My previous car is a Yaris.
When I got the Yaris I heard people make snide comments like “Anyone see that big guy get out of that tiny car?” then gas prices went up and they became “Hey, what kind of MPG does that thing get?”
I like hatchbacks. Bigger is fine but nothing huge.
I have a 2017 Hybrid Yaris in blue like this one:
That I affectionately call “Blue thunder” 🤣
Yaris gang rise up!
Want to trade my 09 in for a more recent model, hatchback would be ideal
The actual model is beautiful, and it has Apple Car/Android auto and also a HUD.
As a taller woman my wife was against us getting a subcompact until I took her to test drive it thinking I wouldn’t fit. Between seeing how comfortable and efficient it was she was entirely on board
Honda Fit gangg
My Yaris is actually older than me. so old in fact, that it was called “vitz” and/or “echo” in some countries. i am the 4th owner. had to replace the starter, all the fluids and the clutch (cuz old people). best car ever. it has around 100.000 km on it and runs like it rolled out of the factory just yesterday. considering we euros pay up to 7€ per gallon it’s good i still get around 40mpg out of it. love that thing.
americans will embrace small cars like they embrace gun control
We embraced the shit out of them during the oil crisis in the '70’s. Then when gasoline got cheap again we snapped right back.
“But my SUV makes me feel so ‘safe’ and gives me a commanding view of the road!!!”
I am of the opinion that everyone ought to just get a motorcycle.
I think there should be a separate license to drive SUVs and Trucks over a certain size. And that maintaining that license should be a bit of a hassle - like a required in-person written and practical test every 2 years. If people want that commanding view of the road and “safe” feeling that comes from endangering everyone else on the road, then they should have to put in some extra effort - not enough extra effort that it’s unattainable for those who actually have a need for a vehicle of that size, but enough effort that it would discourage the widespread use we have currently.
Also, during your SUV probationary period you have to drive a Suzuki Samurai for two years or so.
I’d love to have a motorcycle that would replace my current vehicle, but it would need to be capable of keeping me warm while handling well in heavy snow. Afaik, there aren’t any enclosed bikes out there
When you need a fucking step ladder to get into your jacked up pickup just so you can commute or get groceries you might have lost your mind.
I am of the opinion that everyone ought to just get a motorcycle.
I’d rather not die tyvm.
The US EPA currently penalizes smaller cars thanks to a poorly thought out rule for fuel economy that scales by wheelbase size, making larger cars easier to meet requirements for. The EPA has made many embarrassingly backwards decisions, but this might be the worst.
I was taxed an extra $150 to register a 2002 Honda Insight last year. It was for a “Hybrid Tax” because hybrid owners buy less gas and therefore are paying less tax on gasoline. Like, that’s the whole point of driving a small car!
They did for a while in the 70s-80s until giant SUVs got everyone hot and bothered
With their face?!?
Whenever I’m in the States I hate the fact that everything is a 20 minute car ride away. I understand why road rage can be a thing if you spend so much time in the car.
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USA didn’t start building bullshit suburbs until 1950s. before that it was dense cities.
No it wasn’t. Like 80% of the population lived in rural areas before the 50s. Apparently this sub really doesn’t like facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfla1
Europe is much more population dense than the US, a quick fact check easily confirms this.
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If anything this means Europe’s cities just can’t accommodate cars, because they weren’t built for them. The weird thing is that American cities were built for cars and yet still can’t accommodate cars. Traffic, lack of parking, road rage… it’s a huge mess, and it seems like the more you commit to cars, the worse it all gets. That’s the trouble with cars. They just don’t work.
I don’t really understand this comment though. It doesn’t take thousands of years to achieve urban density. And what does America’s sprawl have to do with loving large cars? You don’t need a huge car to drive medium distances.
You don’t even need a huge car to travel huge distances.
You need density to support a train system. You need a large number of riders to make it economical and you need them living within a reasonable distance of the stations. The US is very spread out. You can blame cars for that but that is the world we live in. The US is also very big with large rural areas, the western US didn’t even really develop until trains came out in the 1869. Europe was built around compact cities based on horses and walking long before cars.
I agree that we are too car focused and it has become a sort of arms race, build more roads, more cars, more roads, etc.
Public transportationdoesn’t have to be economical, it’s a service.
The focus on cars is emotionally driven. The car symbolizes freedom and independence. Besides this it’s a huge status symbol. And the industry is working hard to keep it this way. The lack of decent public transportation is by design.
Adding to this, I think cars are also often a person’s only private space. Look at the YT videos that are people ranting from their car. It’s all they have. They’re very attached to it.
