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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, peopl

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.

davisoneee 4y ago
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.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  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. Here's an article from 2011 predicting our current automotive market: https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-could-mean-bigger-cars-not-smaller-ones/ https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-c... 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.
  - genocidicbunny 4y ago
    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.
- beerandt 4y ago
  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.)
beerandt 4y ago
No- it's primarily CAFE driven. (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.
loeg 4y ago
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.

davisoneee 4y ago

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.

digdugdirk 4y ago
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. Here's an article from 2011 predicting our current automotive market: https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-could-mean-bigger-cars-not-smaller-ones/ https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-c... 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.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  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.
beerandt 4y ago
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.)

beerandt 4y ago

No- it's primarily CAFE driven. (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.

loeg 4y ago

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.