It's a mix of the CAFE laws and consumer habits based on decades of unsafe street design pushing consumers to larger vehicles which makes them feel safer and anyone outside them less safe, which makes them lean toward larger vehicles to match. Viscous cycle and arms race. Point being policy is part of it, but consumer behavior isn't blameless.
safety concerns caused cars to get bigger, everyone wanted to protect their children in a range rover but couldn't afford one, so other companies started making tank suv's
Congress made a fateful decision when it established CAFE. Instead of setting a single fuel economy standard that applies to all cars, CAFE has two of them: one for passenger cars, such as sedans and station wagons, and a separate, more lenient standard for “light trucks,” including pickups and SUVs. In 1982, for instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars was 24 mpg and only 17.5 mpg for light trucks.
Put simply, there's a loophole in the emissions standards. If the vehicle is bigger, it has a lower mileage standard to meet. Manufacturers responded by making vehicles larger.
What I find the most funny and ironic personally is the fact that the old BMW looks like it has a lot more space for passengers than the new oversized one.
Safety standards caused passenger cars to get larger more than anything else (trucks got bigger because of weird fuel economy regulations).
Roll back safety standards and we can have small cars again. It’s probably worth the amount of excess deaths it will create, but someone should do a study.
Safety standards is the stated reason, but the actual reason is that weight is unregulated and can always be increased in pursuit of any more profitable dimension. If weight was the taxable dimension, we'd live in a much better world.
yeah in europe (obviosly it varies a lot cross-country and rural/urban) but lots of places with high safety standards , and high emissions taxes. Still lots of small cars around .
Mostly due to parking in big-dense-cities though probably.
US does come out badly on deaths per billion pax-km: 8 ish vs 3-5 for most euro countries
So on the face of it small cars dont sem to correlate - but these data look a bit hodge podge, so not sure to read too much into it without knowing the underlying sources.
Other factors like the "stroad" thing might be an issue.
And a lot of European municipalities give the elderly free public transport, and have ok bus service, so many doddery old coots have a viable option.
I remember that southpark episode about senior drivers, with the jaws music . . .
Maybe not as funny when you look at that US death rate. To quoe Father Maxi: "No god needs complex irony and subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me, all that we can hope for is that god got his laughs . . ."
This meme is bad because what you're doing is false equivalence. Your claim about thr first two is very wrong. Those "fat" laptops were superior to the metal turd we buy today. I'd honestly consider buying an old Thinkpad X220 because of how irritated I am at this point. Those bulky dumb-phones are sturdier than the silicon paperweight, and they all come in 6 inches, which is too big for my tiny fingers - but no worries, I can buy a cheap Chinese Android phone, root it with a custom ROM and be done with it. And moderns cars, well, just fuck them for being bad and ruining the landscape with concrete jungles.