Getting Americans to Buy Smaller Cars
Going electric may require reversing a decades-long trend.
Writing at The Atlantic, Patrick George muses, “Ford is pivoting to small electric cars. Will a country of SUV lovers actually buy them?” As to the former, the company currently makes precisely one “car,” the Mustang, but has decided that, if it’s going to make EVs profitably, it needs to do so with smaller vehicles than the behemoth trucks and SUVs that have been in demand the last three decades.
The follow-up question is more interesting. Whenever it comes up, we get observations like this:
Americans now tend to equate “small” cars with “dinky” or even “unsafe.” Maybe you want a Mini Cooper, but wouldn’t you feel safer putting your child in a giant Ford Expedition? Car buyers have learned to want more than they need. “We really do buy vehicles for the future and not the now,” Drury said. “Like the occasion where you have family members visiting: ‘Well, I gotta have a seven-seater,’ even if you drive by yourself 99 percent of the time.”
Which drives me nuts. For most of us, our vehicles are the second-most expensive thing we own, behind only our homes. So, unlike things like clothes, shoes, and cookware, we tend to own one rather than having an array that we can choose from based on the task at hand.
It’s true that most of the time, I’m alone in my 3-row SUV, a Mazda CX-9. And I seldom have more than three passengers, rendering the third row empty. But, several times a year, I indeed need to haul 7 passengers. Am I supposed to ignore that need when making my buying decisions? For that matter, the third row is usually folded down, accommodating more cargo.
Indeed, I already compromise. There are several times a year when I really wish I had a full-size SUV like a Chevy Suburban to haul a Home Depot purchase or to get all our vacation gear in more easily. But the trade-off in up-front cost, gas, insurance, parking, and handling isn’t worth it.
Over time, as lithium-ion batteries get cheaper, big EVs should also come down in price too; GM, for one, seems to be banking on this. But the basic economics of building a car are simply different in the electric age. For the foreseeable future, bigger EVs will be much more expensive to make than bigger gas cars—and much harder to profit from. But America’s carmakers have another reason to start downsizing. They face a potentially devastating wave of Chinese competitors selling EVs that are smaller, cheaper, more technologically advanced, and actually profitable. If Ford can’t compete with the Toyota Camry, how can it keep up with BYD’s acclaimed $11,500 Seagull? The Chinese company has already introduced its models in many countries, and it globally sold more EVs than Tesla last year.
American companies can’t compete on price with Chinese companies using slave labor. The cheapest Harley Davidson motorcycle costs more than the Seagull—which isn’t surprising, since they have to pay American workers a living wage to assemble the bikes. (Which would be considerably more expensive if the parts, too, were domestic.)
But . . . if Americans are attracted to something like the Seagull, it would seem that the problem is solved?
For Ford, the answer is a new EV program tasked with designing a new family of electric models that are smaller, more efficient, profitable, and hopefully priced from $25,000. GM and Stellantis have similar moves planned, like the soon-to-be-reborn Chevrolet Bolt and Jeep Renegade, both of which could cost $30,000 or less. To convince Americans that small isn’t bad anymore, automakers may have to bank on the inherent strengths of EVs: Without an engine to account for, these smaller cars can be designed with much more space inside. Great compact EVs may just result from engineers being forced to rethink how to make them newly appealing, Edmunds’ Drury said. “Put the handcuffs on some of the product designers, product planners, engineering … Necessity is the mother of invention, right?”
So . . . there’s an imagined future in which Ford can sell vehicles for a mere double what foreign competitors charge? While convincing people that small vehicles aren’t as small as they think?
And then we get back to this:
Still, American buyers have to learn that, no, they might just not need the biggest SUV possible for the one weekend a year their sister-in-law and her kids come to visit. Environmental concerns take a back seat to convenience, real or imagined. In one survey, American buyers claimed that they couldn’t go electric until EVs have 500 miles of range or more and can fully recharge in minutes; we always seem to be on the verge of some imaginary long-distance road trip and yet we drive 40 miles a day or less on average. Removing such deep-seated ideas from our collective consciousness may be harder for automakers than pivoting their businesses toward cars that run on batteries and software.
So, yes, if one literally only needs a large vehicle one weekend a year, it makes no sense to buy one. The other family can drive separately. But my strong guess is that essentially nobody in that situation is buying one with that purpose in mind. Maybe they also need to haul large objects occasionally? Or they just like the higher vantage point and sense of safety they get from a larger vehicle— especially since most of the other vehicles on the road are big?
But scolding people about their driving habits is no substitute for making great EVs. China’s car companies have already done that, and now they’re posting up just south of Texas. If Ford and other companies can’t do things differently, American jobs and technology might not be the only things that suffer. U.S. carmakers may have no choice but to respond to affordable foreign cars by doing what they’ve always done: leaning further into gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.
