The old reason for driving a smaller car/truck was reduced operating costs, mostly in fuel. That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles. In fact, electric vehicles are larger/heavier than ic equivalents. This problem of huge vehicles is only going to get worse. We will all have to learn to live with more massive vehicles.
Nor is it for IC vehicles. The tall car/truck thing is totally market driven. American drivers want a "high command seating position". Electric or not, people enjoy looking down on traffic. In fact a bunch of small SUVs (rav 4) are just Japanese car models made taller for the US market.
I'll try to find the source, but previously read that the reason SUVs are so popular is that there was some law that let 'utility vehicles' be taxed or something differently, so the manufacturers could make much more profit off them. Thus, they created this demand for a "high seating position", and pushed it on the market...and now because other cars are so large, it's an escalating war. You don't want to be a small car among giants. Nasty feedback loop.
This. It was a regulation that was passed to encourage fleet level average MPG standards for auto companies, by the way. And just like everything else that is causing massive problems in our society, gigantic trucks are an outcome of a loophole in a system that was entirely predictable.
And here's the relevant section that called it from the get-go - emphasis mine:
At issue was this: Some companies offer full model lines, from cars to large SUVs and pickups, but some don’t. How could there be a overreaching fuel-economy standard that penalized companies like Ford and GM, while carmakers that sold only smaller cars effortlessly abided by the rules? So the concept of vehicle footprint was added. Models that ran large, crossing specific length-by-width thresholds‚ would have less ambitious fuel-economy targets. While the Obama administration has pushed for more aggressive CAFE numbers, the amended regulations retain the footprint-based leniency towards bigger cars and light trucks.
The result is a loophole, allowing the entire auto industry to sidestep some of the more painful efficiency requirements by inflating vehicle footprints. And historically, drivers almost always lean toward larger vehicles. “In general, if everything else about the vehicle is the same, consumers prefer the bigger one, with the roomier interior,” says Kate Whitefoot, a senior program officer at the National Academy of Engineering and the lead author of the paper (she was a doctoral student at the time of the study). Combine a regulatory loophole with a built-in, well-known customer choice, and the industry lurches towards the inevitable: larger models and more light trucks.
I wonder if a state can use those same length-by-width thresholds to impose additional taxes on those vehicles. Make owning one of these excessively sized vehicles so egregiously expensive that you'd have to be literally brain damaged to get one when you don't actually need one.
It's based on vehicle weight, not height, and it qualifies the vehicle to be written off for tax purposes as a business truck, for business expenses prima facia.
It basically allows you to depreciate it over 2-5 years. That's it. Pay back the value difference in taxes when sold.
There was a brief Bush era credit on top of this, long expired, but that still haunts the interwebs with rumors of still being prescient. It's not.
Iirc, the weight cutoff is currently something like 7000 lbs, and many suvs have nominal weights of 7001 lbs, with submodels that are 6999 lbs, for locals where getting taxed as a business vehicle is a bad thing.
(Unless by taxed you meant CAFE accounting, which is different.)
(I'll address a small area of CAFE besides what a commenter said about CAFE below, which appears to be entirely correct and on-the-nose to me re footprint.)
People for the most part didn't want larger trucks. They want the old smaller full size trucks. They are no longer an option.
CAFE targets (among other reasons) have forced the market to switch to Aluminum from Steel, because you can achieve near equal performance, with lower mass and higher mpg.
The cost is that aluminum is not as strong as steel, so you need more volume for equivalent strength. Plus the literal cost $.
But the cheat code is that moment-arm is proportional to force, but also length-squared. M=P*L^2 and similar.
So you can make some design elements lighter by switching steel to aluminum and making it bigger. Boxier.
Bonus is the then new-ish popular idea of crush zone is practically baked in with the larger, lighter, less dense designs.
Add in some addl (Steel to Al) complexity due to serviceability, flexure, and fatigue, (which require addl bumps in mass and/or length/ volume to meet design requirements), and extrapolate over the whole vehicle, and you get the size changes from roughly 2008 (cough, cough) to now.
I read your earlier comment as implying the EV transition was going to cause more huge vehicles. We can agree the huge vehicle phenomenon is not caused by EVs.
Electric vehicles are often heavier than comparable ICE vehicles, but not necessarily larger or even large. Chevy Bolt, VW ID.4, Smart Fortwo EQ etc are all perfectly small electric vehicles.
Batteries tend to take up the bottom couple inches of the car, as the "skateboard" design wins. 2170 cells are 70mm tall, 2.75 inches. That's not a huge factor. Also, it doesn't affect the incredibly crucial hood height, which could be greatly lowered since there's no engine/engine bay needed! Also the underside of gas cars need at least exhaust, sometimes drive axles, and usually other crap that can be deleted from ev's that helps lower EVs too. I don't think EVs are practically any taller.
They also, recently, have all the weight at the bottom, which is extremely from a handling/stability perspective. Even if you slam on the breaks, sideways at speed, you ain't gonna flip (some SUV's excepted). This is useful for emergency braking.
As for weight, the main potential problem is braking. Thankfully anti-lock brakes & big calipers are quite amazing. Ioniq vehicles have a 60-0 stopping distance of 118ft, which is on the low end of most vehicles in general, such as the also well performing Honda Accord Sport 2.0T. In car on car situations the additional weight has extra inertia but cars are generally quite resillient. As for pedestrians bicyclists & others light targets, cars already weighed so vastly much more that it's hard to imagine the extra weight changing 99.999% of accident outcomes significantly.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I believe even the NHTSA has made statements about the dangers the added weight and acceleration pose both to pedestrians and other vehicle occupants (and previously, their neat silent operation).