Further, a lot of Americans are in terrible physical shape. Obese and weak, injured, etc or all of these. But behind the wheel of a beefy car they can feel the joy of movement and power. It’s literally an extension of their body.
Freedom, independence, privacy, strength and power… yeah Americans have a lot invested in their cars. I was brought up into this culture and subscribed to it myself for a long time. Fortunately I just have other ways to feel good about myself now and caring about cars seems stupid and pathetic.
You’re absolutely correct, but a bicycle tideuor bus trip or train journey is also a feeling of freedom, too. Reframing ‘freedom’ so people don’t feel they have to get a $70,000 crew cab pickup to drive to the bar or store is the thing.
A bus felt liberating before I got my driver’s license. And driving felt liberating before I got ahold of aircraft controls for the first time. One day I’ll get this jetpack to work and then forget about planes.
There is a continuum and its hard to go in the other direction without feeling the additional restrictions.
Quite literally, same here. There’s nothing wrong with bikes, but used cars became unreasonably expensive and younger people never tasted the freedom. Planes are like that with even smaller percentages of pilots and even more unreasonable prices (last affordable in the 1960s, while cars were affordable until the early 2000s or so). People hate what they don’t have or understand. Personal vehicles are incredibly liberating for those of us who get it. We’re being shamed for appreciating an independence everyone should experience, but can’t because there are too many people, too much demand, and all the ecological problems that come with it. Yes, human impact could be reduced if everyone lived in abject poverty, but guess what, poor people in developing countries want Western amenities too. Everyone should.
This is so true. Bikes are a wonderful feeling.
I actually spent 8 years going to Burning Man and while I was there I volunteered to fix people’s bikes. A bike is really the best way to get around there but many people borrow one that’s in dubious condition, get out there, and realize it doesn’t ride well, or has no air in the tires, whatever. We helped so many people get those shitty bikes into a rideable state. Lots of flat fixes. Many lube jobs. A lot of people just needed the seat adjusted but didn’t have a wrench. A lot of bad derailleurs we would just remove, turning the bike into a single speed.
My goal was to help people have a week of joy on a bike and remember how awesome they can be. Most Americans ride a bike when they are kids and then abandon them. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to bring all those adults a taste of that joy and freedom again. I hope some of them returned home with a renewed interest in bikes.
the western US didn’t even really develop until trains came out in the 1869
The western US didn’t really develop until the government started giving land that had already been ceded to indigenous peoples and couldn’t actually support dense settlement to white settlers, at the behest of railroad companies who needed an artificial reason to build railroads in the first place.
Unfortunately it’s zoning that caused most of this issue. Not size. Dense residential was disallowed for not entirely un-racist reasons, so it spread out enormously instead. On top of car companies lobbying in various ways to make cars essential.
Suburban sprawl is also an issue. It takes 20 minutes or more just to walk out of my massive subdivision. It takes 3 or 4 minutes to drive out of the subdivision. And we’re out of city limits, so no bus. It sucks. The only thing that I can say for it is that it’s very safe in terms of crime.
People also spread out because they could - most people would prefer to have a house with land rather than live in a tiny apt
I totally get that fact. I also think that it would not be bad to copy some things from other countries to make the cities in the States more liveable without car dependency. There’s enough space to do that.
At the very least we could link cities with rail systems. Don’t put a million stops on them either though. Try taking Amtrack from DC to Boston and you’ll see what I mean.
just have more than one set of tracks and you can have a regional and express service train!
Passenger trains exist in the U.S. They used to be popular. Then planes and affordable automobiles put them out of business. If you don’t live in a dense urban area, you almost certainly have a car, meaning you aren’t beholden to train schedules and destinations. If you are in an area where you get by without a car, an Uber to the airport gets you to your destination much faster.
Normal sized cars* you mean.
Normal cars aren’t small. They’re just small if you compare them to the giant ridiculous trucks they have over that.
some reasons for the raise of vehicle size on the last decades are personal taste, but others are policy driven, we could look into that, as utility vehicles are treated differently in terms of emission requirements
I have heard also that a big car is better because a big car crashing with other bigger cars will increase the probability of surviving, but then it’s a war of having the biggest car. It’s basically the same as weapons.
Unfuck the CAFE standards and manufacturers will quit killing off car models and producing so many “light trucks”.
Give me a new El Camino EV with a 400 mile range and I’m in.
All my road trips are around 150 miles and there may or may not be a charger at the destination.
The article says range isn’t important…if you’ve ever looked at a map of the US, you’ll see why that’s a misguided statement.
Something like the Maverick hybrid might be best for you.
But then you have to deal with driving a ford.