Again, it’s just a fool’s errand to pretend that there will come a day when American companies can pay American workers American wages while complying with American environmental protection and workplace safety laws and compete on price with goods made by developing world labor, much less slave labor in totalitarian states.
If we want Americans to buy smaller, American-made vehicles, the free market is unlikely to get us there.
We can apply tariffs on imports to offset the advantages of cheap labor and lax regulations. But doing so will radically increase the costs to American consumers and upend the liberal order we’ve spent the last eight decades building.
We can radically increase CAFE standards, further driving up the costs of gas-guzzling vehicles. But, again, that harms consumers, forcing them to settle for products—again, the second-most expensive thing they own—they don’t want or pay more for what they do, thus being unable to afford other purchases.
We can more heavily subsidize the purchase of American-made EVs, at a fairly hefty cost to the Treasury.
There are probably other interventions that haven’t come readily to mind. But we’re not going to innovate our way out of the problem.
There are other ways to solve the various issues.
1. Size restrictions in downtowns.
2. Encouraging buying of cheaper smaller cars and rentals for the few times a year when you need more space.
Etc.
I saw somewhere else that Ford was also going to switch to more hybrids, which negates the distance issue.
I am somewhat boggled by the absence of the word “rental” from this article. The obvious solution to needing a large SUV or van once or twice a year is to rent one when you need it. I’m doing that myself next month.
Of course, it’s not really the Expeditions and Denalis and Navigators and Suburbans that are the problem — it’s the massive fleet of F-150s being driven by urban and suburban folk who really need a car (and never haul anything), but prefer to wear a truck.
When I lived in USA land in the early 90s your non-commercial vehicle sizes were large but not staggeringly different.
Every time I return on a biz visit, I am gob-smacked at the size inflation – notably in the personal truck and SUV category which have become monsters (the sedans and like are somewhat ballooned but not jaw droppingly bigger than Rest of World)
A pragmatic approach would be to undertake a size ratio benchmarking on other OECD high income (alhtough even as one types the idea of international benchmarking for USA one has to suppress an eye roll, God forbid USA take international benchmarks of course) – it is painfully clear that something other than actual economic need has driven the personal-truck and SUV size inflation as one does not see in rest of world that bizarre prevalence of monsterously sized ‘pickup trucks’ (now it seems defacto the size of industrial vehicle and four door, yet seemingly never having more than a single person…)
[I presume this is even worse outside of the East cost urbanisations where I go on biz trips)
There is a logical fallacy embedded (the fallacy of the excluded middle notably) in a binary “Americans should be forced into econo boxes” (I believe that was the 70s slogan?) and “Americans are bizarrely overweight for a wealthy country – even one with space [see Aussie Land] to mega-sized vehicles”
My recollection is that the perverse 70s era structure of some of your regulations on personal vehicle has incentised this with poor framing that ended up making SUV and pickups more attractive to mfg and to consumer quite inadvertantly – which would go beyond only cultural bias to as well regulatory perverse incentive (there is no reason to take sure as either/or…)
Political pragmatism might well prefer introducing a leveling on regs with incentive for pragmatically sizing (rather than trying to push too small and without doubt having an American yellow-vest type reaction).
Regardless, in respect to e-vehicles, your immediate problems are grid grid grid – I had a quite interesting convo this summer with an Irish 3rd cousin of mine working in USA land in the sector (elec grid), and while being a green lad in the energy sense, he’s absolutely horrified at your upcoming train-wreck relative to lack of electric infra modernisation and utter lack of real understanding of how much your own regs (at all the bizarre layer cake of your various jurisdictions) are utterly gumming up your potential.
Unless you solve these, worrying about car sizes is a complete superficiality.
@DrDaveT: Rental prices have gone up phenomenally the last few years. I would rent a minivan for the summer beach vacation but it’s more than $100 a day. And I’m not going to spend hours dealing with a rental car place to make a Home Depot run. (There are times when I’d pay the relatively cheap rates to borrow on of their trucks, but they’re quite often unavailable on weekends.)
@DrDaveT: Exactly. Up until the point where we needed to tow a camper, we always had small to at-most midsize cares. When we needed to take the kids to college or pick them up, we rented an SUV or mini-van. It was paid for many times over by the lower initial purchase price, the great gas mileage (40mpg on the highway for our Mini Cooper) and lower insurance rate.
But I’m not preaching anything, buy what you want. I mean, I can’t imagine a less practical, less safe car than a Jeep Wrangler, but there is a rabid fan base, and more power to them. And I would feel ridiculous owning a pickup, but it seems to be the most popular thing on the market.
