in the USA is totally bonkers, but in general I prefer to be taxed less and receive fewer services from the government, and then use the saved money to select (or go without) my own service providers.
As a result, your less wealthy neighbors are worse off. And you also suffer because of this as well, you just don't realize.
Anyway, it sounds like you deserve all of the problems of the US since you're not actually interested in making anything better. As a result, you'd be a net negative to anywhere you move with that mindset.
What’s interesting is that two sectors that have had costs rising much faster than inflation for decades are healthcare and college in the US. Replace “physicians” with “professors” and you have a visually identical graph for college costs
And significantly lower incomes in ruralish areas where public transportation infrastructure is rubbish, vast swathes of Europe are still impressively poor.
There are plenty of personal vehicles in rural southern Germany, SUVs and all, to the point I’d go so far as to call it the norm. Not the case in the Balkans, though.
I was never a fan of meeting these monstrous F-150s in an urban setting as a pedestrian. However, linking "Rural" to the right to drive a pickup is still a bit cringeworthy IMO.
Most NYC urbanites I know e.g. wouldn't describe Staten Island or most/all of New Jersey as densley populated. Yet, the workers/contractors that can't afford to live in the center or dumbo have to get their tools into the city somehow, if they are to fix my 150k+/year income earning friends condos.
So now I found your stats intriguing and looking into it: That alledged 72% urban area inhabitants include non-dense areas like staten island and NJ, so I guess the stats are a bit misleading?
>linking "Rural" to the right to drive a pickup is still a bit cringeworthy IMO.
Can you please show where this point was stated? It seems like you are reading between the lines too much and straw manning.
The point is that “urban” by the definition used to create the statistic in the argument is a very broad term and this makes it difficult to draw good generalizations.
I don’t think a claim for “needing personal transportation with a large range” should be equated to “must be using pickups as commuter vehicles”
but smaller, lighter, and slower vehicles are a viable option for most American as a response to So much of what is toxic about cars and car culture could be fixed by downsizing and slowing them. […] I wish north america would fully get on board with these small EVs
Not much of a strawman to me, rather good old urbanite-intellectual disregard for the life-styles/social classes driving these big vehicles.
makes it difficult to draw good generalizations. Agreed, which is why I would refrain to claim that 80% of Americans live in areas with a density above 50k. As the census noted, this is clearly not the case if e.g. Staten Island has a density of 8k.
When I'm in the US, and get the chance to walk around some city's blocks, these things are nothing but intimidating to me. Being rather tall, I'm not used to cross a traffic light as pedestrian and not being able to see above the hood of the car I'm passing. It has a different vibe to it, if this towering above me isn't caused by the vehicle owner's commercial needs but because the driver fancies it.
It’s fairly common to see F150s as regular commuter vehicles but anything larger tends to be bought with work in mind. Once you get above an F350 it’s pretty much purpose-built (construction, recreational vehicles etc.) and I don’t know anybody (including those from west Texas) who’d primarily use these as a commuter vehicle. By any measure an F650 is relatively rare and huge
On the other hand, 54% of rural people live within a metro area. TBH this cuts both ways. I've dug deep into this data using satellite imagery. From a "qualitative" stand-point, most Americans live in what midwesterners would call cities or suburbs.
A Smart Car or Yaris or whatever will do just fine for commuting from rural Floyd County into Atlanta. Been there, done that. It. Is. Fine.
Conversely, a fully-size sedan is the minimal useful car if you want to go the ~10 blocks or whatever from Michigan Ave to the beach in mid January. Again, been there and done that. It. Is. Not! Fine.
This is less of a urban/rural thing and more of a weather/climate thing.
I suppose it's subjective but driving a little penalty box like a Yaris on longer trips is a miserable experience, especially if you're tall. It's cramped and has poor NVH experience.
I suspect you haven't driven any small cars for a long time, would that be correct?
I have an Opel Corsa (supermini/subcompact) rental car right now, and it's both roomy, quiet and comfortable. The little 1.4L engine gets to motorway speed a lot faster than you'd think, plus it's quiet and smooth, really very little vibration felt at all, not even at 50kph in 5th gear.
The front seat pulls back enough that I literally cannot reach the steering wheel or pedals, and I have plenty of headroom (178cm/5'10").
Modern cars in all segments are generally comfortable and quiet, because that's what people want.
The Opel Corsa isn't sold in America so I'm unfamiliar with it but I had driven a variety of other small rental cars during the past few years before the pandemic. I even own a small car myself and it's good enough for short trips but for longer drives my large CUV is far more comfortable.
I owned a subcompact car and an suv. The suv was mostly for the long hauls, and I never drive the smaller car more than 30 minutes. We got rid of the suv because we realized it’s cheaper to just rent the few times of the year we really needed the extra space for those long hauls. Fwiw :)
I live in Florida without a car. Where there is a will there is a way.
The truth is the lack of proper urban planning due to over reliance on the automobile is why European cities always feel so much nicer than cities in the states you mention.
If we continue to embrace sprawl then we will continue to have long commutes, worse health, and be isolated in our homes without anything to walk to.
Maybe more transit, but it doesn't really help when it's not usable for folks. The biggest difference between US and Europe I've noticed (except that everything is bigger in the US) is the lack of grocery stores in the US. There's huge subdivisions with no grocery stores, so you have to enter the highway to get to a grocery store. Walking is not practically possible. In my small suburb in a small town in a small country in Europe there's two grocery stores within walking distance, four within a short bike ride. Not huge stores like Wallmart or well stocked like, I don't know, Whole Foods, but small grocery stores that sells food and everyday products.
> is why European cities always feel so much nicer than cities in the states you mention.
Speak for yourself. It’s all about priorities and they only feel nicer if you don’t care about affordable houses with private yards and prioritize walkability.
I get it that you don't have a family or maybe you just don't have the money.
Here in Canada there was this provincial deputy from a very left leaning and pro public transport party that got elected. You know the first thing she did with her salary? She bought a SUV (https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2018/11/19/la-deputee-catherine-...)
> The truth is the lack of proper urban planning due to over reliance on the automobile is why European cities always feel so much nicer than cities in the states you mention.
And we saw how that was great during the pandemic, and that's not even mentioning other calamities that could happen. And that's not even taking snow into account. Not everyone lives in California.
> If we continue to embrace sprawl then we will continue to have long commutes, worse health, and be isolated in our homes without anything to walk to.
Or organize planning so that everything is more distributed. There are no reasons for mega cities to exist in the Internet Age.
> Here in Canada there was this provincial deputy from a very left leaning and pro public transport party that got elected. You know the first thing she did with her salary? She bought a SUV (https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2018/11/19/la-deputee-catherine-...)
That is a nice sound bite and proves nothing. Someone campaigning on a pro public transit agenda may well not believe that transit is yet suitable, and running on that platform is hardly incompatible with car ownership. They are nowhere near mutually exclusive. If you live in Toronto, a train won’t take you to the cottage up in the Kawarthas, nor should it more than likely. Not sure where provincial politicians have their cottages —- the Laurentides?
Cars will have uses even if transit is beefed up, certainly in the winter. Good on the provincial deputy. Or at least, a big shrug.
> And we saw how that was great during the pandemic, and that's not even mentioning other calamities that could happen. And that's not even taking snow into account. Not everyone lives in California.
We did. European cities fared much better than American ones and continue to. That’s got little to do with how the city is laid out and everything to do with how those in it act in the face of shared danger.
> Or organize planning so that everything is more distributed. There are no reasons for mega cities to exist in the Internet Age.
Sure there is. It’s vastly, and I do mean, vastly, more efficient. In terms of water, in terms of energy, in terms of carbon footprint, in terms of space. Vastly. That alone makes not having cities a dealbreaker for some whole countries like Australia where these resources are at a premium.
The other poster explained well why mega cities in fact make a ton of sense for the health of the planet and the ability to plan public transportation and other services.
Europe has done significantly better with the pandemic so your point doesn’t make sense. The walkability of their towns and cities is a benefit during coronavirus.
I’ll just add that your assumptions are wrong. I can easily afford a car and it’s this sort of car-centric attitude that people without them must be too broke to afford them that is emblematic of why North America has such poor planning.
Georgia and much of the US has car-requiring zoning laws that should change to allow more intelligent use of land and not necessitate ridiculous commutes.
The common wisdom in a lot of the States is that car size is an arms race. If you drive a little car, you’re in more danger in an accident. 70% of auto sales last year were SUVs and trucks too.
The city I just left, Boise ID, had 80% of people driving to work alone in these suburbitanks.
We're talking about two types of car so we understand they were designed for cars. Is there something particularly interesting about electric cars with the suburban model?
Suburban environment is not so dense so you could expect the nearest fast charger be pretty far away. Driving in a city traffic involves a lot of acceleration and slowing down, where the electric recuperative braking shines, unlike on a highway. OTOH in suburban setting you have a good chance to be able to put a fast charger into your garage (and you have a garage!), and maybe even charge the car from solar panels on your roof (and the roof is yours!). In a city, chances are you park in a multi-level parking or on a street, and charging your car from an electric outlet of your third-floor apartment is not realistic. The parking garage has a higher chance to provide charging, though.
I grew up in Northern Michigan, 6+ foot snow piles from drifts were the norm. Growing up, all we could ever afford were tiny sedans. Can you do it, sure, absolutely. The problem is a sedan not capable for all winter tasks, even minor inclines on ice create a major impediment to getting to work. My mother recently chose to spend a little extra on here quality of life and purchased her first SUV. The effect is that you forget ice even exists, it's incredible!
To me, this entire problem can be solved by having a market with varying options for varying situations in life. If you don't want to spend the extra money on a big SUV, you don't have to, and one can use their own reasoning to decide what's right for them. If some person in Russia is happy with driving a crappy little car, all the more power to them. If they want to spend more on a vehicle that more adequately handles the conditions, I would be happy to sell them a big SUV!
I've lived in both rural areas in secluded towns of less than 3000 people in the wintery north and in cities with 1 million+ metros that hardly get a few inches of rain, let alone snow. Different situations call for different tools and if one doesn't like their current mode of transport, they are always free to either move somewhere that fits with their lifestyle more adequately or simply change modes of transportation.
I'm all about the right tool for the job for your life. Personally, I hate snow and love walking so I choose a city that is both walkable has relatively short winter months (Ann Arbor, MI). I'm able to walk or bike to work for most of the year, but I choose to own a vehicle to handle snowy days and Costco visits. Could I get rid of my car? Absolutely. Uber, Lyft, and good neighbors to the rescue... but the cost of ownership is so low compared to the value I get in return. By keeping my car and paying a small amount for gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.., I get to travel anywhere in the continental united states whenever I damn well please without talking to another person, why would I want to get rid of that? If my neighbor hates to travel, hates driving, and is fine with walking a few blocks or waiting on the bus/train to get groceries every few days, all the more power to them. Been there, done that, I'll take my car.
> The problem is a sedan not capable for all winter tasks, even minor inclines on ice create a major impediment to getting to work.
this is some very weird bullshit. i would (and always do) chose a smaller/lighter vehicle over the heavier one any time i need to go through the ice/snow.
the only explanation i can think of is that they tried it on summer tires? but itd be too stupid, wouldnt it?
Honestly not sure, someone with more of a physics background should chime in! We always had winter tires and were quite religious about checking treads, pressure, etc.. as we had to be.
If you equal SUV with AWD then it may be true.
However if your sedan had a proper AWD, locking differential(as some Ladas, Subarus, Suzukis, .. have) and slim tires with or without spikes it will beat every now so called SUV with ease.
We always kept our drive free of snow through copious amount of snow blowing and shoveling and if you look at the private roads/driveways up there, that is typically the solution. For the private roads that people didn't shovel or snow plow, they would either ski, snowshoe, or drive a snowmobile. In my view, the issue up there was that government was doing an awful job and the public didn't care enough to change it so it never changed.
> I grew up in Northern Michigan, 6+ foot snow piles from drifts were the norm. Growing up, all we could ever afford were tiny sedans.
Could you not have afforded skis? For 6 feet of snow, they're much better than any car.
> If some person in Russia is happy with driving a crappy little car, all the more power to them. If they want to spend more on a vehicle that more adequately handles the conditions, I would be happy to sell them a big SUV!
Many people in Russia driving crappy little cars often aren't doing that because they prefer it.
> Could you not have afforded skis? For 6 feet of snow, they're much better than any car.
Snowmobiles were extremely common, absolutely! But as someone who doesn't like be cold and wet, they're not exactly the thing I want to ride before sitting down at my desk. As I mentioned in another comment, a lot of my fellow classmates would drive their snowmobiles to school because they either wouldn't get plowed out before noon or they would simply prefer it over the alternatives.
> Many people in Russia driving crappy little cars often aren't doing that because they prefer it.
Well yes, Russia has had it's own problems with creating opportunity and wealth in their country (I assume this is what you are getting at anyway). Policy aside, I disagree with you that they don't prefer it. If that were the case, those people would be walking or doing something else instead of driving those cars. If you are saying those people are not choosing their preferred option due to say, someone forcing them to do something else by gun point, well then I would say we are discussing very different things and I'll leave it at that.
Edit: I should also note, I loved to ski! It's roller-blades with snow and when I could, I would!
The real difference is not AWD/4WD, it's tire quality. Any car will do great on snow and ice with good winter tires, the key to all winter driving is to be smooth on all inputs you give the car.