Or an adequate mass transportation system.
Or walkable zoning, lack of which is the fundamental cause of the car dependency.
The lack of continuous sidewalks drives me nuts. A developer might put in a sidewalk but the one next to them doesn’t. Sometimes you are walking alongside a ditch or have to cross a busy road to continue on.
As much as I’m inclined to agree with @[email protected], the real reason is typically that all new developments are required to include sidewalks, but existing ones aren’t required to retrofit. So you get a patchwork of sidewalks installed over time as things get torn down and rebuilt.
The “annoying and pedestrian hostile” part is municipalities’ unwillingness to infill sidewalks in front of old developments at taxpayer expense.
I would wager (small amounts of) money that the majority of “urban areas” have “adequate” mass transportation. The US prefers buses (which are horrible) but it is there and you can usually get around cities out to the surrounding suburbs.
The problem is actually the same that even the gold standard countries like Japan have. Rural areas and remote villages/towns do not have good coverage. If you are lucky, there are two buses per day and you best catch those or you are stuck sleeping in the terminal until tomorrow. And we have a lot of those. Like, the works of Makoto Shinkai are well worth watching for this reason alone (aside from them being magnificent) because he LOVES the imagery of two lovers trying to connect with each other over a day or two of transferring between trains and buses and the emotional devastation of possibly missing your next connection.
That said: Americans still tend to love to drive even when there is public transportation. Some of that is routing. Some of that is that buses are horrible. And some is just that it is people from one “megacity” on a day trip to a different “megacity”.
I never drove into Boston, I always took the train. I still needed a car though if I wanted to go anywhere away from the city. Boston also has an awful spoke and no rim train system. If you want to go from the end of one line to another you can’t go in a ring around the city, you’d have to go all the way in then all the way up the other spoke.
Buses aren’t horrible.
- they feel safer in terms of crime, which might not be an issue you deal with but for over half the population it matters
- they can often go around problems. One bus on the same line up ahead has an issue that has no real impact on the bus you are on
- lot easier for the disabled to go on and off compared to down into a subway
- you have a small degree of privacy
- Mechanical problems? Get off the bus. No biggy.
I do understand, I was a subway guy for the longest time, my wife would take the bus every day and she converted me.
Yeah, I will never acknowledge buses as a good alternative to a subway or even an el train. If you can’t do something good you go with what you have but:
- “Crime”: A lot of that is people being generally afraid of black folk and homeless people. If you think the driver is going to do anything because a Poor sat next to you then I got a bridge to sell you. Aside from that, the vast majority of “crime” is resolved by staring out a window or not making eye contact. And the people who ARE going to actually rob you? it is a lot easier to flee onto city streets than into a crowded subway. Watch your shit when the vehicle comes to a stop. And guards/cops tend to hang out at train stations which helps in the event that something does happen.
- Going around problems: Yeah. Unless you need to get off on the stop they are now skipping. If you know the area well enough you can adjust. Otherwise you are now very confused that the stop google maps told you to take is not next and you need to figure out if it makes sense to get out at the next stop or two stops from here when you are closer to the original route. Been there, done that, made the wrong judgement call and walked an extra eight blocks in the pouring rain to get to my hotel*. Also, if you are AT the stop they are bypassing because of an accident or whatever… good luck.
- Differently abled folk: Any decent subway is handicap accessible. And rolling/crutching/caning onto a subway is a LOT easier than needing to wait for the entire bus to deflate its tires, the driver to help clip you in, the angry passenger being pissed off that they are now behind schedule, etc.
- Privacy: You have zero privacy in any situation. You have not LIVED until you have had no choice but to make eye contact with someone defecating on a subway train or having an episode on a bus.
- Mechanical Problems: I will definitely give you that.
*: God, this would have been five or six years ago? Was heading out to a European City for a holiday and to visit a few friends. Got more than a bit flabbergasted trying to find the train station at the airport but ended up finding a bus station eventually and just went with it. Got on, knew my route to my hotel, waited. Like two accidents and the bus was shifting between two of the main routes with the driver rambling in the local language and me understanding one word in ten. Eventually just started comparing the GPS coordinates versus the route and saw we were “somewhat still on it” and hopped off and walked eight blocks in the rain. That evening, when my brain was a bit more functional, I figured out which other route we were migrating between and realized the bus would have actually let me out right by the train station outside my hotel. Still grumpy about that one.
So I live in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south where 90% of what’s on the road is trying its best to be a monster truck… I drive what looks like a pregnant rollerskate by comparison cuz I don’t want to send half my paycheck into the gas tank.