On the other hand, our road taxes and registration fees should reflect the weight and pollution that the various vehicles put out. Gas taxes should go up with inflation. These big vehicles damage the roads much more quickly than small ones and they should pay their fair share. I occasionally cross a bridge that says 5000 pound limit. A Cybertruck won’t make it collapse but it will degrade it more quickly. And DOTs all over the country are ripping out perfectly good guardrails and replacing them with ones that won’t flip the gigantic and impractical lifted front ends of the modern pickup truck and, increasingly, SUVs. And speaking of that, there should be pedestrian/biker/small car safety test for these killers, like they have in parts of Europe.
And get off my lawn!
I was recently in The Netherlands for work. Always striking to see just how compact (and still functional) the automobiles are.
I saw a few American sized vehicles, and they were almost cartoonish in that context (I say this descriptively, not judgmentally). They must be terribly difficult to manage in that built environment.
By contrast, the Dutch bicycles are enormous compared to the typical American commuting variety that prioritizes sleek and lightweight.
Rentals were raised as an option. Phone-a-friend is another. Friends with trucks and/or boats are da best.
My wife drives a 2023 Nissan Sentra
I drive a 2005 Toyota Matrix with 65,200+ miles on it.
65,000 isn’t a typo. The car was left to us by a parishioner (who dear wife brought to communion to at home. DW did this for at least 5 years) after she died in 2019. The car had 51,000 miles on it at the time.
Consider the collateral damage. Smaller cars would kill Costco. An average Euro hatchback would struggle to contain a typical 800 roll package of Costco toilet paper. And what about the 55 gallon drums of extra virgin olive oil?
Have owned a pick up most of my adult life. Did a lot of the finish work on my home and did all of the extensive landscaping, planting hundreds of trees plus tons of shrubs, perennials and built a large vegetable garden (raised a bit). Did all of the maintenance for years. You do indeed have more friends when you have a truck. However, I sold my last truck to buy a small car for wife but will need a new vehicle soon for myself. Am torn between getting another truck and having the convenience to go get a yard or mulch or topsoil whenever I want but also realizing I am getting a bit old for that stuff. Once you have had one you really do miss the convenience. If I do give in will get an EV truck.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
Don’t you know those things are still in short supply due to Covid 19?
Old pending disaster movies, Threads and The Day After to name two, got it wrong. People would hoard before Doomsday arrived but not one of them is seen getting toilet paper.
The minivan segment has actually trended smaller the last two decades. The models made by Honda, Toyota, and Chrysler are a bit less tall and more aerodynamic, and I expect the ICE versions all get better gas mileage than before, with the Pacifica available as a hybrid and the Sienna only hybrid for several years. As long as we don’t need an SUV with high ground clearance (and most of us don’t), there’s already a path for roomy but relatively efficient electrified vehicles that can transition from hybrid to PHEV to EV. And for those occasional large items from the home center?… Consider delivery, or get a utility trailer that can be towed by a mid-size vehicle.
It seems to me that Ford is targeting the market I think is best targeted with EVs – second, commuter cars. The car that gets left home when the family does that “special trip”. The car that goes to work and back and that’s it. I think this is the perfect niche and a very solid adoption path. And lower weight will improve range, too.
To me, that renders the thesis of the article moot. I would tend to agree that I think of all use cases when buying a car, not just the day-to-day use. I would never rent a car to drive the thousand miles we would do to visit my sister.
@Jay L Gischer: Oh yes, and about pickups. I owned a Nissan small pickup once. I loved it. I think it still has a niche. And I would suggest the most avid buyers of monster trucks are not likely to want an electric truck any time soon. They’ll take the shark.
One of my neighbors has a kei truck. Actually two — one is for sale. It temps me every time I pass by. Inexpensive and functional (for my purposes). Most importantly, it would help burnish my hipster cred. Alas, on net, it doesn’t make sense for me. For others…?
The illusion is that smaller means cheaper. Consumers set 70% of the cost of a new vehicle on the conveniences. And those conveniences are better with more room. They just assume it will go and stop. But to shift to EV, that 30% drivetrain value starts going up in cost, eating into the profitability of the vehicle. And while you don’t have a motor in the way, you do have a very heavy battery. And you have expensive failures requiring entire EV sub-component replacement rather a simple part.
You can’t buy a base model vehicle, especially since COVID as they don’t have the profit margin or the loaded model. Some manufactures have even tried to build with all the bells but only turn on the features for a fee rather than leave things off on the assembly line.
And we can add in that this is a the-childless idea as it has long been documented that there is a child seat limiter on having children. The cost of a third child goes up massively when you factor in needing to buy a bigger vehicle to meet the restraint requirements that run from 0-15 yrs of age.
The future is hybrids. Smaller battery, EV operation in traffic, but a large generator that can keep the car going and going plus provide power for heavy loads. The generator can run at optimum parameters for load and design for emissions if they do it right.