Remember that your AWD car may put power to the ground through all four tires, but it has the same braking capabilities as any other car. Please don't over-speed your braking distance.
The best vehicle I’ve ever had in the snow was pretty small - a (2001?) Mercury Cougar. I live in Minnesota and I remember staying at a girlfriend’s apartment overnight during a snow storm. The next day we had someplace to be and she was really worried we weren’t going to be able to get out of the parking lot because people were needing to shovel out their big trucks.
I told her it wasn’t a problem and just rocked my way out of the space and on we went. Snow tires are amazing, and it’s incredible to me how few people get them here.
Soviet Russia even created the Lada Niva (which is still build), a precursor to modern SUVs in that it features a self-supporting chassis. It's small enough to put on the side for changing tyres.
Even parts of the US that are "urban" are sprawling highway dependent beasts. Go to Houston or even the SF Bay Area. That's not even counting the sprawling suburbs that can go for 50+ miles around the city. They're technically urban but not dense enough to get anywhere without a highway. San Francisco to South Bay is like 45 minutes on the highway without traffic. I did that trip every few weeks when I lived there to see one friend or another. My daily commute was 15 minutes on the highway at highway speeds and I avoided traffic by starting and leaving later.
Most of Texas is not considered to be rural by this basis and still most commutes of 30 minutes in places like Houston, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Amarillo, Beaumont, and San Antonio are considered “short drives”.
Semi-rural areas need big, fast vehicles as well. Have you ever been to a medium-size, out-of-the-way town outside of a popular urban space? They're everywhere, and they're super spread out.
I wish it was standard practice for cities to move away from the highways connecting them to other regions. Have a loop circling the city. Then have park and rent or ride areas for people visiting. Or go the other way and take the ~20% real estate tax of increasing parking lot and road widths. I don’t see either as viable.
Another idea would be to build out bullet trains and infrastructure. Make a societal decision to reconnect all rural areas so living there and working in any of a number of cities is readily accessible.
> Given typical (pre-pandemic) traffic in most cities, much of that commute time will be spent in traffic congestion and very little will be spent at high speeds.
That is not factually accurate given your prior statement.
In my personal case I have to sometimes wait 30-40 mins in traffic to get to the freeway about 5 miles away but once there the remaining 40 miles of commute takes about 30 minutes. This about average in the super giant US urban area where I live.
Yup. It's hilariously naive to think that as GDP goes slowly up over time (with the occasional dip) people are gonna somehow accept lower standards of living, smaller cars.
Society just doesn't go backwards in terms of living standards unless there's literally no other choice and forcing it backwards artificially is not something people will take kindly to.
Given a sufficiently strong government you might be able to get people to suck it up for awhile but that "awhile" is gonna end with a lot of people getting shot.
> Being bigger doesn't automatically make a car better at snow.
Huh yes it does. Especially 4x4 and higher to the ground which are two qualities SUVs and trucks tend to have compared to "normal" cars.
> A family with kids probably has more than one car, and probably only needs one big one.
First of all that's not true, it's pretty much 50/50 if there's only one car or not and it mostly depends on budget, work location and schedule. Also, people with families tend to bring with them more stuff than what can be put inside the trunk.
Spend some time in actually wintery places, like the north of Sweden/Norway/Finland, or Siberia, and you'll find most people don't drive large vehicles. AWD and snow tires make a far bigger difference than raw size, and plenty of SUVs are utterly terrible in winter conditions.
I am guessing that you haven't been to the north of any of the Scandinavian countries I mentioned. Stockholm is indeed pretty moderate. Luleå in winter, not so much. Svalbard, not moderate at all.
I bet a small car with 4x4 will beat a big car without it under most snow situations. And you don't need all that much ground clearance for snow in most of the US.
Saying bigger vehicles "tend to" have 4x4 is not a counter to what I said.
Hard disagree. I've got a couple identical wagons (same model, year and everything) and one of them is optioned AWD while another is optioned FWD. The FWD one gets snow tires every winter and it's still the crap one of the bunch. I bet if I constructed some tire commercial-esque test where I compared handling on a literal ice rink it might win but in real world driving conditions (snow under 6" that's been churned into partial slush by the melting action of road salt and the last bunch of cars) it's still second place.
I am comparing some of the cheapest all-seasons on earth to some of the cheapest snow tires on earth in a vehicle platform that was renown at the time for having one of the most effective AWD systems so if I were to compare high dollar all seasons to high dollar snow tires in a vehicle known for having particularly bad AWD the results may be different.
Tire quality makes all the difference. If you value traction and safety, please don't skimp on tires. Buy the good ones, the difference in braking performance alone is massive.
There are plenty of "regular" cars with 4x4, and mini SUVs. There's even a little Fiat Panda 4x4. Just because the US market is dominated by large SUVs and trucks doesn't mean that there's something inherent about that.
Small 4x4 cars tend to cost way to much for what they provide (that transmission and two differentials take place!) and again, clearance under the car is very important to not get stuck (which can happen one-two weeks)
People will often make choices of accepting an inferior product for vastly cheaper price. So yeah it is possible it is about how many choices you have and what are the different costs for each choice.
This is in the form of not having the latest and greatest where suburban families might buy used 5-10 year old large sedans and SUVs instead of a comparable small car from 2019. If Americans were fine with smaller cars, they'd buy more smart cars and MINIs, but that isn't the case.
I live in a city that likes to call itself progressive, near an major arterial. There have been no significant changes to the way its traffic moves in 20 years. During the first couple months of Covid, with a lot of businesses shut down, there was a noticeable traffic reduction. But since mid-summer there's been as much traffic on Saturdays as there is on weekdays. And most of the newer cars are no smaller (every 10th one is quieter).
Short of putting Greening on a wartime-footing - massive incentives for change, including gas-rationing - I don't see the end of the tunnel-vision. The home-heating elephant in the room gets no press.
The earth’s climate will not become incompatible with human life in the next 500+ years in the worst case climate models. Where did you even get that idea?
For a price of less than two units of Brompton electric folding bikes you can get an EV car, really nice engineering there to get to the price point.
This can be a game changer in urban set up especially in my part of the world where it can protect the occupants from the weather that is either rain or hot.
It can also solve the last mile problem and hopefully they can ride share them at the Park & Ride LRT/MRT train stations.
I grew up in a town in Italy where half the population still worked in agriculture, and the FIAT Panda[0] was insanely popular in the '80s, '90s and somewhat even now.
The '80s 4x4 version was basically perfect.
This to say: you do not need a huge modern SUV for non-metropolitan area.
Edit: I just realized there's an underlying issue: you can have more than one vehicle in a family, one larger for specific needs like long trips, and one small for daily usage. This seems to be the default in Europe these days.
Looking at the gradual car-choice changes of the us forces in Italy, I see a slow adapt to smaller vehicles. Still too many huge trucks that seem to carry mostly air, though.
Also the trend of cars getting larger as well as to match the increasing girth of the population i.e my VW Polo (it slots in below the Golf) is now the same dimensions as my 1990 Golf Mk 3.
I come from a very rural world, and I have to say you seem insecure about our common way of life. We are a minority of modern life, and our cars should become the exception due to their size, not the norm. Urban areas have access to deliveries up the wazoo, and their cars should become smaller and electric, to afford us the carbon footprint of our big cars.
I do think that that Americans are largely choosing to use bigger cars with bigger engines that they usually require. There should be a move to small engined, smaller and more efficient autos, but I don't see that in the US.
Just move to one of several cities where the combination of parking and environmental restrictions has had a noticeable impact. It has been done and it should and probably will be done to a greater extent over time.
The city where I used to live in the US, which probably has small cars as US cities go, is very comparable (in this respect) to the city I currently live in across the pond, which probably has large cars as European cities go.
cars made especially those rural areas worse, because cars made it possible for people to travel longer distances in a short amount of time. for this reason stores, schools, and other infrastructure centralised and became mostly only accessible by car.
I think the schools and other public places are just built around the center of it's surrounding population so it can serve everyone best - since everyone is already spread out in rural areas, the schools have to do their best to accommodate the most households they can so that no child is without education. I couldn't find anything about what happens if a school isn't available for someone that building a house in the middle of nowhere, but I imagine state education departments have to make an effort to service all households with public school.
> you might realize that what you hope for is laughably out of touch with about half of the US.
Oddly enough, that's a really good summary of our two-party political system in my opinion. 60m voters on the left, 60m voters on the right. Pretty evenly split down the middle, very little common middleground.
No they do not. Half of Americans live in the suburbs or equivalent, which are not urban environments and certainly nothing remotely compared to what qualifies as an urban environment in eg Europe. Having a Target, Costco, Home Depot, Whole Foods and Starbucks doesn't qualify a region as urban. 70%-75% of Americans don't live in urban environments:
"America Really Is a Nation of Suburbs"
"According to the newly released 2017 American Housing Survey (of nearly 76,000 households nationwide), about 52 percent of people in the United States describe their neighborhood as suburban, while about 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent as rural."
Towns and suburbs are generally classed as urban. Maybe low density urban, but urban nonetheless.
It probably makes sense. Having yards and trees and driving 2 miles to Target is more similar to not having trees and driving 2 miles to Target than it is similar to driving 200 miles to Target.
Given the choice, how would someone living there most often visit a grocery store?
In an urban area walking might be the common mode.
In a suburban area driving is OFTEN going to be the preferred mode, and even in small cities (particularly ones still small enough to have free parking at a nearby grocery store) driving there is still going to be preferred; at least in the US. In my experience Bellevue WA is a small, still suburban like city, while Seattle has crossed the anti-car (and expensive real-estate) line to 'big city'; but is neither old enough (pre-industrial grocery store layouts) nor big enough to be a healthy big urban city.
Offhand, I would define rural as any area where a drive to the third closest typical grocery store is at least a one hour round trip (by car, at legal speeds, including delays at any traffic device or from commute volume).
I wasn't trying to invent a dividing line, more trying to highlight how usage/understanding can vary. Here's some discussion from government statisticians:
Large swaths of the US are what that page calls 'micropolitan', centered around small urban clusters, which are the areas I think cause the most confusion, built up areas that are treated as urban in statistics and conversely thought about as rural by lay audiences.
Automakers will still market to where the dollars are: people who buy cars (17 million/year in the US, 60 million/year globally).
Outside of NYC, Chicago, and SF, there’s very little mass transit to speak of, even in urban areas. Texas and Florida have significant population centers where car ownership is required, and that’s where folks are moving to.
Sure, but they don't necessarily need such big ones. Big cars are primarily a consumer preference thing in the US rather than an actual need, and consumer preferences can change, both organically and due to outside pressure (the 70s oil crisis did reduce the size of American cars significantly, for instance).
Also, of course, bad mass transit is fixable. And potentially fairly cheaply; for the lowish density cities common in the US BRT systems would likely largely be fine.
We can afford them for now. If oil prices go up significantly I’ll seriously reconsider my 18MPG suv... but I’ll reconsider to an alternative that can still support my lifestyle (perhaps Tesla truck, or something like RAV4 Prime/Hybrid but larger). Not a mini car that can’t go fast.
Based on the metric I’m guessing you don’t live in USA? Here we have vast expanses of designated wilderness area (well over 1M sq km), where it can be really quite fun to get up to speed while enjoying the views.
I do live in the USA. I used 100kph because that's the car under discussion.
I've never been to a drivable wilderness area, or on a freeway where I'd be comfortable going all that fast. And if I was going there just to drive hard it would probably be rare enough that I'd rent a really nice fast car.
Average price of a new car in the US is creeping up on average income, so the ‘can afford’ thing may be marginal. The industry seems to be quite effective at making people stretch their spending on this.
That's a specific (I think over represented) use-case. When I had my first kid I considered something large. Looking around I saw people buy large cars after having their first kid and by the time they needed it (driving around friends, hockey equipment, etc) it was 5-7 years old and probably getting swapped out anyway. I'm happy I switched to a 4-door and went with a smaller car. I can carry much more and longer lumber using a roof rack on top of a subcompact than I can inside a larger vehicle. If I need something larger I rent it or have it delivered. Using a bike rack outside the car is much easier than storing it inside. For road trips I'm pretty sure I've seen its cheaper to rent something instead of putting miles on your daily vehicle--so you get a nicer car that's more appropriately sized.
The average number of kids in the US is 1.9 and the median age interval is 2-3 years. That's not that many years of carrying around kids and their gear; one, maybe two cars in a lifetime.
On the other hand, so many Americans drive by themselves, long distances, every day, in giant cars. A lot of people like larger cars because it makes them "feel safe." Or people buy the largest vehicle they can "just in case." I was taken aback when I found out about 10 years when a friend had to run his credit card twice to fill up because it capped the sale at $50 and when gas prices went up he couldn't fill his tank for that.
I feel like I'm the weirdo in the US for preferring smaller cars. I couldn't stand poor pickup of fleet vehicles a decade ago, but as long as they have decent pickup I really love the maneuverability, the ease of parking in smaller spots, and the mileage of a smaller car.
>Until you need to haul 6 kids, or three bikes, or furniture, or hone remodeling supplies from Home Depot, etc.
Station wagon with a roof rack can do any two of those things at once. And I say this as someone who also owns a minivan and a couple trucks. I actually prefer station wagons for hauling sheet material that's too long or wide to fit flat in a pickup bed because it's less of a pain to deal with strapping it to a roof rack than any of the other options.
