5 ms·
it's easy to throw rocks when you personally don't have 3-4 kids.
by joewhale 3y ago
it's easy to throw rocks when you personally don't have 3-4 kids.
- pharmakom 3y agoPlease buy a minivan if this is your situation.
- yellowapple 3y agoWhile I largely agree with you, AWD/4WD minivans seem to be harder to find than AWD/4WD SUVs - so if you live in a place with both snow and hills, you're probably going to be gravitating toward an SUV.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoAWS/4WD drive can't be pulled off with a minivan while maintaining the flat floor that people expect. There's not enough clearance for a rear drive shaft.
- yellowapple 3y agoI mean, it clearly can be, since AWD (and RWD, for that matter) minivans do exist. It's just less common for minivans than it is for SUVs, likely for the reason you mention.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoSorry, yes. It's technically feasible. However, practically, it's not. Within the modern minivan sector, it'd be a non-starter to have a transmission tunnel when all of your competitors don't have that.
- yellowapple 3y ago> when all of your competitors don't have that Aside from the Chrysler Pacifica, which does offer a traditional AWD (to this day AFAIK), presumably with the requisite transmission tunnel. There's also the Toyota Sienna, which gets away with AWD by using an electric motor for the rear wheels. Hopefully this continues to catch on.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI kinda want to take a picture of the parking lot at a local (Salt Lake County, UT) Costco. It's almost exclusively "light truck"-classified pickups and similarly sized SUVs. I'm sure a similar image has already been captured for posterity but damn if it wouldn't be useful for pointing to a problem.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoYou can buy Kei vans too. I've seen them, in the USA. Same import rules as the Kei trucks. When I lived in Chicago, a neighbor had one. It was 4x4 too, so great in the winter.
- kalleboo 3y agoI have kids, we drive a Kei minivan. They only seat 4, so it wouldn't work for a family of 5-6 as in the example.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoWhy? What do you care what he drives?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agohttps://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data... > The estimated number of police-reported crashes in 2020 decreased by 22% as compared to 2019, and the estimated number of people injured declined by 17%. > While the number of crashes and traffic injuries declined overall, fatal crashes increased by 6.8%. It's at least a somewhat common belief that the 6.8% increase of fatal crashes despite a decrease in total crashes is caused by a perceived increase of the average size of vehicles on the road. A minivan is not an American-sized pickup truck which are commonly seen as unsafe for other drivers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yamtaddle 3y agoCars much bigger, heavier, and with worse visibility than necessary, make the roads more dangerous for everyone else—motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, everyone. The whole thing's turning into an expensive, dangerous game of prisoner's dilemma. It's best if everyone buys exactly as much car as they need, but anyone who "defects" and buys a bigger, heavier car is safer than everyone else, while making everyone else a little less-safe. Iterate for a few decades and you get the current situation. However, begging individuals to behave differently isn't going to fix the problem. Certainly not in the US.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoSo what did people do when they had 3-4 kids in the 80s? I see families of 4 with huge SUVs these days. If anything they want a kei van right? It maximises the size of the vehicle, cuboid on wheels, and minimises the cost for that volume.
- SoftTalker 3y agoThey drove big station wagons.
- sgath92 3y agoAnd the station wagons got killed off by CAFE standards because they were treated as cars instead of as their own category. Taking a sedan and turning it into a station wagon is going to inherently make it heavier and less fuel efficient. So if the auto makers are already struggling to make their sedans hit MPG goals, suddenly those station wagons have to be phased out. Though to be fair, minivans start in the mid 80s and were very popular in the 90s instead of SUVs. Comparable MPGs to the wagons but felt a lot more roomy inside. The big problem came in the 2000s when the auto makers started subtly turning their minivans into SUVs. Even the last wagon hold outs like Volvo took this road eventually.
- themaninthedark 3y agoBut interestingly enough, a lot of new vehicles are SUVs that look like lifted station wagons... So we like the form factor of station wagon
- peterpost2 3y agoLike you can't fit 3-4 kids in a sedan. Hell most people have 2 cars per family nowadays should still fit easily. Or if you really have a large family a minivan works even better and is less dangerous to other travellers and yourselfs and has a lower gas usage. SUV's and trucks are stupid for 99,99% of the use cases.
- klyrs 3y agoWe didn't use seatbelts or booster seats. We rode in the bed of the pickup, we rode sitting backwards in the trunk of a hatchback, we crammed in 5-wide in the bench seat in the back of a sedan. Also, there were proto-SUVs like the Chevy Suburban.
- tshaddox 3y agoYou probably won’t fit more than 2 kids in a gigantic pickup truck either. And you’ll mostly see them empty apart from the driver anyway.
- yamtaddle 3y agoA lot of the popular models have full-size back seats. They've got more room back there, and are easier to get at (to, say, strap a kid into a car seat, or to add/remove a car seat) than many sedans.
- Marsymars 3y agoSUV market share is ~50%, families with >2 children are ~5%.