I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who is trying to decide which new truck to get. She made the point that renting a truck when she needs one for her garden and to take yard waste to the dump etc would be a dumb expense when she could just own one. I have also known her to complain about how expensive it is to fill her truck up with gas twice a week since she commutes with it. We didn’t actually do the math, but I bet the balance between the two costs is in favor of rental, or at least negligible. This doesn’t include the non-monetary cost of planning ahead and making a reservation, or being unable to easily defer a dump run for a day or two because it is raining or something, but I do think it’s important to measure the costs correctly so as not to artificially skew the decision.
I would love to have a small hybrid truck similar in size to the old Ford Rangers or Chevy LUVs or that little Toyota one whose name escapes me. My current 2013 KIA Soul is just the right height off the ground for me in terms of sight lines – if it was rated to tow a small utility or cargo trailer, or if the back was a bit more open for hauling stuff, it would be perfect.
@Lounsbury:
This is such a common experience for people from outside the US when they experience our four tier government/regulations system: federal + state + county + municipal.
I am more familiar with is impact on social services and law enforcement the criminal legal system, I would bet that permitting and construction are even worse.
Did you know that every Ford F-150 has a speaker built into the front dashboard that plays fake engine noises so that the driver can feel like the engine is more powerful than it is? That tells you everything about the mind set actually driving the decision to purchases these cars.
All these stories of Home Depot runs, camping trips, movings, etc are just another Republican fairytale.
The entire rest of the world aside from North America manages to have light trucks that have the same capacity as American light trucks, yet are far smaller in size. Because American light trucks aren’t big for any reasons based on function, they’re just big entirely for the sake of being as big as possible.
They want a gigantic car to feel powerful and dominant, and are just making up stuff to justify anti-social behavior that imposes real costs on everyone around them because they think they’re entitled to make their community demonstrably worse for their own selfish self-gratification.
I’ve been driving 4 door hatchback hybrid Toyota Priuses since 2008.
This is primarily because I was commuting rountrip 100 miles every day. I’m retired now.
For everyday use the car is very practical. It is virtually maintenance-free, gets over 50mpg, and the hatchback has room for plenty of luggage or groceries.
I understand that small or mid-sized compacts aren’t for everyone but for me perfect.
Final note on renting cars: In my travels to visit friends and family in various cities, I have pretty much stopped renting cars, and use Lyft rides whenever I need a vehicle for crosstown trips from AirBnB to restaurants or musuems when necessary. The last time I rented a car was for a longish sidetrip when I was in Asheville NC.
My DH ditched the pick-up for a small Costco trailer. He zips around in a Honda Civic. When he needs to haul something, he hitches up the trailer. Easy peasy.
@Mimai: Netherlands has amongst the world’s highest density, it’s simply not a model for USA in general.
@mattbernius: For clarity, the fellow is not a newcomer to USA land (working for a certain multinational owned eastern operator for some decade), however he is in a position to be aware of comparables and the degree to which American authorities from top to bottom are being massively massively myopic about their upcoming grid modernisation train wreck.
@Stormy Dragon: yes yes, the other side are all morally bankrupt superficial heathen… very useful mode of reflexion, very effective.
@Michael Reynolds: There is a fallacy of the excluded middle embedded here (however not entirely serious a comment)
USA is not going to be Netherlands nor generally W. Europe of course from purely geography alone never mind path-dependency that can’t be removed due to your last 50+ years of infrastructrue choices – but the W. Europeans are not the only OECD peers to reflect on.
The Biden / Democrats over-emphasis on elec-vehicles versus electrification of vehicles is probably a policy error, as well as weak-to-inattention to date to
A. Critical energy distribution infra speeding – the process for grid upgrade (and the huge expense coming, as elec. requirements for charging are far beyond what your distribution grids an handle at scale (nevermind your issues for long-distance transport intra-regionally). My dear cousin mapped out for me what his adopted geography looked like noting that the planned promo of chargers would either lead to black-outs or needed ~1 bln in upgrades over the decade. This mind you is good infra spend but it needs action now if you are to h
Forget bloody fucking mfg of e-cars – building the bloody cabling, the transformers, the grid frequency modulators (including interesting old-new tech in flywheels)
B. Neglecting promo of transitional as like Hybridisation in favour of pure e-vehicles: notably for trucks from real commercial as well as the p
C. Regulatory: the Lefty Left of course never thinks regulation is a problem, but while the American libertarian weirdos incorrectly see all regulation as evil, bad regulation outdated regulation or simply unintended constraints or pathways pushing regulation structurally is impeding you. Permitting for RE in USA has a global rep emerging for being utter shite (and your idiocy around offshore-wind including not structurally waiving your Jones Act an example of deeply idiotic self-harm…) and the vehicles regulation, where a small Google reminded me my memory on this was indeed correct, non-updated poorly or incompletely thought through regs are significantly explanatory of USA having the inflated-pseudotrucks-as-cars along w archaic tariffs…
I hope that Harris wins (there being no hope for any rational energy reform for USA w Trump), and some compromise w Repubicans is executed for the Reg reform che USA as USA could become quite the motor for non-China scaling on RE but only w significant reform action otherwise you have an upcoming train wreck.