The problem with this approach is that despite the fact that modern vehicles can support thousands of pounds on (or in) the passenger cabin and that modern air suspension and dynamic shocks (as found on many higher trim SUVs these days) would be fine with the extra weight) it is not socially acceptable (and social norms are very much defined by vocal minorities) to use vehicle at 110% their capacity if you can reasonably avoid to. Imagine the "think of the children" themed hate you'd get if you posted a picture of a Mercedes wagon hauling 300lb of I-beam on the roof or a minivan hauling a ton of paver bricks or a bunch of people crammed into a Honda Fit for a road trip. That's why we can't made do with less.
Audi station wagons are probably the single most common company car in Germany. Much more fun to drive than any SUV for sure.
A lot of the arguments here read like people want an SUV that will fit all the stuff you'd normally just use a trailer for, like moving furniture or a bunch of lumber. This seems very odd to me.
We discovered, after accidentally having twins and bumping the kids count to 3, a typical sedan cannot physically carry more than two children because you cannot fit 3 or more child seats in the back as required by law. That's why families of 3 or more kids have minivans. It's not like the 80s where you toss the kids in a station wagon and let them wander in the back, they are required to be in massive padded seats.
Chicco infant and EvenFlo little and big boosters will get you to three in a back row. Use a seatbelt extender or two to make buckling easier. Not taking away from your point, because parents absolutely prefer two to a row, just helping anyone who happens to read this.
Suburbia has made parents lives needlessly miserable with extra kid hauling. For the other rare occasions, rent a bigger vehicle. The idea that we need to clog the roads to prepare for that 2/y errand is also ridiculous.
> I’m getting tired of the “all I need is a tiny tin box thus so should you” crowd.
I don't care to tell people what they need, but I do want my public space back. Car owner's aggregate decisions absolutely do effect personally and the commons so they have no right to hide behind that shield.
The only one of those that requires a large car is six kids (which is pretty rare). Bike racks work great on small cars. Home Depot delivers. I rent a van or truck to move furniture the one time a year I need to do it. Most people who drive a giant SUV absolutely do not need one.
The comment of yours that I replied to was in response to someone whose first sentence is an acknowledgement that the use case of 6 kids does need such a car.
Then they suggest that the other use cases are valid but people like them don't need such a car despite those use cases.
How did you interpret that as "hectoring other people with different use cases"??
Or alternatively, how much nicer of a car would you like to have for the same money? Most large SUVs are not well-constructed, nor are they much fun to drive. They’re just big.
My smallish wagon does everything a typical family (2 adults, 2 kids, dog) has a regular need for (heck, I carry trees and 2x12s and gravel in it, which is more than most people need). On the rare occasion that I’m buying furniture and they don’t deliver or whatever, I rent a van. As a result, my day-to-day driving experience is infinitely more pleasant.
True! But they’re spending the dollars, so their preference is what will be built for (see: Ford’s vehicle lineup, all trucks and SUVs). And if you attempt to regulate against them, you’ll get voted out (just like NIMBYs).
There are a lot of personal preferences we regulate away. I prefer to drive drunk home from the bar, but that's illegal. I prefer to build buildings without obeying fire safety building codes, but apparently that's also illegal.
30k / year die in car accidents in the USA. This is a real problem with a huge human toll, akin to drunk driving or building codes.
Step 1 is slow the vehicles down. As soon as they slow down, one of the main drivers of size - fear of an accident with a bigger vehicle - will be greatly decreased and we can do step 2: shrink them.
I can't even imagine what that would do to traffic that is already pretty congested. Large swaths of suburban metros would just grind to a halt.
> 30k / year die in car accidents in the USA
Closer to 40K. Even then, that is compared with almost 3 million people who die for all reasons combined. It's actually sort of amazing how low the fatality rate is given just how much movement there is every day. One for every 100,000,000 miles driven. That's remarkable.
Slower speeds means cars drive closer together which means throughput increases (to a point). I think around 60km/h is generally considered the speed which yields the biggest throughput of cars.
I think we need to change our language a bit and stop referring to crashes as accidents.
Crashes are common. Accidents are exceptionally rare. While "accident" is a statement of intent, and outside of extreme road rage scenarios, nobody intends to cause a crash, people do deliberately create dangerous situations that lead to crashes.
You might not have intended to rear-end somebody, but you did choose to text while driving.
You might not have intended to side-swipe somebody, but you did choose to not check your blind spot before changing lanes.
The word "accident" implies a mistake that you couldn't see coming. But when someone chooses to create the dangerous situation, it's no longer an accident, because the situation could have been avoided entirely.
You are also right driving has never been safer. But you could have said that before airbags or abs or even seatbelts.
and fyi, interstate driving is dangerous:
> the fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled in 2015 was still 2.6 times higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.84 in rural areas compared with 0.71 in urban areas)
I already solve this problem on the regular, since I live in an urban area but do not own a car. There are car coops and car share programs that make renting a vehicle incredibly painless. Not hard to imagine a world where there are in-the-city cars and inter-city cars that are designed quite differently.
From your tone I can tell you're not listening, but the car coop in my city has clean well maintained cars that are all less than 5 years old. The car share app has a fleet of prius v's that are in even nicer shape than the coop's cars.
But how often would you need a vehicle that goes +40mph to take your kids somewhere? It'd only be useful for drives where you'll be outside of the city for long enough to make the lower speed matter - since for city driving the limit is almost always traffic and stoplights not your vehicle's top speed.
Op was being an asshole but not wanting to share cars with the population at large is a thing whether it’s “a dirty hippie coop”, a regular rental car, or the backseat of a Lyft.
I don't get it, nothing in the parent comment means getting rid of cars. You made that up entirely.
The point is simply that if a fucking 60 kW transporter can scale the alps, people can do their so necessary drives with something a whole lot less powerful, a lot less hefty than they likely are doing.
Half the us geographically, not by population. You're really exaggerating the nation's dependency and how few people half the metro areas of the US can serve. That's a massive number.
This is obviously a larger issue than what type of car etc, but there's no good reason for Americans to live in suburbs and exurbs and drive hours every day. The entire lifestyle is stupid, but you're right that just offering small electric vehicles won't change that.
Honestly, suburban lifestyle is relaxed, enjoyable, and affordable. It's pretty easy to see the appeal in it.
Most people living in suburban areas do not drive for hours every day. In the time it takes me to cross Boston on public transit, I can drive between two suburban metropolitan areas and have access to a huge variety of people, places, and activites.
Great that you like it, but most people don't. The much higher housing prices in cities demonstrate that people will live there if they can afford it. American suburbs are an artifact first of all of racism in the earlier part of the 20th century, and now they are driven by profiteering by city homeowners who won't allow enough housing to be built in cities.
This forces people to live in bulldozed wildlands because it is cheaper, due to the fact that there isn't anyone to show up to zoning board meetings to block new construction there.
Suburban and rural areas have become hot real estate markets in the past five months; thanks to the remote work policies.
Having lived in a huge city for most of my life, moving out to the suburbs several years earlier was a nice change. I can never see myself moving back.
Sure, people congregate into large cities but that’s because of work and for the bustle.
Value judgement need to be made against an agreed upon standard. I think you'd need to argue that that the the suburban lifestyle is a poor way to the achieve the values that that those who currently like a suburban lifestyle actually have. That might be possible, at least on a margin. I suspect many in the suburbs would actually prefer something more like a "small town."
The closest hackerspace is 30km away from me. I'm not complaining but a world without single family homes would also mean that people can't have personal workshops and therefore there must be public workshops nearby to compensate. Each city would require multiple maker/hackerspaces.
So much of what is beautiful about cars is the ability to choose one that fits your needs, desires, and lifestyle.
Whether you are commuting 40 miles each way to work, hauling large loads for work everyday, bringing your ATV to the trail, or your trash to the dump.
Being able to hit the road in your own private vehicle is a great joy of life, and an essential liberty in America. So much so it’s quintessential of the “American Dream”.
Some people look at these things, and then decide they personally don’t like them, and only see a massive opportunity to regulate or tax them out of existence. Or they see the negative first order effects (e.g. traffic fatalities or pollution) and don’t consider both the first order benefits, nor the second-order costs of eliminating the thing itself.
I doubt I’ll convince anyone, but at least here is my alternative thinking on this. It is extremely important to reduce traffic fatalities, and reduce pollution per mile. Likewise it is also extremely important to allow people to choose their preferred modes and means of transportation.
It is merely a lack of creativity to pit these two goals against each other.
We are on the cusp of a clean energy and clean vehicle revolution, as well as what will arguably be one of the greatest technological accomplishments of humanity; a self driving car.
Dreams of regulating away SUVs or the right of private car ownership are over. Preferences will not be shaped by excessive gasoline taxes much longer. And passenger vehicles will only continue to become safer and cleaner from here on out.
Ultimately the war against private passenger transport will be lost to the Robotaxi. The marginal cost per mile will be lower than public transit, so they will be left to compete on point-to-point speed, safety, and convenience. And by safety I mostly am referring to safe from crime and safe from viruses, not collisions which will be exceedingly rare. Some cities might have a public transport system that can compete, but most will not.
These are good points, but we have to remember that the car industry is backed by a powerful lobby that makes car ownership particularly convenient. I argue that it's _too_ convenient at the current point in time.
The problem that makes vehicles incompatible with other modes of transportation (mostly cycling, but increasingly walking) is that cars are increasingly made "safer" at a social cost -- namely, visibility of pedestrians/cyclists and vehicle mass (and therefore momentum). Cars are much heavier today than before, and they have worse visibility of the road than before. This is to make the driver safer, and it comes at the cost of the safety of non-car drivers around.
Cyclists and pedestrians have (almost) no voice when it comes to regulation of automotive safety. There isn't even a notion of "whole community safety" when automotive safety is discussed. The only thing that seems to matter is whether the driver is protected, and this has created a safety imbalance. In the rare moments that something is done, we focus mostly on driving speed.
I think we can do more.
We should be asking ourselves: Is there an engineering solution to ensure that foot traffic, bike traffic, and car traffic can peacefully coexist to move people around as effectively and harmlessly (environment, other people, etc) as possible?
Following your comment I think it is important to point out that it is not an either or type of scenario. Both could easily be true. There are powerful interests attempting to ensure that their business model remains viable ( if necessary, at the cost of other modes of transportation ), there are various ideological interests that see future as carless or largely the same ( just powered by different technology ), there are various cultural influences, decades of advertising and geographical considerations. In other words, people of America preferences ( if there is such a monolith ) are considered, but I am relatively certain they are not a primary driver. At best, they are one of many factors.
Cyclists and pedestrians do have a voice, but only in places where they exist and account for a sizable amount of the population. Why suburban and rural living is so popular has been discussed elsewhere in this thread, but it's the fact of the matter, so: cities that are extremely spread out will end up predominantly car-dependent, while cities with extremely dense populations like large metros will end up accommodating for their pedestrians and cyclists in road design.
Cyclists and pedestrians don't account for a sizeable amount of the population in places where there is no infrastructure for them. Build cities designed for them and they will magically appear.
I used to live in Texas, which should be perfect for biking (it's very flat), but the reality is that it's too dangerous. The serious bikers would travel in packs for safety.
Another way of looking at it is that no matter how beautifully you describe American car culture or how much you romanticize it, it has immense externalities. The externalities don’t depend on how much people enjoy using cars however they please.
> It is merely a lack of creativity to pit these two goals against each other.
Exactly. Lightweight, low-speed electric vehicles still allow you to hit the open road, haul a load of trash to the dump, or commute in from the burbs. There is nothing about that freedom that is dependent on being able to go from 0-60 in a specific time, or having a specific top speed.
Kennywinker, you’ve posted about a dozen times in this thread, you clearly feel strongly about it.
But no, you can’t haul your trash, or your ATV in that thing.
You certainly can’t fit a rear-facing child seat in the back with a passenger in front.
It’s a glorified golf cart. It’s illegal to sell in the US for good reason. You probably couldn’t even take it on the highway because it wouldn’t be safe at the minimum required speed.
Actual subcompact cars (that are relatively much bigger than this one) have been discontinued in the US because people generally won’t buy them.
People don’t generally choose a car primarily based on its acceleration, although it’s a factor. Decent acceleration can be a safety feature aside from being quite pleasant. And I would guess that most people have no clue what their car’s top speed is, let alone approach it. (Well, unless it’s the golf cart in question, then I supposed it’s highly relevant).
I was hesitant to reply from the onset because it seems to me that you’re making a caricature out of any opposing viewpoint and domineering the discussion.
Hello! Yes, it's something I've thought about quite a bit over the past ~10 years.
> But no, you can’t haul your trash, or your ATV in that thing.
When I moved apartments last year, I did the move using an electric cargo trike. You don't need a large vehicle to move a lot of stuff. Smaller vehicles like the one in the article would necessitate cargo trailers for larger hauling tasks. But that's an easily solvable problem with a local community trailer-share.
> You certainly can’t fit a rear-facing child seat in the back with a passenger in front.
You're right, of course you can't. I was not ever suggesting this ONE vehicle would solve everyone's problem. I was, however, suggesting that vehicles LIKE this could. I.e. a small, low speed, lightweight electric minivan. Or a micro-pickup truck, if you were a regular ATV-er
> You probably couldn’t even take it on the highway because it wouldn’t be safe at the minimum required speed.