> That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles.
An electric truck will still use more electrical energy to accelerate than an electric car. The cost to drive a mile in an electric vehicle is lower than a gas vehicle (maybe like one third?), but it's still a cost. Also, there's the larger initial capital cost of a larger vehicle.
> We will all have to learn to live with more massive vehicles.
Or we can start legislating against them and stop de kindermoord.
But not a significant one from a consumer perspective. When trading from an ICE to an EV you'd see about a 50% reduction in fuel costs. So to a consumer it wouldn't matter if you use a little more for a bigger vehicle because you're already saving more than with your ICE.
"Or we can start legislating against them and stop the kindermoord."
Yeah, I guess the disagreement could have been with his opinion and not the rest of the comment. Although, did the kindermoord movement actually ban larger consumer vehicles? I thought it was more about street/city design.
Who is this "we"? It seems most people in the US are at least fine with larger vehicles, or even actively want them. Good luck legislating something when most of the country is against it, and corporate interests would be up in arms as well.
If you look at EVs with high capacity batteries 100kwh the weight difference between the saloon and SUV versions tend to be much smaller since the battery is the single heaviest component in them.
The curb weight of the EQS SUV for example is only about 600lbs higher than the saloon EQS.
And the model 3 is only about 400lbs lighter than the Volvo XC90 which is far larger and is about the same weight as the XC60 (ICE).
It's possible to make EVs lighter by giving up range (e.g. 500 km -> 200 km), speed (e.g. max speed 150 km/h -> 100 km/h), and capacity (e.g. 2 seats). But people aren't willing to make these sacrifices because they're too used to the status quo.
It is also possible to not use a car at all. Neither of these are feasible solutions…
People take trips longer than 200km and charging isn’t possible at all times also sometimes you do need to be able to make an emergency trip when infrastructure might be under stress or non functional such as in the case of bad weather or natural disaster.
People in general have mobility issues, small children and large families too. Having a 2 seat feather weight short distance car is likely more wasteful than having a proper one since if you can make that work for you you probably don’t need a car in the first place.
Because electric vehicles are above reproach, mostly by people who panic if asked to drive a stick. Basic car knowledge is looked down upon by many tech people.
>That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles
It already mostly disappeared, or entered the realm of “completely reasonable trade-off”, with the rise of unibody low-displacement SUVs. The original SUVs were body-on-frame V8s that got 13 mpg. Gas price and uncomfortable ride were a huge factor. Now you can get a RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg. And you get a tailgate. Why would anyone bother with a sedan and the limitations the trunk gives you? For 5-7 more mpg it’s not worth it.
> RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg.
I had a 2018 rav4 hybrid that never got close to 40MPG. Maybe 30-32 in the city, but once you hit the interstate where the speed limit is 65-70 the MPG significantly drops to 25-7 due to the underpowered 4 cylinder engine and the massive 3,900 lbs curb weight. The rav4 only had 5k miles on it when we got rid of it.
I guess it’s good if you live in a big city or never drive the actual speed limit on the interstates.
There are all kinds of interesting "reciprocal" units that lead to confusion. Another one is price-to-earnings ratio, which goes through an anomaly at zero, even though earnings-to-price ratio is a nice smooth function.
> Do EVs really have to be so tall though? If they need capacity can't they be made wider or longer?
Suddenly ahead of me
Across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air-car
Shoots towards me two lanes wide
Oh, I spin around with shrieking tires
To run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley
As another joins the chase
Ride like the wind
Straining the limits
Of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope
I've got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded
At the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle
At the fireside
Sure, but people like being in the tall car. Kind of an arms race situation for 25 years. More and more people have tall cars, so “I don’t wanna be the loser in the short car who can’t see over all these a*holes!” says every SUV buyer.
A midsize crossover where they can basically just slide right into the seat is way easier to get in and out of vs a low tide height car where they have to raise/lower a good portion of their body weight. Lotta bad hips and knees in the 50+ demographic.
I'm looking forward to the battery tech that is currently in testing. It's supposed to be 4x better than today, at around 1kWh/1kg. As long as it pans out, that could mean 2x the distance with 1/2x the battery weight.
depending where you live the main reason was and still is fitting in the streets and finding parking spots.
I mean sure large parts of the US are designed not only car centric but also with not only focus on large cars but even wants to make driving them extra easy. But that's not at all the case in the EU. Like there are many places with streets where driving a large US cars is troublesome or outright impossible and parking spots are all the time at least slightly too small for many US cars. Similar there are many place with no or very limited dedicated parking ares, mainly at the side of the street and the larger your car the more spots you will not fit in or fit in but it's hard to enter them without touching surrounding cars or similar.
> largely disappears for electric vehicles
which many people still don't want, because if you don't have your own parking spot (very common in the EU) then charging gets much more complicated
> In fact, electric vehicles are larger/heavier than ic equivalents.
Heavier yes, but there are small and compact EVs, through often with quite limited reach and mainly advertised to/sold in countries with a lot of small streets.
The weight of the car only affects the fuel cost for accelerating to a given speed. Maintaining a speed is almost entirely the surface area * coefficient of drag * speed^2 some of which is used for cooling. Electric cars generally have better drag characteristics, the 3rd variable is largely the driver + speed limits, but yes bigger = worse.
That's assuming EVs will become popular which is pretty ridiculous for most of the world. Most people want to stick with their smaller ICE cars, and that's really what we're going to continue to live with.