Give the Republicans & Manchin et all permitting reform that allows for their pipelines, so long as you get mega reform for elec. grid upgrade speeding and RE permitting (and waive the idiocy constraints on boats for off-shore wind for God’s sake – a reg reform structured as a market waiver until the domestic market is mature enough [boat makers for off-shore would be happy to locate in USA if they would have a degree of regulatory and market certainty – if one looks to North Sea, this will take 10-15 yrs). RE will flatten most hydrocarbons, Green Left purist-hair-shirtism isn’t needed, do so wheels greasing and the market will undercut the hydrocarbons now. It’s not 1975 nor 1995…
Just as an aside, UHaul’s small trailers. Pretty cheap to rent for an afternoon. One does not have to rent a truck if you have a car with even minimal towing capacity and a hitch. Probably still a bit more than using Home Depot’s delivery service though.
@mattbernius:..federal + state + county + municipal.
Add to that list the private property owner. When I worked in the land line telephone industry one of the jobs I had was to locate existing direct buried telephone cable and mark it on the ground with orange paint and orange stakes and orange flags ahead of a plow crew placing new direct buried telephone cable. Some times the existing and the new cable was placed on public right of way. Sometimes it was placed on private property. While I was not the one who negotiated with public agencies and private property owners for the right to place direct buried telephone cable beneath the surface of the earth I worked with telephone company employees who did. Sometimes when crossing private property was the plan private property owners would refuse access. The times when this occurred on jobs that I worked it was costly and a general pain in the ass to change the cable route.
@Mister Bluster: Your atypical problem is the States.
Private property rights of way are not an atypical issue as such although the degree to which the Left driven reforms for ‘lawfare’ have perhaps over-enabled local / regional opposition by blocking fractions of the population may be atypical (it is plausible, but needs benchmarking, perhaps the global impression is exaggerated).
@Mister Bluster:
I don’t know how a utility company plans to cross private property without an existing utility easement. But my experience is from my property and family members’ properties where we are aware of existing easements and the fact that the rights to those easements will be exercised at times.
EDIT: Just to keep my recent post on topic I used my personal truck on the job for which I was paid a decent fee. 1960 Ford F-100, 1979 Datsun, 1985 Nissan, 1989 Ford F-150, 1992 F-150. The 1960 model was bought used in 1973. The others were bought new.
@JKB:
I agree with you that the future is hybrids. At least the near future, along with increasing numbers of plug-in hybrids and EVs. Hybrid vehicles are well established, having been on the road for a quarter century with no major longevity or maintainability issues peculiar to the hybrid-electric drivetrain. In the next year or two, the first Priuses sold in the US will be eligible for registration as “classic”, or even “antique” in some states.
Hybrids and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) already have the major components of an EV, so there’s no reason to expect high rates component failures in EVs. The batteries of EVs are an issue, as you point out–they are heavy and expensive, being nearly an order of magnitude larger than PHEV batteries, which are themselves nearly an order of magnitude larger than hybrid batteries. So a transition to hybrids and to PHEVs and to EVs does make sense from the standpoint of battery supply and cost, as well as grid and charging station capability, which I believe is basically the point made by Lounsbury in their item B.
My experience has been that driving a hybrid made me look forward to having an EV. The EV-like characteristics at low speed (traffic, parking lots) or when idling (but the engine seldom running) are already a big improvement over an ICE vehicle. If there were certain vehicle models available as PHEV in the US now, I would probably buy one this year, but the selection is still a bit thin. For example, although this isn’t a model I’d necessarily buy, we rented what happened to be Jeep Renegade PHEV when abroad last year, but that model is not available in the US.
@Eusebio:..My understanding is that the utility company negotiates with the private property owner to secure right of way easement for a fee. At least that’s what the telephone company employees who worked as right of way agents told me.
About minivans… In some cases they have more utility than a pickup. We have an older model minivan that can carry 4×8 sheets of drywall (or whatever) inside with the middle seats removed, and removing the seats is simple and quick. It can also carry 10-ft long boards or pipes down the middle of the vehicle without removing any seats. Compare that to pickups, very few of which have 8-ft long beds anymore, and would need a cover to transport drywall and other materials in wet weather. Some loads are definitely more suitable for a pickup or a utility trailer, and as others have noted a small trailer can be purchased cheaply or rented.
@Gromitt Gunn:
Go look at the Ford Maverick.
Just yesterday I was sitting at a stop light behind a truck. Took me a minute to realize it was a ranger because it’s bigger than a 2000s F150.. I wish I could get an oldschool style ranger or hilux (you know back when they were compact trucks). Now you can’t buy anything that is reasonably sized or priced.