That's a matter of convention, not a natural law of the road. I'm suggesting that we transition away from fast + big + crush whatever we hit, as the optimization for cars - and instead optimize for small + light + low speed non-fatal collisions.
> you’re making a caricature out of any opposing viewpoint and domineering the discussion.
It is not my intent to caricature or domineer. I see a lot of people in this thread defending the status quo in a similar way to the way you are - I'm just trying to share that there are some simple ways we could dramatically rethink the core premises we've all taken for granted - ways that might end up creating a safer + greener world.
As much as I love small electric vehicles (I drive a third-party converted electric Citroen c1), I just can't imagine driving across the US at 40mph so the electric trikes can keep up.
as a highly multi-modal angeleno, i love the idea of a small, cheap electric car.
however, you make the very common mistake of focusing on speed as (inverse) proxy for safety, because that's what's been beaten into our heads by the confluence of politics, media complicity, and industrial lobby.
the biggest issue wrt car accidents is distracted driving. speed is only a contributor to severity, not the cause of accidents. reduce distracted driving and reduce accidents. reducing speed only reduces severity while increasing susceptibility to distraction. plus, you can reduce speed in populous areas (where overall danger is highest) through traffic calming measures like narrowing lanes and lining streets with trees (which heightens alertness too).
but the measures to reduce distraction are contrary to convenience, comfort and expression of "personal brand", which is why hardly anyone wants to tackle that real problem and instead blindly piling on the speed bandwagon as a palliative rather than a solution.
>Decent acceleration can be a safety feature aside from being quite pleasant
Just like vehicle mass this is purely relative. You get the safety from having the fastest car on the road, at the expense of everyone who is slower than you.
I believe in the right tool for the job. Getting people and goods from A to B is a job that's done incredibly inefficiently and unsafely. Our society would be cleaner, quieter, and safer if we right-sized our vehicles.
The market is widely regarded as the best way to find exactly these solutions (right tool for the job).
Your thesis is that people are throwing away on the order of $30-$50k every 8 years or so, in order to do something inefficiently and unsafely.
If that were true, these golf cart vehicles would sell like mad. As it is, “subcompacts” have failed to sell in the US.
I posit that there is very significant utility in larger vehicles that your personal experience is simply failing to account for. Humbly consider that for millions of Americans they decide to spend their hard earned money on a large vehicle because in fact it provides massive utility to them and their family.
Besides, our transportation system is a modern marvel, and the safest way to achieve mobility per mile ever in human history. So to call it incredibly inefficient and unsafe is not merely hyperbolic it’s just untrue.
I suspect we can and will continue to make transportation safer per mile into the future. I see no evidence whatsoever that miniaturizing vehicles is the way to do that, certainly not without outlawing or somehow segregating the bigger ones, which is neither practical nor economically or socially viable.
The market is good at finding local minimums/maximums, but even there it fails when there’s weird trends and perceived benefits.
Like the SUV trend that stubbornly won’t go away. Bad drivers behind these 5000 lbs death-on-wheels is the primary reason I would never own a sub compact, even as a second car!
This is where government comes in, to gently but firmly guide the market through taxes and rules.
> Bad drivers behind these 5000 lbs death-on-wheels is the primary reason I would never own a sub compact, even as a second car!
I really wish crash test scores would factor in the effect of the car they hit.
People have this idea that "bigger = safer", and all it's done is create an arms race. My previous car was a Subaru BRZ, a 2-door coupe not much bigger than a Miata. In crash tests, it scored great! If I hit a wall, pole, tree, or another Subaru BRZ, it was a very safe car.
But if I got hit by a 5,500 Chevy Suburban, my small car would be obliterated.
Of course, the "bigger = safer" mentality also ignores the fact that a smaller, lighter car is going to be more agile and will do a much better job at avoiding crashes altogether.
It'd be interesting to see if purchasing patterns changed if testing driving a car included having to take it through a course where you had to practice emergency maneuvers.
> The market is widely regarded as the best way to find exactly these solutions
There is no such thing as "the market". There are innumerable markets on Earth. Some do a good job at accounting for externalities, while some do a terrible job of it. No market is perfect!
>for millions of Americans they decide to spend their hard earned money on a large vehicle because in fact it provides massive utility to them and their family
Nobody is disputing that large cars are useful for people who drive them. The claim is that the utility they provide to the driver is massively offset by unaccounted for negative externalities.
Road wear, brake dust, and fuel consumption is all higher with heavier vehicles. If those costs were paid by the drivers and owners of heavy vehicles, those people would be more likely to purchase smaller and lighter vehicles.
>somehow segregating the bigger ones
Why is that not practical? Why should passenger vehicles drive on the same roads that are constantly torn up by heavy trucks? I imagine most people would be pleased to drive on smooth roads with less air pollution.
> If those costs were paid by the drivers and owners of heavy vehicles, those people would be more likely to purchase smaller and lighter vehicles.
Outside of fuel consumption, which indeed is directly paid for by the person who owns the car, It's all paid for by taxpayers, and like any public service some people don't use it as much as others (or at all). Everyone in NYC pays for the subway yet some people own a car and drive it exclusivity.
> I imagine most people would be pleased to drive on smooth roads with less air pollution.
This largely doesn't matter to most people since cars have very good air filters[0,1]. I also question how much a regular consumer truck actually contributes to road wear compared to the millions of 18 wheelers that weigh over 50,000 pounds.
If we wanted to let the market decide what the right transportation method for most people is, we need to stop subsidizing roads.
the cost of infrastructure is a huge part of the cost of personal vehicle transport. if the cost of using it was relative to the strain your chosen transportation type put on that infrastructure, i have no doubt that we'd see a swing to smaller vehicles.
The physics of road wear means trying to more accurately assign costs would result in higher costs for consumer goods (mostly a regressive tax) due to increased cost for big rigs while cheaper transportation costs for passenger vehicles.
Passenger vehicles currently pay more than their fare share in road maintenance costs.
Overall, roads and infrastructure are a profit center for governments, returning $1.5 to $3 for every dollar spent.
> The market is widely regarded as the best way to find exactly these solutions
The market necessarily only optimizes internalized costs. The market will happily sell you things that burden the lives of people who have no say in the transaction.
Because most people get very little utility out of having a SUV. Why do they buy SUVs? So they can sit higher and look down upon the peasants. Then it's a race who can sit higher [0][1].
It's literally the case that urban living is what's regulated out of existence, and it's suburban and rural living that gets subsidized in a (very successful) scheme by politicians to buy votes. But the political realities are what they are, so voters will continue to demand those subsidies while pretending they are the ones that are being regulated.
More specifically, slowing them in zones where they share space with pedestrians (and bicycles). You can go 150kph in highway and its still safe (as safe as 120). But in a city, speed limits of 30 would slash pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. Accidents, when they happen, would be mostly nonfatal.
I hear what you're saying, but I don't actually think speed limits solve the problem. There are parts of the downtown core in my city that have 30kph speed limits, but cars regularly drive 60kph anyway. The only effective way to lower the speed of drivers in shared spaces would be electronic speed limiting, or (perhaps simultaneously) a transition to low speed vehicles.
And now you either have to convince everyone to change their cars or their engines in their cars. These things will not go over well with those in poverty.
My 50K car sometimes decides while driving down the freeway that it is in fact on the street next to the freeway, and should be going 25mph. Maybe we should wait a little bit on trying to use bleeding edge technology to force cars to drive a certain way.
There certainly is if you're talking about knowing the difference between lanes, or between an elevated section or the surface street below, or any number of other things that affect the speed designation of the roadway.
It’s untrue that highways are “just as safe at 150”. There are a couple studies looking at the results of various states upping the speed limit on highways.
The conclusion is the intuitive one: more accidents and more likelihood of fatalities.
Maybe joke driver licenses, no vehicle inspections and joke technical requirements are to blame? You can get a license after self declaring doing the "course" with your dad and taking 10 minute round around School parking lot, and them go ahead and legally register LS engine strapped to a shopping cart. Mah freeeedums etc.
Are there state border crossings doing additional inspections I am unaware of?
Just to make a more concrete example, washing out salvage title in Oklahoma comes down to showing up at the DMV and getting a stamp.
>Change of classification. Vehicles over 10 model years old may go in to, or come out of, salvage at any time. _No inspection is required to bring such vehicles out of salvage_.
>Out-of-state salvage titles. Vehicles over 10 model years old entering Oklahoma with an out-of-state salvage title may receive either a salvage title or standard (green) title with a salvage date listed.
For comparison in Germany you can lose registration title for mounting non TÜV certified spoiler/bumper/hood.
New York has a much more difficult road test, but nothing to the level of a British one. Coming from NY, I always thought it was ridiculous that you could be licensed without showing that you can drive in traffic. But it’s not like New Yorkers have a reputation for good driving, so it’s not a big part of the solution.
Can you describe drivers license procedure in your state?
Is there a state licensed drivers ed training course required? How long is it (hours) and what is the division between theory
traffic law
best practices
basic physics
basic car knowledge
and practice
basic vehicle roadworthy check - fluids, lights
pre drive preparation - setting up mirrors/seat/headrest, fastening seatbelts
parking lot maneuvers - parallel parking, reversing, stopping and starting on a slope
city driving
That line of thinking sounds incredibly beneficial to the tiny percentage of population that lives in urban areas not dependent upon freeways or long commutes.
At any rate the US has already tried this with a national maximum speed limit of 55 and it was incredibly unpopular like prohibition.
Instead of setting the speed limit, we could regulate the speed of cars off the production line. It's a lot more fun to drive a slow vehicle fast, than a fast vehicle slow.
The law of camping/holidays: whatever your storage space, you’ll need all of it. Applies to cars, suitcases, backpacks, houses.
You don’t even need a car. In countries with decent cycling infrastructure, it is possible to go on a weekend with young kids on a bicycle. Kids go in the trailer, or if over ≈4, on the trail-a-bike or, if over ≈7, on their own bicycle.
I would never expose my children to that risk on a day to day basis... Maybe if you live somewhere with very good cycling culture and bike lanes, etc. But still cycling fatalities are higher than driving, and that's for adult riders - children aged 4-7 ?
They don't even have the coordinaton to land properly - it feels about as reckless as taking a child on a motorcycle - but I guess a bycicle is more "hip"
When the mundane task of cycling is seen as some risk activity, there is something wrong. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the health benefits of regular cycling far outweighs the relative risk of cycling, even in places that is hostile to bikes.
This obviously depends on where you are and where you’re going, but for example the region I come from (western Plalatina) has a full second road network built by farmers for farm machines. It’s even denser than the “regular” road network. And it’s open to cyclists. You can go pretty much anywhere on paved roads and you’ll only occasionally meet a farmer.
Other regions have discovered cycling tourists as income source. I’ve made the entire stretch from the Baltic Sea to Berlin by cargo bike with our 18 month toddler without major stretches on any public road. A large chunk is on the service roads for the oder river flood dam works. A similar path exists on long stretches of the Rhine river - my parents and I made the treck up the Rhine to the Bodensee when I was like 14 or so. And that was like 30 years ago, things have considerably improved since then.
Sure, it does take some planning and consulting maps, but it’s not impossible. Especially since mapping applications have started to support bike-friendly routing. There’s also companies offering per-planned trecks where they transport your luggage and you just take the ride.
And then there’s the Netherlands where they probably wouldn’t even be able to parse your statement. I sometimes have the feeling they get born on wheels.
Children aged 7 can drive on the sidewalk in many countries. You can transport bikes on public transit to get to something that resembles nature, then ride there (with no cars in sight).
There’s not that many European families with 3 kids any more. The reproduction rate is somewhat below 2 kids per family - hence all that discussion about shrinking population. Then there’s quite a few options. I can easily hop on the train and go to the beach. It’s even faster than by car and less stressful when traveling with small kids. Or take one of the many rental or car-sharing cars . In Berlin, car owning households are actually a minority.
I live next to an NJ transit train station with a 1 hour ride to downtown Manhattan. I can drive into NYC faster because of the time savings from not stopping along the way and waiting on train transfers. I'm also not trapped by the limited service intervals on my line. This is a region with the best train service in the US and driving still is a better option for non-trivial trips.
Do you not have express trains? We have some in chicago and for example, the naperville to downtown express takes 34 minutes to go 30 miles downtown because it literally goes straight downtown without stopping at any other stations.
My line is shared with MTA and has/had express trains for their stops further out. Those trains save 15 minutes but are of no use to me and "steal" a time slot for a normal train I could use. Most have been removed in the past two years due to service reductions.
You ignore the fact that the MTA has been neglected but roads haven't. Also the mayor is extremely pro-car and has let things degrade for everyone else (the majority of NYC residents do not own cars).
I’ve got a Skoda Fabia, can’t get three car seats in the back, nor two and an adult, so assuming a kid every 2 years you need something bigger for most of a decade. An Octavia might do
I have 4 kids so we had 3 car seats for a while. We're in the UK and we have a Vauxhall (Opel) Zafira which is a 7 seat minivan, very small by US standards, built on the chassis of the Astra small hatchback. I believe we have used this car to do everything we might do with an SUV, including taking our 6 person family on extended camping trips (with a small trailer) and across Europe as far as Lyon, Geneva and Luxembourg (with a roof box).
But living standards are higher in the US, and our trips are longer. To drive my family across Texas is nearly as far as driving across France and Germany, and I have three other states to cross.