It’s funny-sad how the folks in the giant trucks get offended just by seeing my tiny car. Every day there’s always at least one asshole in an F-350 or some shit that likes to ride up on my ass cuz I guess it makes them feel powerful? I just drop a mph every couple seconds until either they fuck off or get annoyed enough to pass.
Anyway, moral of the story is that stupid-big vehicles are here to stay in the US, at least in the regions occupied by Y’all Quaeda. Their trucks are one of their few sources of self esteem.
…I’m really tempted to find one of those rubber testicle things that the cowboys like to put between the rear wheels of their trucks, but like a comically tiny one, color it like the trans flag, and hang it on the back of my tiny car just to annoy the rednecks on the road. …although here, that’d probably get my car or myself shot.
I got the chevy spark right before it got discontinued and the amount of people who comment on my small car in the south is obsurd. It’s great being able to fit into a parking spot between 2 monster trucks and it only costs like 25 dollars for a tank of gas. People who see vehicles as more than just a means of transportation baffles me. I like the tiny truck nuts idea I might have to steal that.
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The problem with CAFE is that it does not apply to trucks and SUV’s. So bear with me for a moment:
You are a car executive, choosing what car to make. On one hand, say there’s a station wagon. On the other, say there’s an SUV. The bean counters assure you they cost about as much to produce, but the station wagon has to comply to stricter regulations, and the engineers tell you they’ll have to work harder to make the station wagon comply to the law.
Meanwhile, the SUV costs about as much to make, but has way fewer rules it has to comply with. The marketing team tells you they can sell both vehicles just as well, though you may be able to set a higher sticker price for the SUV.
Do you build the more heavily regulated station wagon, knowing your margins are thinner? Or do you take the easier option with bigger margins and build the SUV?
You’ll even see the outcome IRL. In the US, Ford tries to convince you that the car you need for your family is a pick-up truck with a crew cab. Meanwhile, in the European market, where larger cars start costing much more much sooner, the same segment gets offered a seven seater minivan.
My dream car is a Nash Metropolitan converted to an EV.
That would be fucking dope. I’d love for retrofuturist cars like this to appear
Lovely car! Btw: how do you put a picture in a comment? What sorcery is this?
I’m on desktop, so how I do it is right-click, copy image, then just paste into the post. Not sure how to do it on mobile.
Oh! Ok. I don’t know if that possible in Mlem (iOS app). Thanks!
Got it! it just needs the
markdown formatting. Thanks a lot. Cheers!
Bro if you could get a used leaf gen one (they run around 4k), you could take that thing to a drag strip and absolutely turn some heads.
I have a friend who wants to take my gen one leaf and do a conversion. He just went to an EV mechanics course on it.
There was a time back when gas prices got kinda high when I thought Americans would finally shift down to slightly smaller cars, but now it’s practically a cultural thing for half the country to burn as much fuel as possible, so I suspect even if gas prices here hit Europe levels it wouldn’t cause them to budge much.
It does feel really odd, though, going somewhere like a school and just being absolutely surrounded by huge SUVs and pickup trucks that you know damn well like 90% of the drivers aren’t actually utilizing.
Double-sucks because it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a small car. Everything new, even most cars, are huge.
I thought after 2008 that we had finally gotten over our large car addiction.
They’re so addicted to SUVs now that Ford doesn’t even make a car other than the Mustang. Their entire lineup is SUVs.
Looks to me like vehicle sales have been taking dramatically, probably due to the increased cost due to “supply chain”. Also, EV sales grew 42.7% last year.
Here we have higher taxes for cars more than 4m long, so there are lots of small cars. Also, a lot of 3.99m cars.
I mean, yeah. Small electric cars, more trains, more public transport.
The author notes that he would like to see more people take public transportation, and I’m all for that. There’s one problem for me: In Michigan where I live there is no public transportation that really gets you around Detroit, or gets you from the suburbs to Detroit. There is the joke of a QLine that goes no where and the People Mover that also doesn’t do much, but other than that nothing. Convincing people that have private transportation (read: cars) that they should invest/have their taxes used for public transportation is a no-go. Convincing the rich that they should pay more than $0 a year in taxes is even harder. This is probably the case a in several states around the country, but definitely in Michigan (and believe me, we tried with a bus system). So while I get that smaller cars can be and maybe should be thing, I think public transportation, as the author points out, could also be a thing. However, trying to get anyone, especially millionaires and billionaires, to pay a cent more than they are forced to is like pulling teeth.
Fellow Michigander here. I’m located towards Flint in Mount Morris and I can agree that public transportation is a joke. Where I live it isn’t as feasible either, as there is more rural homes.
Which is why they should be forced to pay more