THe CAFE standard amended in 2011 encourages larger foot prints (wheelbase by track width) by creating lower MPG targets and such.
Then there’s the GVWR6000lb vehicle tax deduction AKA Section 179. Basically can write off the cost of a new +6000lb vehicle for “business use” on your tax returns. I’ve known some business owners who used it to buy their personal vehicles for a fraction of the sticker price. You just need to throw a cheap LLC on the title.
Big trucks provide big profit margins and that excites the stock holders. Since C-suite compensation/pay is directly linked to stock performance that provides even more incentive to build bigger and bigger.
It’s kind of like how Nvidia has stopped selling budget gaming cards because they can make vastly more selling fewer overpriced cards. Selling fewer cards means less costs associated with manufacturing, shipping and even marketing. Why bother moving 20-30 compact cars when you can make more money straight up off 10 or less trucks?
@Eusebio: Yeah ironically despite trucks being bigger than ever bed size has generally shrunk… So trucks today are generally worse at being trucks..
@Sleeping Dog: Bro that thing is bigger than fullsize trucks from just 20 years ago…
@Sleeping Dog: Another example of a modern truck being less useful as a truck than older trucks..
@Lounsbury: oh bother, cut off B.
Meant to evoke real commercial usage and truck as passenger vehicle that is bizarrely common in USA (although if one reads on this its is clearly the result of perverse outcomes from poorly framed regulation in interaction over decades with an extent cultural biss).
Electric long hual trucks are regardless not particularly realistic as a goal, whereas enabling an emerging of a broader medium duty to heavy duty hybrid vehicle mfg infra, and as well overall reinforcing the electric systems mfg.
Of course this is playing Don Quixote sans grid – transmission and distribution mega investment
BTW, in most metropolitan areas, there are delivery services for large objects (like furniture) that work just like an UBER.
@Lounsbury:
Long haul trucks shouldn’t be a thing to begin with and only exist because we provide a ridiculous degree of subsidization for roads but not rail, resulting in a large mass of cargo that would otherwise be on trains being driven about, wasting huge amounts of fuel in the process.
I had a Prius. It saved my life in a head on with a Honda SUV but was completely totalled (impressive demonstration of crumple engineering). All safety devices performed flawlessly but I cracked some ribs, had neck strain and was transported to the ER. The Honda owner walked away and their car wasn’t totaled. My next car was a mid-sized hybrid SUV. I was sorry to upscale, but I’d just rather not be on the losing side in an accident with an idiot again. Of course, I’d still be f*cked if the other car was a monster pickup…
@Eusebio: Let me second your remarks about minivans. Were on our second Honda Odyssey, preceded by one Chevy and I’ve lost track, at least four Dodge/Plymouth. Would have gotten a hybrid last time, but it was still COVID and they weren’t to be had. Hauled a lot of 4×8 whatever and a lot of long lumber. Towed the racecar and trailer many times. No image, but hauls what I need, drives like a sedan, and parks like a sedan. And it’s covered and locked. Usual rule is anything you leave in the back of a pickup will get wet or get stolen.
A lot of Americans don’t really fit in small cars — we’re an aging, overweight, out-of-shape nation with bad backs and bad knees.
Lifting yourself up from a low car seat, or lifting groceries from a low trunk is a lot of stress.
Little SUVs are also incredibly handy in emergencies — when a friend was confined to a wheelchair after a massive accident that required lots of metal to rebuild his legs, my SUV was the car that was tall enough he could safely pivot in and out of, and it had enough storage for the wheelchair in back. It was annoying that I was the one hauling him to doctors, but we eventually worked out a rotation where various other friends borrowed the little beast.
It hauls things to dumps and picks up small appliances and bathroom fixtures without stressing lumbar muscles.
It’s amazingly convenient to just have that functionality right there.
If my 84 year old father didn’t have an SUV, I don’t think he would be able to drive (and that might be a good thing)
I don’t think we will shift to small cars until small cars better fit more people’s needs — a complete redesign of the concept. Maybe tiny vans? Adjustable suspension lifts to raise the car when you’re getting in and out?
(I’m also about six and a half feet tall with a 38” inseam — there was basically nothing that fit me other than two small SUVs, the VW Beetle and a Dodge Charger. But. I’m more that two standard deviations from the norm, and am not the common use case.)
@Stormy Dragon: You have absolutely no idea what you are blithering on about.
Long haul trucks exist not just in your precious country for fuck’s sake. They exist as well in our fine EU land where we have some of the highest bloody rail density on the entire fucking planet.
Blithering on in profound ignorance is an embarrssement. Long-haul trucking is a major EU vehicle market in and of itself.
So no, long hual trucks do not exist simply because of some American twattery or superficial drivel you have read in some ill informed Lefty article. Perhaps you should follow the attributed aphorism of one of your 19th century Presidents.