If I can afford to pay more to get a bigger, faster, safer vehicle for the trip, it’s my money.
Us Americans use our vehicles to pick up a Hot Wheels jungle gym at Toys R Us, then we spend 3 hours on the freeway driving to another state to pick up some In N Out. We keep 8 large dogs in the back 4 rows, and have to hit Wal Mart to pick up a pallet of toilet paper to clean up. You can't understand our lifestyle requirements.
EDIT: Yesterday I had to run to the store to pick up a vat of queso. I'd like to see you Europeans do that in your Mr. Bean cars.
I doubt there is any conventional metric for "standard of living" (which basically means per capita wealth/income) where the UK would be higher than the US, at almost any point on the income scale (even adjusted for the imputed value of the more extensive public health system in the UK).
That doesn't mean the UK is "worse" than the US, or that it has a lower quality of life, just that it has (and has had) a lower standard of living for decades. Few countries car match the standard of living of the US.
while agreeing to your point about living standards, i would add that there are almost no countries matching US military spending, foreign debt levels or energy consumption per capita
I suspect one factor here is that the US has, for practical purposes, no passenger intercity rail network, and has a somewhat less developed budget airline market.
That said, I find it notable that the average price of new cars in the US has typically been rising faster than income over the last decade or so. This would indicate, bluntly, effective advertising, rather than resources, being a big driver of the huge car thing. Average new car price in the US is creeping up on average annual income. This isn’t just an American problem, incidentally; it’s happening in a good few countries.
Now you're talking about three kids within a very short window of time, which is even less common.
But... my own youngest and oldest are almost exactly three years apart, so I can tell you that even a Toyota Camry was incapable of handling three American-standard carseats side-by-side.
However, in countries with lower speed limits, less bulky carseats are required to keep kids safe even in the unusual case of three closely-spaced kids.
Very short window? What is your car seat age range there? Current trend in the US is car seats till age 8 give or take. 3 kids within 8 years is very expected if you are having 3 or more.
Booster seats are often required for kids up to age 8 or so, often only if they are shorter than 4' 9". But booster seats easily fit in small cars.
The age limit recommendation are a rear-facing seat until 2, then a front-facing seat until they reach something like 65 pounds, then a booster seat.
From experience, three car seats cannot fit side-by-side in really any car, whether front-facing or rear-facing. But booster seats are fine, even in my tiny Fiat 500e. Back in the day, I leased a minivan for a while and then the kids started to outgrow bulky carseats.
The range in which all three are in car seats is still very small. Even with one child a year, the quickest "regular" speed, you would have a five year period with three child seats of the fifteen years that all three would be underage.
It's a bit "squishy", to use my youngest's word, but you can easily put three car seats in one. Helps if at least one of them is only a booster though.
So either no one with a car does anything in Europe or it's possible with a smaller car.
It may be worth saying that everything in America is bigger than its European counterpart, to a first approximation. You can tell that Tesla's are designed for an American market by just how fat the back is compared to (say) a Mercedes S-class - it still fits on the road but it's very voluptuous
Not hard. We have taken the whole family camping by bike-train-bike. Even a small car would be a doddle.
The four year old is towed using a follow-me, all the gear goes in a couple of panniers.
We have spent a small part of our car-money on some very high quality gear, through. Small and light equipment is much easier to pack than Walmart camping gear.
Real example: my family could not afford a car when I was a kid. We used 2 options: cycling (with all the gear, picnic blanket etc) or a regular bus.
There were also organized summer outings in a chartered bus.
Later we I also managed to go to weekend outings in a mazda 323 with 2 kids. You just take less stuff.
I did it just fine in a Fiat Panda, for instance 3 adults, 2 French bulldogs and luggage for 2 weeks, 6 hour drive.
Going home, we added a cat, its transport box and toys/accessories/food. Not a problem.
In the Peugeot 406 (midsize sedan) I had after that, we were 5 adults going to weight lifting competitions, so you can probably guess that none of us were exactly tiny. Also not a problem.
I don’t want to pay taxes for schools since I don’t have children. But I’m an adult capable of understanding that what I personally want isn’t necessarily what’s best for society at large, so I suck it up and do it anyway without complaining.
It doesn't help society for everyone to travel at 90mph. Faster speeds are deadlier full stop, denial of this sort of thing is as asinine as climate denial or creationism, it's an already established fact accepted by anyone who studies traffic statistics.
Unfortunately the relationship between speed and energy is unintuitive (square rather than linear). Increasing speed from 60mph to 70mph doesn't sound like much but it increases energy by over a third.
In an unachievable ideal world instead of a speedometer and speed limits we would have an "energy meter" and energy limits, which would also take into account the mass of your car.
You are only considering safety and discounting everything else. The capacity of the road network is absolutely related to speed. Slowing down transportation across the board amounts to slowing the economy, which has it's own health impacts. It's not obvious what the ideal balance is. For certain, 1 fatality about every 100 million miles driven is pretty low, especially compared to the sheer amount of utility we get from all of these cars.
You’re not considering glaring effects too. Wind resistance increases with the square of speed. Going 85 instead of 70 or even 75 is a significant change in fuel economy.
Indeed, and I would even say that I want to pay my taxes if I know most of it goes to societally useful activities even though I may not utilize all of them now, or some even ever.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems with this country right now is that people are too damn selfish, and vote “in their own best interest” to the detriment of not only everyone else but—ironically—to the detriment of themselves as well.
On an issue that boils down to social consensus such as how much selfishness is reasonable or what the speed limits should be it's impossible for the overwhelming majority of people to be wrong since they form the consensus.
One consequence is that we're in a low trust <-> bad social safety net feedback loop, rather than an innate consequence of a fixed "American disposition".
Jam one thing like through like Healthcare or Federal Rerserve accounts for all, and the feedback loop might find a markedly different equilibrium.
op here! I definitely do believe that regulation is the path forward to shrinking and slowing cars. But that's not actually what I suggested. I just want the ability to PURCHASE one of these in north america - and for them to catch on
EV part is pretty critical, since I'm trying to avoid fossil fuels whenever possible - but what are my options? A fiat 500 starts at $16,500, smartcars were not much less, and are no longer sold in the usa anyway.
Car salesman will sell you anything just to get some of that commission. Not everyone wants to drive an SUV. You make it sound like people will only buy what a car salesman wants them to buy, if that were so we would all be driving luxury cars and severely in debt.
Maybe the majority just prefer SUVs instead. There is a lot more comfort in larger cars. I personally prefer an SUV to a mini van which turns funny in my experience.
Historically taxes were (and theoretically still should be) collected to finance the government (and, during a war, the military) and not for the redistribution of wealth. Socialism is a different theory, of course...
Historically taxes were (and theoretically still should be) to fund the lifestyles of the king, the king's family and the nobility.
America was founded on breaking from traditions to try new ideas (a government for the people by the people), but somewhere along the way y'all stopped innovating and started resisting all change. Redistribution of wealth fits perfectly into "gov for the people by the people". The many benefiting from the work of the many.
It is the wealthy and above average earners that already pay most of the taxes in America and some disagree with where the government is spending funds and even what they are taxing (one of the primary causes of our Civil War mind you). Redistribution of wealth has been tried in countries like Venezuela and many places but it collapses eventually when you have a single point of failure. Hell theres Social Security which got basically ruined by the government.
Any kind of redistribution would need to be at the full discretion of local governments instead of a federal body. The amount of power our federal government has amassed itself would make the founding fathers roll over in their graves, or pick up their musquets and revolt.
Noted Communist Thomas Jefferson proposed it rather before the Communist Manifesto was written (not that he came up with the idea, of course), and some US states and various other places started introducing it from the early 19th century on.
Just because Marx was in favour of something doesn’t necessarily make it inherently socialist.
Are you using ‘socialism’ to mean ‘doing anything for the common good’? I mean, free education seems completely orthogonal to socialism as normally defined.
Only if the company doesn’t have any other shareholders. I think John Lewis is run like that? Devil is in the details, and I’ve never had reason to look closely in their case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership
I would argue that “things in the Communist Manifesto” defines communism, in the same way that “things in the Bible” defines Christianity even though some (lots?) of the Bible originated in Judaism.
That said, I was asking for an example of the concept of free schooling from before socialism, and I got it :)
Modern motorcycles have to deal with increasingly stringent european noise regs. Many manufacturers have been discontinuing models to avoid the bother of updating them for compliance. They are all dramatically quiet in stock configuration. The loud ones are modified by their owners or one of the relatively few old machines on the road.
All cars were loud and belching unburned hydrocarbons 40 years ago. Comparing motorcycles to modern cars is missing the gains in street life impact that have actually been made.
I really wish the standard penalty for that would be "you lose your motorcycle license for 5+ years and the motorcycle is crushed into a cube before your eyes". Not "here's a 100 EUR fine and you have to undo the modifications, show us that you did it, and then put them back on".
It's completely unnecessary, hard to do accidentally, and a great way for one single person to affect thousands of others in a single day.
Agreed, I'd like to see noise laws enforced in the US also.
Motorcycles are probably the main offenders but some cars, trucks, and even 2-stroke gas scooters can be ridiculously loud. The law should not discriminate.
How badly do you want it? There are 30,000 deaths per year from cars in the USA, and many many more injuries. It's not clear what the relationship between that number and the speed/size of cars is, but I'd be willing to bet we could cut that number in half by reducing cars to a max speed of 40mph. Is your desire to drive fast worth 15,000 lives every year? Over your lifetime that could be a million lives saved.
Sorry but that requires a big citations needed flag. And don't say "because 40 mph is half of 80 mph" because I submit you aren't travelling for 80mph long enough throughout the trip to justify it unless you go across statelines everyday.
My desire to drive fast (my sweet spot is 78mph on the highway) is based solely on how far I have to drive when I do drive. I travel off of the farm less than once a week. But when I do leave the farm I can easily put 150 miles on the truck getting everything done that needs doing. And the bulk of that is on the freeway, once I get to it.
Or travelling to see my sick mother once a month (1200+ mile round trip) or my daughter as often as possible (1600+ mile round trip). Add to that I am on the large side of the equation at over 6'3" tall and near 300 pounds, and getting my v8 powered truck (20+ mpg) away from me will be a challenge.
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of your views or how strongly you feel. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
Maybe you don't owe America better but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
It's still unclear to me that self-driving cars will EVER arrive, much less if they'll arrive in the next 10 years. There are a lot of today's problems that will no longer be problems if some future technology arrives - but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to fix today's problems.
Many compact cars were discontinued in the US in 2020 due to low sales- Toyota Yaries, Honda FIT, Chevy Sonic. sUVs and trucks account for 78% of new sales. Especialy with gasoline testing $2.00 a gallon.
i think it's pretty telling that this comment seems to have gotten the same reaction as any comment suggesting people commute by biking, walking, public transit, or any other method beyond personal vehicle.
most of the objections people have to giving up their car (my suburb was designed for cars...) would be perfectly solved by something like this. but the rabid defense of cars is out in force anyways.
There are many situations where a car is infinitely more practical, such as when you need to transport goods (eg shopping).
Before I had a car, I once bought a dumbbell set. Had to carry it 5 minutes to the bus stop. Box fell apart on the way. Bus driver wasn’t particularly patient with me needing multiple trips to get all pieces into and out of bus either.
Since I own a car and pay insurance, why would I bother with other forms of transit when they are slower and bring their own set of problems?
What if I have a large family? What if I need to crate my large dog in the car? What if I want to go to Costco and buy a bunch of groceries and supplies and bring them home? What if I like visiting national parks and the speed limit en route is in excess of 70MPH?
This is pretty much why in Asia and Europe people dont have large families, nor large dogs, nor buy massive boxes of goods from warehouse stores. National parks you should be good.
The thought processes is more like: we are not willing to have more than (1-3) children because doing so will have costs that will lower our quality of life. That includes expenses of all kinds including cars, but opportunity costs are probably more dominate than financial costs. At some point people just don't value larger families, but there certainly is some marginal consideration where people want a larger family but don't find the tradeoffs worthwhile.
Cars which the American market describes as “superminis” can fit five people, and if have more family than that then sure nothing shops stop you buying a bigger car, but most people don’t. Shopping can go in the passenger section if you really are bulk-buying too much for just the boot. 70 MPH is the upper limit, not the lower limit, but even if it was a lower limit I believe the suggestion is to lower the limit.
My state has 75 MPH speed limits, which effectively allows 85 MPH in real use. I’ve driven my family tens of thousands of miles across the American West, and seen posted limits as high as 85 MPH.
Nothing like seeing a police car pass you by without a second glance while you are doing 92 MPH in the right lane.
The police (and everyone else) ignoring the rules does not change the fact that you would save a lot of money on fuel if you obeyed the speed limit, nor the fact that you could be fined for speeding.
I’ve never understood the drive to go so fast.
I knew a guy in the UK who, when I asked him why he was doing 98 mph (speed limit was 70, we were one of two cars going to a stag do, the other car was obeying the speed limit and therefore arrived 25 minutes later), gave me the answer of “If I was going faster and was caught, I would have to waste time going to court to prove I wasn’t driving dangerously” rather than slowing down.
(He got a lot of speeding tickets and penalty points before this; penalty points are a UK road law thing, get enough and you lose you licence).
The odds of getting pulled over in the western US for going less than 10 MPH over the speed limit are minute.
As is the extra fuel cost to driving 10 over.