Ignoant superficial blithering on is useless and often actively bloody harmful
@Lounsbury: It should be added to this that USA Democrats are not the only ones to have gotten priorities wrong – the twats in Brussels would have me financing only e-trucks in Africa under one of our facilities – which is utterly nonsensical given that there even in EU market at best there are some niche availability from Volvo although really it’s urban muni services vehicles (which one can say can be sensible given very defined circuits and hub based depots)
however some twat of a functionary read an Exec summ about transport and a non-sensical rule is being pushed.
And for the statistically inclined one can profitably be informed on European zone rail and road freight from Eurostat, in road freigt in billion tonne kms (ntl, intl, cabotage) and rail freight in billion tonne kms
The US w/o doubt has similar.
In actual fact, North American modernisation of inter-modal approaches (sea-rail-road integration) has been extensive and standard setting, and entirely different than your pathetic passenger rail track record (with all allowance that in fact passenger rail really is only applicable for sub-national geographic zones in USA, not national, by any reasonable econometric analysis)
@Lounsbury: Passenger rail basically gets shit on by everyone. AMtrack can’t make times because basically everything on the track has higher priority (especially freight). The rail companies don’t want to deal with passenger service so they make it as horrible as possible while lobbying congress for more money so they can fire more employees after “upgrading”..
Glad someone mentioned rental when you need to haul stuff. I have myself a great BMW i4e40 and its fast, sporty, has a great range, and is cheap to charge. When I need to haul wood I rent a truck for $29, which is worth it just not to have the wear and tear on my would be truck. You know what they say about men who need to have a big truck….
@Gustopher: There are, in this discussion, some definitional issues. I thought BMW did something clever with the Mini. What makes sense for most people is an econobox. But they have no cachet, so BMW revived the Mini name and gave it a fun, performance image. They seem to sell OK, but then they had to introduce the Clubman because it was too small for some people. Still modest success.
I thought about a Mini, but bought a Mazdaspeed3. It’s faster than a Mini Cooper S, but larger and more practical. The basic Mazda 3 was a very practical package. Comfortable for two, OK for four, and with the rear seat folded, pretty good hauling capacity. The 3 is a four door hatchback. It’s seen as a small car, an econobox, and now everyone wants an SUV. But a lot of small SUVs are little different from a Mazda3. A Honda CR-V and a Chevy Suburban are both SUVs, but the CR-V is closer to a Mazda3 than to a Suburban. Like BMW, Honda, and everybody else, found a way to sell econoboxes, make them a couple inches taller and call them SUVs. They’re quite practical, but I’m not sure they should be classed with Suburbans.
@Lounsbury:
Comments like this, disparaging and unnecessarily demeaning, is one of the principle reasons that I tend to skip your remarks.
If you have a point to make, just make it without the derogatory language.
To the extent allegations of slave labor in the Chinese auto industry are true – AFAIK they remain unproven – they would account for only a very small part of its competitive advantage over America’s. The reason today’s autos are so reliable (exclusing outliers like the Cybertruck) is that they are built almost completely by robots. Here’s a Tesla production line, for example: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/rBBQP/s3/tesla-fremont-factory.jpg
China gets its advantages from having short supply chains within a single country, economies of scale from a vast domestic market, access to cheap raw materials (for example it secured long-term supply contracts with miners in Australia, the world’s leading producer of lithium), substantial government subsidies, and yes, cheap (but not slave) labor. India is in a similar position.
@Bobert: oh well, so sad. Of course how the sensitive feeling Left feels about a subject is rather more important than bothering to get something right – or taking a brief bloody moment to go outside of one’s echo chambre.
The statement (long haul trucks only exist because us in USA have roads) was painfully bloody false and one easily cross-checked as simplistically wrong if one merely looked at my own EU. Long-hual trucking is not something that only exists because the USA highway policy or lack of rail as one can see from the EU data.
The person in question irrirates me as consistently inserting unfoudned, superficial misinformation across any range of technical subjects and worse, jumps in preachily asserting such, not merely sharing an observation “I have heard” (which would be a quite fair thing to do). Such things are merely the photo negative inversion of your MAGA, no better.
Misinformation is harmful and leads to bad policy.
Vote away with your cliquish feelings as you bloody well want, at least pay attention to bloody actual data if you lot are going for the pretence of “reality based community” and ‘critical thinking” or other pretences.
@Matt: I am quite aware re Amtrack of the structural issues, and generally it is in something of a Zombie state – neither capitalised to modernised nor rationalised to the modern role – where it has partial rail responsability
However even if you did rationalisation of Amtrack on modern lines – which would likely include a split the infrastructure from the rolling stock and carriage business, and enabling a capital infrastructure special-co to separately invest in upgrading where it makes sense.