And when it’s 500 miles to the next national park, that’s another hour of hiking. Let me know when you have to drive from London to the northern tip of Scotland for an event, that’s just an average day on our summer vacation trips.
What you wrote does nothing to contradict the ordinal claim that “So much of what is toxic about cars and car culture could be fixed by downsizing and slowing them. Primarily, less injuries and deaths - but also lower overall energy consumption”.
It also does not really deal with you being one change of enforcement policy from having a problem: if you go 10 mph over the limit continually for 3 hours, is that one speeding offence total, one offence per road you are on, one offence per state (city?) you pass through, or something else?
What you have is the capacity and the habit of doing something. That’s different from it being good that we live in a world where it is normal for most people. I have the capacity to take ten international flights in one year, and I visited the UK from Germany 8 times last year to make sure I didn’t lose contact with any friends when Brexit happened, but everyone doing that every year would be bad for the environment, and I have no internetion of repeating that year of travel.
> Let me know when you have to drive from London to the northern tip of Scotland for an event
I don’t own a car; I’d either fly or take the train. That trip would be CO2 intensive no matter what option I take, but the rest of the year I still don’t have a car.
(Right now I’m spending an hour each way walking to the office rather than taking public transport on the few occasions I can’t work from home, but normally I prefer trains. That said, I have done a 1080 km cycle holiday once).
We've asked you multiple times to stop posting flamebait to HN. If you keep it up we are going to have to ban you. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?
The car is the extension of the penis. People want it big and shiny. Sure it was the US that invented SUVs and pickup trucks but they were embraced just as much in European towns as in rural Kentucky.
US gas prices is still very cheap though ... like the 70's oil crisis people only changed over to those smaller Honda's and Toyota's when they felt it in their pockets.
A really good take on cars I saw years ago is that they have two modes.
One is high speed death machine which needs to be isolated from humans - e.g. the average highway.
The other is a mechanical horse that you can out run if you try - e.g. how a forklift is normally used.
The problem is where those two modes meet, e.g. anywhere where people and cars share the road and cars move faster than 30km/h, which is unfortunately every city in the last 80 years.
Public transit is unusable during pandemics, and natural disasters.
I like trains more than most people do, but I'm really glad I also own a car, and I'm not going to get back on a train, or any other form of public transit, until the pandemic is over.
I never really thought about it, but could online shopping + delivery actually be much more environmentally friendly? i.e rather than having everyone drive do to their own shopping.
This is with the assumption that a single delivery truck can hit multiple customers on their route, and in the context of more rural\suburban areas.
I think the problem with that is how many cold foods won't do well outside of the freezer for more than 30 minutes, so any combined delivery would have to be purely opportunistic (eg. The delivery destinations being within a few miles of each other, and ordered/scheduled close enough together as to still meet delivery windows) and/or filtered so that people with cold items get their items first.
I go to help my wife (I enjoy looking around). We take my mother inlaw because she has macular degeneration and can't see that well to drive. The kids like to come for a slice of pizza or a hotdog and we enjoy being with them.
No one should be offended because you enjoy different things in life than they do.
Perhaps if they somehow first convince themselves that the “whole world is suffering” because someone has a vehicle which can fit their nuclear family in it, and second convince themselves that condescending you on a message forum is an appropriate way to somehow lessen that behavior...
But no, that comment is just out of order.
I saw an interesting article today “Joe Rogan World vs NPR World” [1] which describes our current political environment, and it seems to me this type of interaction is emblematic of it.
I also prefer shopping alone - have a list, get in, get it over with asap, and get out. I pity the people who enjoy shopping, although due to us not enjoying it, we're obviously the ones who should be pitied.
If people here wanted to drive tiny cars they would. The only time there has been any interest is during oil shocks. Nobody enjoys or desires to drive a Yaris if they can avoid it
Yet China already has these small EVs, and their traffic-related death numbers are abysmal compared to North America. Yes, even when adjusted for population.
I was hit while cycling, by a car which pulled out of a minor junction as I was turning into it. As it was an extremely low speed collision, there was no real harm to me, although the (cheap) bike was not worth repairing. The worst I can say about my injury was not having any memory between being in contact with the bonnet at 45 degrees while thinking “oh no”, and finding myself horizontal looking up to a bunch of strangers insisting I didn’t get up. I didn’t even have any grazing.
Yes! Speeding things up just causes distances to increase and facilities to centralize.
Game-theoretically, each individual does save time, but soon everyone has a car and the equilibrium shifts. It's like two income households, college degrees, or access to machine guns: Great when only you have it, bad when everyone does.
Or like commute times: It doesn't matter where you are or what the distances are; people are willing to commute about 40 minutes. Increase speeds and they just move further out.
The centralization brought by high speeds then destroys Main Street and shifts power to big box stores. Yes, the overall economy does get "more efficient", but in a way that the gains are captured by the Walton family.
If infrastructure were changed to make higher speeds more difficult -- if we could blow up the damned highways -- then the equilibrium would shift again, and, within a few years, people would be spending no more time going back and forth to the grocery store, because smaller local stores, bodegas, would have popped up.
If you go to "developing" countries you see more of this. There are villages and little shops. The roads are dirt, and you travel by moped/scooter at low speed. Sometimes cows wander on the road. The whole economy and transportation network fits together. And it's totally fine.
This is closer to how we should live in America. Yes, outright poverty is bad -- you need food to eat. But once you reach the "middle income" bracket? Once you have a moped, a (not "smart") cellphone, two molded plastic chairs, a pair of flip flops, and a t-shirt? At that point, so long as the weather is warm, you're basically fine. You can't live like that in America. But if we all did, then (in many of our climates) you could.
Now, you don't need to turn the US into Cuba to accomplish this. There are ritzy high end places that have made this trade too. There are a few suburbs built with networks of low speed paths, where everyone just drives golf carts (except to go outside the community). There are retirement communities in Florida that are basically Disney World. There are resort-town beach islands where cars are banned. People love these places.
Something like 60% (remembered stat) of Americans now live in places administered by an HoA or condo association. We're turning into a weird feudal sprawl of gated communities. Which sucks. But it may also offer an opportunity: Those communities, being more self-contained, might be able to experiment more.
And the experiment they should do is to look to the pre-industrial past, and the lower-income present. Money, cars, highways, McMansions, Whole Foods, corporations, "leaning in" -- they are a curse. They rob you of your happiness and of your grandchildren. Build villages. Grow food. Keep shops. Have families. Find better gods to worship. A civilization, a culture, a built environment -- they all fit together. They need to be conducive to life.
So I wonder how true it is that smaller cars would have better efficiency. “Smart” electric cars get about 3.3 miles per kWh compared to about 4 miles per kWh for the Tesla Model 3. The gas versions also aren’t terribly efficient versus efficient gas cars. And that’s ignoring the lower passenger count, which will tend to lower the occupancy rate on average.
I’m also unsure if they’re that much lighter once you make them safe in crashes. I’m not sure they’re better for pedestrians, either.
You save parking space, which is nice, but at the expense of a lot of utility and without any benefit of efficiency that I can tell.
Slowing them might help, but that directly impacts their utility. The utility of cars is making housing cheaper (by expanding the distance one can live from one’s job or school) and by expanding someone’s job opportunities both by expanding the area they can cover on a reasonable commute time but also as a resource for the job itself, ie as a courier or ride share driver or pizza delivery or just to haul stuff around for one’s own small business. And it’s also a sort of safety net in the case of housing insecurity in the US. Many homeless don’t sleep literally on the street but sleep in their cars. Also, flexibility in family size or ability to share the car with household members in a carpool if only one vehicle is available. You can save at least 20% on groceries by being able to buy in bulk and not have to buy at a nearby convenience store or order food delivered (and, the delivery person’s livelihood is enabled by their vehicle).
Also, while flying has become cheaper in the last few decades (if traveling alone, not needing a car at your destination, planning months ahead of time, and traveling long distance), driving still allows optionality and greater flexibility for long distance travel and is cheaper with more than one occupant (Or if you need transport at the destination) plus allows vastly more cargo. If you need to evacuate or go to a nearby city for whatever reason, a regular sized and speed car gives you that flexibility.
Cars offer a lot of agency to an individual. If you live in an area that isn’t so dense that parking is always a hassle, it’s an easy net win for almost everyone. I love the idea of more pedestrian and bike friendliness, but we shouldn’t underestimate the vast value and agency And flexibility that a car provides.
I can, at any time of the day or night, travel to another state without checking anyone’s schedule and without breaking the bank. I can bring as much stuff as I’d need. If I can’t find a place to stay, I can just sleep in the vehicle. Even if there’s a terrorist attack, a strike, or a global pandemic. Rain or shine, cold or heat wave. I don’t have to be particularly fit or able (either than being sighted), either. The agency that even a really cheap car (a couple thousand used) gives almost anyone in the US is vast.
Chinese cities may be much denser than in the US, limiting parking options, so I can see how smaller cars might be better there than here, but other than that, I don’t see why someone would voluntarily buy a much smaller & slower car.
The problem is that these are not made to crash-worthiness standards of other cars. The article hints around this when it says that in China an electric car that has top speed under 100 km/h (around 60 mph) has very little regulations attached to it.
So these are wonderful, if you do not consider that they will have to share the road with actual cars which can easily pancake them and kill the occupants.
With the advance of batteries, power electronics and electric motors, there all kinds of cool new modes of transportation coming up but they are all kind of metaphorically and sometimes physically crashing against the concept of cars and the fact that all of our streets are basically made for cars.
I think we have to start seriously rethinking cities in view of these new modes of transportation. I would suggest a city center where there are no cars and bycicles and various slow speed electric vehicles, like scooters and glorified golf carts are allowed to roam. And then you can have the suburbs where full sized cars (electric or not) can drive but will have to have full modern crash protection.
Something like this is already starting to vaguely happen in some cities in Europe. It is of course easy to do in some european cities where the streets in their centers were pre-industrial and never designed for cars to begin with. But it is something to be expanded.
And it will be very helpful if large international manufacturers created a "glorified golf cart" standard that was reasonably safe for pedestrians and bicyclists (again assuming that it does not have to share the road with cars) so that the cities around the world can start doing city planning around it.
This "$5k electric car" is a glorified golfcart pretending to be a car, which is quite dangerous, because people will treat it like a car and will all to late realize how bad it fares when it crashes with actual cars.
Is safety different from a Smart car? Some people drive velomobiles, some drive regular bikes, some drive electric scooters.
Car was always overkill and will always be unless there are two of them or there is an ability to hire bigger car conveniently. Or there are more places to park smaller car.
In Europe speed limit within towns is 50 km/h and often smaller in residential areas. That's entirely different mode of transportation from 90 km/h outside, which is yet different from autobahns.
Waymo Firefly was just a thing you've described. Time has not come yet. Until than I'd better bet on pedestrian only zones, bike lanes, low emissions zones, congestion charge, paid parking lots.
It's good for you to focus on the safety of a car's driver and passengers. Cars these days are so big for some reason, all the more reason to make them crash-worthy and safer by making them more robust by making them more weighty.
Also, the top speed of 60mph is pittiful when an SUV can go at 90 easy. I wonder why anyone would allow something so unsafe as these vehicles on the road.
Of course that 90mph top speed is essential for the quality of life of its driver - especially during the 80% of time it's stuck in traffic moving forward at 10% of that speed :)
> So these are wonderful, if you do not consider that they will have to share the road with actual cars which can easily pancake them and kill the occupants.
A much better approach to crash safety than trying to survive a crash, is to not to crash in the first place.
Companies need to make a distinction whether they want to protect the occupant from the collision beyond his control, from protecting the occupant from himself.
European accident rates started to plummet when ADASes became a thing in mass market cars.
If you can limit the maximum crash velocities to 60km/h with ADASes, then I believe car-to-car collisions can be made much, much less lethal even in such light cars.
I wonder if an acceptable level of safety could be achieved, at greater cost but without compromising weight or size, through advanced materials, active safety systems, and better driver training.
Vehicles like these would be much safer in countries with high driver training standards and a low rate of fatalities per distance driven (e.g. New Zealand[0]) as compared to e.g. Mexico[0].
The 'from GM' in the title is a little misleading. The manufacturer of this car, as described in the second paragraph, is SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co. In this 3 way joint venture SAIC Motor, a state-owned Chinese company, is the majority share-holder, owning 50.1%; GM owns 44%. [1] [2]
However it is a cool idea and I would think the rest of the world can learn a lot from this: Instead of filling the freeways with queues of daily commuters sitting one person in a five person car, then driving around in something smaller suitable for one or two persons.
As other have mentioned - it looks a bit like the French Citroen Ami:
Usually the limit there is crash safety. It's a difficult argument to make to the public that we should allow a slightly higher rate of death and serious injury in exchange for much less co2 emissions.
A Citroen Ami is less safe than a 2 tonne SUV but maybe not compared to a scooter and maybe not for its surroundings. So maybe we can push the massive SUVs out of the city and leave space for lighter vehicles.
I don't have the numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if traffic in China is more safe than in Thailand or Vietnam which have all these gasoline-powered high speed scooters.
If most people drive smaller cars, and we reduce speed limits further, I would think we'd be at a similar rate of highway death/injury (which is already too high) if not maybe even lower.
Then again, I don't design cars, and wouldn't know.
Everything written in the American press is from the side of America. Guess what - Pfizer isn’t inventing their Covid vaccine, it’s BioNTech. Johnson & Johnson didn’t invent theirs, it was Janssen (though at least the latter is now owned by J&J).