Other moustache twirling cartoon villian factors are of course pleasing to Lefties to cite, however, long-haul freight lines mgmt are generally unlikely to deeply care about the infrequent and archaic Amtrak – indifference and prioritisation to their own business is perfectly explanatory.
Of course Amtrak continuing the archaic service approach which has not made sense since at least the 1950s does not help, allowing due to the half-baked set-up you have they are forced to in chasing after political dollars.
And of course since so much of the Left as exemplified by commentariat here is chasing after economically iliterate misinterpretations of the European example in rail, dreaming of transposition to USA, you’re not going to get a rationally tailored urban corridors Amtrak, but feelings over data, feelings over data and econometrics, and blame the failure on moustache twirling villians in corporate management, not an incoherent strategy and archaic service structure.
None of this however has much to do with the subject: vehicle sizing in USA land.
@Stormy Dragon:
I mean . . . no. It doesn’t happen all that often but there have been multiple times the I’ve been unable to fit a Home Depot purchase or pick up, say, outdoor furniture, in my CX-9—which is itself a rather large vehicle. It won’t fit, for example, a sheet of plywood.
While it technically seats 7—enough to get our 5 kids (ranging 13-25) in—the back seating is rather tight for a trip of any length. Fine for going to dinner or even the 75-minute trip to see the wife’s folks but murder for the 7-hour trip to the beach. And, with the 3rd row in place, there’s next to no room for gear. A full-sized cooler won’t fit, let alone luggage.
There’s doubtless a lot of marketing going on with the trucks. As the photo atop the post illustrates, “full-size” trucks have gotten bigger. But Americans are much more apt to tow boats, trailers, and the like than our European cousins.
@dazedandconfused: I’m a unique use case, in that Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other delivery services tend not to work for me because my house is not accessible to large trucks owing to the only road here having an old railroad tunnel with a 9’11” clearance. I can get ordinary orders from them without much hassle but large appliances, lawn furniture, and such are always on a large truck. And, so far as I know, they don’t deliver lumber and the like.
@Lounsbury: “The person in question irrirates me as consistently inserting unfoudned, superficial misinformation across any range of technical subjects a”
Actually, it’s evident to everyone here that you are irritated by anyone who doesn’t bow down to the supreme knowledge you claim on every subject and bloviate about endlessly in prose so bad Bulwer-Lytton would slap you if he saw you.
We all understand that you think we come here to sit at your feet and gain enlightenment, but really you’re just the loudmouth at the end of the bar, drunkenly demanding that everyone listen to his blather.
@Lounsbury: “However even if you did rationalisation of Amtrack on modern lines – which would likely include a split the infrastructure from the rolling stock and carriage business, and enabling a capital infrastructure special-co to separately invest in upgrading where it makes sense.”
Wait — you’re actually recommending the Tory scheme of privatising rail profits while socializing expenses, which has led to the destruction of the formerly great British rail service? What’s next from the great economic genius — going to start complaining that the NHS needs to run more like the American system?
@wr:
Apt description, and why I tend to ignore his comments.
What he doesn’t seem to understand is that by putting forth unnecessary demeaning comments, some people will avoid hearing his counter-argument. Having a counter narrative is fine and useful, but couching an argument in personal derogatory context diminishes the opportunity to be heard.
@wr: No, in fact Iam recommending a European scheme i keeping witb , although for Leftists with both a superficial and impoverished understanding of European rail development of course you’ll create a misunderstood straw man.
@Lounsbury: European here means continental of course, not to imply my English cousins are not European as such.
Not that one can expect an actual reflexion on the Continental examples versus weakly informed stereotypes about UK examples (as notably the ridiculous American Left modeling on NIH where in fact the French Mutuelles model is far more applicable and actionable, but isn’t in the Guardian….)
Otherwise in terms of rail model the Capital co versus opco has nothing to do with “privatisation ” of any ownership and everything to do with capital efficiency and separation of the invest burden types rather than weighting Amtrak as OpCo with impossible infra spend and and infra ownership balance sheet.
There’s no “privatisation (no fictional profits) in play.
It is simply taking international operations lessons, actually informed by other successful models.
It is bad fan fiction to believe a private passenger operating co would be remotely feasible, however you have no way to remove the utter tracks incoherence in the weird frakenstein monster that is Amtrak. Track development with the mushmash of ownership and lines needs to ge sn entièrement séparate entity with specialised infra capital.
@Ken_L: American companies can compete with Chinese companies for one reason: vanity. There is always a market for something that is much more expensive than the same thing in another brand. You just have to market it as the cool luxurious thang that common people can’t afford, and it will sell just fine.
@Sleeping Dog: Will do. Thanks for the suggestion.
@James Joyner:
A basic U-Haul panel van one-day rental is $20 plus mileage. 9’6″ x 5’7″ x 4’8″. How many days of lower insurance rates and higher gas mileage does it take to pay for that?