I mean, those companies do different things in those partnerships, it would be unfair to say either company in those pairs are responsible for the vaccine.
>the EV retails for between 28,800 yuan ($4,230) and 38,800 yuan -- and its ability to run for as many as 170 kilometers (106 miles) on a single charge
A. the people who already have a car and want a 2nd for trips to the grocery store,
B. the people who only have a scooter and want to upgrade to something a little safer and weather-friendly,
C. the people who were taking public transportation, but due to the low cost, can now afford this car.
D. teenage students to drive themselves to school....
It seems to me that the low price point may enable a large volume of sales, but for the most part, it will put more vehicles on the roads by pulling people out of public transport and off of scooters.
The caveat: the $4000 version doesn't have AC nor airbags. It's road legal in China. If you only use it for commuting then it's probably fine because mostly you'd be stuck in traffic jams and moving slowly anyway.
Just let people drive whatever the hell they want as long as they stay off the roads where traffic flows faster than X.
Moped? Chinese golf car larping as an EV? Construction equipment? Shouldn't matter what it is, it should be allowed. There's no reason all this stuff (and bikes and pedestrians) can't coexist in low speed areas. And there are tons of industrial facilities the world over where it does all coexist.
This will never happen though because a lot of the interest in cheap EVs comes from a subconscious desire to not have to share the roads with the poors in their '99 Taurus wagons with mismatched body panels and letting people drive whatever defeats the point of forcing them to drive something palatable to the people making the rules.
Autonomous driving is just around the corner, too, which means that there is no need to waste space on parking structures, either. Here's a Tesla engineer that gave a great technical talk demonstrating their progress as of early this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8
EDIT: yes, there are clear reasons why having an three-dimensional underground structure will absolutely affect the social dynamics above-ground in a city, yet it remains true that it is possible to banish cars from downtown cores in the near future (i.e., say by 2030 or so), given the present shift to electrification and autonomous driving. These issues are worthy of debate, and I'm just trying to shift the conversation to what's current. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade! I love the goal of city streets for people, as exemplified by the beautiful laneways in Melbourne (11 minutes): https://vimeo.com/131396094
If underground construction is so easy now, why not move all the people underground and leave the roads in place? It's much easier to build a lot of unconnected spaces vs a network, and being in a highrise is basically the same as being in an underground box
Having lived in both a basement and a high rise, I disagree. The high rise was fabulous with tons of natural light, high above the noise of the city, with pleasant breezes and no risk of flooding. The basement was damp, had no natural light, transmitted all the noises from the street, and was stuffy because air wouldn’t naturally flow.
The car market right now is dominated by huge cars and I hate it. I grew up in a rural area in mid 70s and throughout most of the 80s and my parents had tiny Datsuns (aka Nissan) and we got along fine. My aunt and uncle had 10 kids and they managed to get around without an SUV or a minivan (of course we didn't have car seats for kids and barely seat belts back then but still)
Right now there are very few new cars for sale under $20,000 which seems crazy https://jalopnik.com/heres-all-17-cars-available-in-the-u-s-...
I have an 09 Honda Fit that I guess I will be holding on to until it dies since Honda announced they will quit selling them in the USA.
The Smart car brand failed in the US, and the Fiat 500 will be discontinued in the US.
Americans just don't like small cars, (for obvious reasons, as if you are driving next to F-250 and GM Silverados, your car will feel unsafe).
Also, in Cities, registration/parking/insurance cost quiet a bit, and those cars are usually charged full prices for parking.
So, even in metro areas, the difference in total cost between a 13k (super small car) and a 23k midsize/compact car are not that much. If they have to go to the hassle of owning a car, folks in metro areas in the US, prefer a size up
Now, in europe is a total difference. If you have driven in some Italian towns, you would understand that anything larger than a Toyta Corolla/Honda civic, would not fit in many streets and parking would be super hard. By necessity, you have to go down a size.
I know, when I was looking to buy a car for my parent's home in Albania, I had to choose the smallest crossover possible, otherwise it wont be comfortable to drive in the tight roads of my neighborhood. (even VW Tiguan, would be too large).
Compact cars are popular in Australia, even though we have big open roads and most people live in the suburbs. I think running costs are a big factor in choosing a car, if you are comparing between 5L per 100KM and 15L per 100KM, and the price of petrol is around $1.40 per litre ($3.70 USD per gallon). Registration and insurance is also more expensive the bigger the engine. Once popular sedans like the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon have all but died out, as people no longer wanted a petrol guzzling 6 or 8 cylinder engine.
I think an electric car the size of a Toyota Yaris / Honda Jazz would be a big hit in Australia, since that category has been popular for decades. Whereas I think the only popular sedan nowadays would be the Camry, and they are mainly used for taxis. Family cars tend to be SUVs with underpowered petrol or diesel engines to try and get the fuel economy, even if it struggles to climb hills.
Another big seller I think would be a plug in hybrid ute similar to a Hilux, since they are the main vehicles used by tradies. If you could get maybe 100 - 200km of travel using electric only and then petrol for the rest, I think that would be suitable for people who mainly work in metropolitan areas. You could also use the battery instead of carrying a petrol generator.
> I think an electric car the size of a Toyota Yaris / Honda Jazz would be a big hit in Australia, since that category has been popular for decades.
I agree, but clearly it needs to come from the right brand. Renault currently sells the Zoe in Australia but it doesn't look like they're selling a lot - Renault's aren't popular in Australia and only have a few dealerships.
A student in my gf class got killed during commute in a morning as he exceptionally drove an old beater instead of his pick-up. A full-size transport truck crashed into it. He would probably still be alive had he been driving his pick-up.
At that price, they won't pass us crash-safety tests.
Look at the British mini and compare it to the Cooper mini that ended up for sale here. And that's British vs US safety standards. I've spent enough time in China to know that the difference there would be even more extreme.
What's the demographic? If you can only afford a $4320 car, you're buying a 20 year old junker. (They aren't that expensive to maintain, if you only fix the drivetrain and safety parts. Find a shade tree mechanic (like me) that only charges $25 an hour.) If you can afford a more expensive car, the $4320 is going to be miserable to drive. Vague steering, poor brakes, terrible wind and tire noise, stiff suspension, uncomfortable seats, plasticy interior that rattles.
You're missing two key points, it's electric, and therefore doesn't need gas, and it's new, and therefore doesn't need much maintenance (plus being electrict).
It would be, by far, the cheapest way to own a car, and would be green to boot. Also, I'm not convinced the car is that bad, from the reviews I've read.
I'd buy one. The safety concerns people raise in this thread are worthy of discussion, but it is at least as safe as a motorcycle(cue the pedantic HN argument in 3..2..1..).
I drive a Fiat 500e with what they bill as an 84-mile range, and I live in a suburb of Dallas. I actually get closer to 100 than 84, but I am rarely concerned about the range, despite the extreme sprawl. But I know people who have commutes that would make driving my car nearly impossible, or at least impossible without mid-day charging.
Not in the US, and especially not outside of cities. For the reasons I mentioned above. I'm a fan of them, but wouldn't want to be driving at full speed on a long-distance trip with one.
>“A lot of consumers don’t need anything fancy, a commute is all they ask from a car,”...
Tesla has lost its way with expensive cars loaded with sensors, launch control. Tesla jumped the shark when Musk mentioned gas rockets as an option. Wasn't the original philosophy of Tesla to give away EV patents to make the world a better place?
I don't need a car or a truck that can go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. I want safe car with a reasonable range that doesn't cost $100K.
You got everything wrong. Tesla is doing it right by hitting the high-end market first, while they are ramping up the production. Once they know how to automate everything, they will go for cheaper cars.
It's not like they are sitting on a massive supply of cars that nobody wants to buy. They sell them all.
You act like Elon spends all his time on build a rocket car. The overwhelming focus at Tesla, is lowering the cost of the car, specifically the batteries. The amount of time and engineering going into that is 10000x higher then goes into Roadster. He literally called the Roadster dessert, the only reason they are making is to show that an EV is better in every possible way then a Gas car. And the SpaceX package they probably only doing because Elon want to build the most insane car in the history of humanity (and probably drive it himself).
> I don't need a car or a truck that can go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. I want safe car with a reasonable range that doesn't cost $100K.
That's the whole point behind battery work they are doing, to be able to make a car the price of a Honda Civic that can everything a modern car should do, including drive itself in many situations and enough range to drive it whereever you like.
It seems like you are massively underestimating how difficult it is to produce millions of EV. The whole global battery industry right can only support a few million cars a year.
+1 to this. I love my Tesla, but when we decided to pick up an EV for my wife to use, the Bolt was the obvious choice $6K out the door for a 3 year lease at 15K miles/year. $20K if you'd like to roll the dice and buy it outright.
For what she will save on gas compared to her previous ICE daily driver, the Bolt is practically free.
I shopped around and got another local dealer to undercut Carr by more than a thousand bucks. But they don't advertise that price on their public web site.
$2500 of the discount is coming from a state tax rebate (which is applied at the time of purchase, not something you have to wait for when you file your taxes). $3000 is from Costco, and I have no idea who actually pays for that.
So some people won't get all the way down to $20K, it'll depend on what state they live in and whether they are Costco members or not. Some states do better than $2500. Carr likes to say "everyone qualifies for this price" so I'm not sure what their discounts are comprised of.
It's actually kind of funny that I have experience with that California dealer. Make no mistake, if you show up in person, they will do all the same nasty tricks that most dealerships will. However, for some reason, it seems like they have an abnormally good online division.
You send them a request online; they send you a pretty good, but not great, offer via email with no hidden garbage and no irritating attempts to pull you in in person. You go in, and they see if they can run the financing through themselves and shrug if your financing is better. You sign paperwork and drive off with the car.
3 people in my circle of acquaintances bought cars from them simply because their online presence is so pain-free.
They must have decided that running low touch, higher volume through the online pathways is a better choice. Presumably online buyers fall into 1) will waste your time grinding you down, so sending an offer and being done minimizes the time wasted and 2) wanting to interact with people as little as possible so those customers will bite at a good offer with a bit of profit baked in as long as you don't make them deal with people very much.
Dealers are very pragmatic about sales tactics. They absolutely stereotype people walking in off the street vs online, and among the people that do walk in they stereotype based on gender and race. They will use different tactics with Mexicans, blacks, whites, etc. Effective dealers (going to avoid using 'good' in this case) realized pretty quickly that the folks who work the deal online will just walk instantly if you feed them the usual line of crap. The best shot at closing the deal is to go directly to the best price and be done with it, because they probably won't wait around for a second shot.
Those are pretty great deals, due to the excellent local incentives. I was quoted $57xx for one-pay 36mo 10K/yr lease. We opted for a 15K/yr lease at a little over $6K instead because my wife puts a lot of miles on her daily driver. We won't go negative, but my wife was spending $200/mo on gasoline previously, so our only net cost will be the insurance (which would also be a wash except we're keeping the old daily driver for it's utility aspect).
Just a hypothesis but Telsa is a self-driving car platform that just happens to sell vehicles right now.
The trajectory Tesla is taking is where a user buys subscription to a Tesla vehicle, all cars have the same feature set but what is available to you is based on the subscription you've bought. So if you have the autopilot option bought it will be available to you in whichever car that arrives.
In this case it makes sense to push out homogeneity amongst all of its vehicles out there.
"In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are."
How are these shared cars not going to be treated like crap like most other shared vehicles, such as scooters? At my old college, drunks flipped a shared smart car onto its roof for sport.
The Tesla ride sharing network that's in the works (but slow-gowing in the actual full self-driving department) is supposed to be more like Uber than Hertz. If you mistreat the car and the next person reports it as dirty, you'd probably get charged extra or barred from using them if you were a repeat offender.
> The Hongguang MINI EV, made by SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co., is currently the hottest EV in China, the world’s biggest automobile market. Sales of the compact four-seater beat industry giant Tesla Inc. in August, with consumers wowed by its tiny price tag -- the EV retails for between 28,800 yuan ($4,230) and 38,800 yuan -- and its ability to run for as many as 170 kilometers (106 miles) on a sin
The irony is that while upstart Tesla pursues the path of market incumbent (moving upmarket), incumbent GM pursues the path of upstart by moving downmarket.
I don't know how well GM will be able to stay on this path. I suspect that Tesla's current path is risky at best. I also suspect that GM can stay on its downmarket path, and build an unbeatable presence doing it, indefinitely.
This is more related to the discussions in the comments..
(eu perspective),
The other day I was watching a drag race on carwow with 4 German super-estates. None of this "sport-ier versions" had bellow 2 tons*.
Lot's of people in Germany drive more "sensible" versions of this cars with weights of "just" 1.8 tons.
How much will the fact that people are today fatter affect the decision to buy this car?
- BMW M5 has gone up in weight 200 kg or so
- I heard people use "Tesla weight" downside when compared to a normal "saloon"
-I would buy this car gladly here in DK.
Wouldn't make the decision in lot's of other EU countries where driving awareness isn't as high
I too would happily buy this car if I didn't own an EV already, but it's too cheap.
That's not me turning my nose up at it by the way, it's that invariably everything is cut to the bone in a new car that cheap, and that goes well beyond the luxuries you might expect.
China and India have known lenient safety standards that large international companies have in the past talked about leveraging to get the price down for their domestic markets. I very much doubt this car would withstand even a modest collision, and I'd not want my kids in it.
In terms of the markets where these cars sell it's something of a necessary evil to take the risk in something that will crumple on impact in exchange for family transportation (which we did happily in the west 20-30 years ago).
I agree with you completely.
That being said, there is a lot of room between 6000 dollars and 20000-ish for Smart Fortwo* (EU numbers) which I guess could be an equivalent.
I will say though that my Leaf was the local equivalent of about $8k US and is actually worth more now than when I bought it so would thoroughly recommend the used route with EVs for anyone considering it.
Wow, 8k is nothing!
Well, a used Leaf with around 50-60000 kilometers, 2015., is 15 000 dollars+ in Denmark.
Interesting thing is, if you didn't know, Denmark has 70%-180% taxes on cars. Reality is that the base car prices are lower(ed) so the end price is not as high as people expect.
Electric cars were exempt from taxes until Tesla came and messed things up (people bought model S instead of nice beemers, audies as they got more car for buck...Danish government didn't like that). Now the tax is 20% with planned increase, as Danish welfare system, unlike Norway's (similar taxation policy), can't afford losing future tax revenue (quoting Danish government). So logic dictates, rate of electric car price decrease has to be same or higher (abs) as tax increase in order to make average Jørgen decide to go electric.
I would love to buy one of these, it would handle almost all my transportation needs here in rural Vermont. I've been looking for something like this for years and have been finding basically nothing in the US market. US car makers seem to only want to sell big cars (which makes sense, more profit) but big cars are bad for global warming. I believe that over the next 5 to 10 years you're going to see the US and world markets shift dramatically to small EV's like this. If it had a small trailer for hauling larger loads short distances it would be perfect. For long distance travel I could rent a larger vehicle, but that would be rare.
Totally! This would bring me to work and back for half a month. I can also load my EV at work, so there wouldn't be any range problems. Would love to see something like this for the European market.
You might want to take a look at the Citroën Ami. 6000 euro including VAT. Not sure which country you're in, but it seems more likely that something street legal in France would work for you.
I'm in Germany. Had a quick look at the Ami. The "problem" is the maximum speed of 45 km/h. As inner-city traffic normally is 50 km/h this will make you kind of a disturbance for other motorists and this will turn people down or keep them from buying this. Not to mention that overland traffic is normally 100 km/h and well... 45 is quite slower... Nevertheless, good idea, I like it.
Renault Twizy probably isn't a million miles away (though for regulatory reasons, it's slower). I do think it's interesting that most if not all European equivalents have been made to look apparently as un-car-like as possible, whereas this one looks like a very small car.
I think this might be due to regulatory issues. If I remember correctly, a Twizy will be categorised as a "light vehicle" [1] which will probably lower some requirements in terms of safety or whatnot.
>> "“A lot of consumers don’t need anything fancy, a commute is all they ask from a car,” said Yale Zhang, founder of AutoForesight"
I expect a great deal more than the simple commute. I expect safety. I expect crumple zones, airbags, traction control, and enough actual strength that I have a hope of surviving a serious crash. This not-a-car 5K EV doesn't have such things. It is essentially an enclosed 4-wheel motorcycle. Cheap, but not offing any degree of physical protection.
>> I always feel a bit nervous in this low-speed car because it’s kind of shaky.”
Ya. Be afraid. It might seem all friendly at low speeds, but one day those tiny wheels dig into a pothole, throwing you into oncoming traffic (bad) or a tree (worse). The people praising these things are like those who call motorcycles dangerous but hop on a Vespa without hesitation.
> One of the biggest challenges in making EVs cheaper is the battery, which currently represents about one-quarter of a car’s cost because of the expensive metals used, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.
No, it's such a big, massive misconception the misconception that the echo chamber keeps repeating.
The raw material cost of metals used even in the biggest batteries around is at maximum $1k-$1.5k, and usually just few hundred bucks.
What makes it expensive is the big chem, and it's stranglehold on processing them into cathode, and anode materials.
Plain graphite, while also being dominated by an oligopoly, still only costs $1 per kg, but the moment it becomes an industrial chemical, its price shoots n-fold.
Lithium is by far not the cost factor at all, with the amount used, and no scarcity prospect is in sight, despite speculations of the stock market lemmings, but the moment it is put into some chemical relevant to battery making, it too shoots up in price n-fold.
Cobalt was one of few things which really used to be pricey, but not much now. The cost was approaching $200 per kg at the top of the Cobalt bubble, but then it felt to $20, and below. And again, the moment it becomes a cathode material, it costs 10*n-times as much.
The cost advantage of LFP batteries which a lot of Chinese companies prefer to cobalt based ones is not much in the material cost, but because the chemical's supply chain is much simpler, stable, and has much, much, more domestic competition.
The cobalt based cathode materials are still a domain of LG Chem, and few much smaller Japanese companies.
Do you have any citations explaining this in more detail, perhaps with some argument supporting intent or collaboration? I ask because it directly conflicts with everything I've seen about the economics arising from the fundamental physics of chemical engineering. To whit:
The chemical engineering department at my university was full of extremely bright people working on incredibly complex machinery and wacky fluid-dynamics tricks to eke out an additional tenth of a percent yield or purity in basic chemical processes. I presume that this could only be even faintly economical if the industry is so competitive that minuscule improvements are a major advantage.
Similarly, my understanding is that putting together and running a chemical operation is an astonishingly complex and expensive proposition. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of using a tanker full of benzene is 5% the benzene itself and 95% safety measures, regulatory compliance, purpose-built equipment, and specially-trained employees.
I know for a fact that it takes decades for new chemical plants to come online, which makes the supply extremely inflexible; I'd be more surprised if new sources of demand didn't cause prices to explode.
> Do you have any citations explaining this in more detail, perhaps with some argument supporting intent or collaboration? I ask because it directly conflicts with everything I've seen about the economics arising from the fundamental physics of chemical engineering. To whit:
I do not, but I mingled a lot with EV engineers from BYD, with some of whom I used to spend Fridays.
> the cost of using a tanker full of benzene is 5% the benzene itself and 95% safety measures, regulatory compliance, purpose-built equipment, and specially-trained employees.
The cost of benzene is 50% and more tax in most Western countries.
> The chemical engineering department at my university was full of extremely bright people working on incredibly complex machinery
Indeed it is, but there are far more harder to synthesize, and work with chemicals sold at single digit margins, largely thanks to Chinese factories steamrolling chem monopolies for the last 2 decades.
And battery materials are by far not that tricky to make.
> I ask because it directly conflicts with everything I've seen about the economics arising from the fundamental physics of chemical engineering. To w[]it:
> I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of using a tanker full of benzene is 5% the benzene itself and 95% safety measures, regulatory compliance, purpose-built equipment, and specially-trained employees.
> I know for a fact that it takes decades for new chemical plants to come online, which makes the supply extremely inflexible; I'd be more surprised if new sources of demand didn't cause prices to explode.
I don't understand how you think this conflicts with the parent comment. You seem to be in near-total agreement. Compare:
>> The raw material cost of metals used even in the biggest batteries around is at maximum $1k-$1.5k, and usually just few hundred bucks.
>> What makes it expensive is the big chem, and it's stranglehold on processing them into cathode, and anode materials.
>> Plain graphite, while also being dominated by an oligopoly, still only costs $1 per kg, but the moment it becomes an industrial chemical, its price shoots n-fold.
>> Lithium is by far not the cost factor at all, with the amount used, and no scarcity prospect is in sight, despite speculations of the stock market lemmings, but the moment it is put into some chemical relevant to battery making, it too shoots up in price n-fold.
>> Cobalt was one of few things which really used to be pricey, but not much now. The cost was approaching $200 per kg at the top of the Cobalt bubble, but then it felt to $20, and below. And again, the moment it becomes a cathode material, it costs 10*n-times as much.
The parent comment claimed that prices of finished products were higher than the costs of raw materials because a "big chem" cartel has a price-fixing agreement. I disagree with this. My knowledge of the field and personal observations imply an extremely competitive market (-> viability of expensive R&D for small improvements) and a field whose basic engineering problems (-> near-zero price elasticity) would naturally yield the observed prices (-> extreme variation when new demand is found). Both of these argue against widespread anticompetitive behavior.
Every battery cell itself is a little engineering miracle, that's why its expensive.
> The cost advantage of LFP batteries which a lot of Chinese companies prefer to cobalt based
This is a kind of nonsense statement. Cathodes can't really be 'cobalt based'. The Cathodes primary part is Nickel. The Cobalt is an additive to stabilize the Nickel.
Processed chemicals used for battery making cost many times the cost of raw materials, and it will be so until competition can weaken the big chem oligopolies currently dominating the market.
That’s completely misunderstanding why the cost increased. 95% pure carbon is worth next to nothing per pound. 99.99+% carbon is really difficult to manufacture. If battery manufacturers thought they could do it for less they would manufacture things in house, but purification is both difficult and expensive.
If it is so easy[0] go start a company and undercut them. Raw materials are commodities, if you can make battery grade materials for less - in bulk - someone will buy them (or buy you out to protect their monopoly).
[0]its not. Batteries have exacting purity and qc requirements that meeting and maintaining is neither trivial nor cheap to do well even at small scale.
What sort of processing are they doing? It seems like processing those materials to be pure and consistent could be pricey. Maybe not a perfect comparison, but raw silicon costs $1-2 per kg, but can cost several hundred per kg once processed into wafers.
Because that calculation assumes the existence of a kitchen to make the soup, energy to heat the soup etc. If you ignore what the actual costs of production are it seems like everyone is using an extreme markup.
Raw material cost has usually very little to do with what a similar weight or volume of purified material costs. The purification process, energy input and any kind of stabilization trickery required to keep it pure are what drives the cost, the raw material costs are a footnote in that.
Meta: when you collapse the first top-level comment here and need to then click "more" to see anything else on page 2 it's not worth commenting anymore.
They won't sell these small cars in the US because they claim the US market's only growth is in huge SUVs and trucks. Well that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you brought to market a $5k EV that fits two to a parking space, I can promise you that the market is definitely there.
I drive a Fiat 500e, but I'm one of few enough that they've stopped even selling them in the US.
If your emphasis is on the $5K, there's no way to make something that meets US road safety standards for that price. The cheapest new (gas-powered) car in the US is $10k, and it's really, really cheap.
It's the other car I own, a Ford Fiesta, and Ford stopped making it this year, too.
Is still cannot comprehend how in the world Chinese fell for American cars.
One thing I noticed is that recent Chinese immigrants to the West often get a very unpleasant surprise after buying GM cars in North America. GM in China is known to be much better than American GM, but they are still known as quite a bad deal to more technically literate buyers.
I guess, some people will drive just any car for as long as it's not Japanese.
Or may it be the appeal of a an image of a product made for "rich old people" is still so irresistible to Chinese buyers.
> Is still cannot comprehend how in the world Chinese fell for American cars.
Well, because it's not an American car as such; it's a car designed for the Chinese market by an American company. Similarly, Ford is pretty popular in Europe (and so was GM until fairly recently when they sold off Opel), but their big sellers are largely cars designed for the European market.
This goes both ways; Japanese and Korean manufacturers have models that are primarily or entirely designed for the US market.
GM basically lost money in Europe for 15 years straight.
Ford does make some money in Euope thanks to their commercial vehicles mostly, they don't actually make all that much money on the personal cars either. That said, Ford did much better in Europe then GM and are actually profitable there.
American products are considered a luxury status symbol in much of China. There are literal "Jeep" stores in Beijing that are just selling Jeep-branded camo apparel at upscale prices.
Ah, I did see this at the bottom of that caixinglobal link:
"In August, the Hongguang Mini, a two-door micro EV launched by General Motors’ Chinese joint venture, claimed the title of the second most popular electric car model in the country, with sales of 9,150 units, the CPCA statistics showed."
So I can see both perspectives on this small question about sales figures in the short-term.
The tie-breaker for me? The innovations presented at Tesla's Battery Day event. I don't think GM is going to be able to catch up to that, because they simply haven't made the investments required to do so. Tesla is ahead by a decade on battery manufacturing and software, including autonomy.
What does GM have? A legacy of fuel cells, and a failed partnership with this little fraudulent company named Nikola...
More like someone nervously talking their book, first and foremost trying to reassure themselves.
I think the GP can relax, no one interprets the "Tesla nemesis" in the title as anything else than sensationalism. The two EV markets have absolutely nothing in common except the (maybe) compatible charging stations.
I don't know why the parent felt the need for this rant. The article itself is kind of pointless as those cars are not really comparable, might as well throw scooters in there.
If we seriously want to argue GM/Tesla. The 3M ice vehicles are pretty irrelevant, all cars will have to go electric and that is the market that matters. And selling a tiny car in China is not gone be what makes GM the big money they need to be 'General Motors'. In fact I would argue all infrastructure related to ICE will be negative value in a few years, and that includes outstanding leases on ICE cars. That will be a huge issue for GM and Ford.
I'm a long-term investor. I got in back in March, way before the split or much of the stuff that has come to pass. I documented what I was doing back then, and I think my bets have held up pretty darn well!
When you see evidence that you've missed something, don't double down with your head in the sand...
Dude, I'm long Tesla as well but there is no point to this creed. The headline is just attention grabbing. Nobody believes a 5k car in China is gone help GM win over Tesla in the EV space.
