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Nah... it's like with dumb SUVs - do you think that everyone wants them? Or the demad was created because it was better for the makers to make them (with relati

Nah... it's like with dumb SUVs - do you think that everyone wants them? Or the demad was created because it was better for the makers to make them (with relatively lower increase in cost they can charge more for the end product)? Tied with and thanks to Corporate Average Fuel Economy… In my circle I don't know anyone wanting "infotainmant" - just a regular car to which I can connect my mobile hassle-free without dumb TV screen smack in the middle of the car... Same goes for mobile phones - most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium...

RajT88 3y ago
> do you think that everyone wants them? SUV's are very popular among women - 43% of buyers. The industry research says that women feel safer driving them - the size makes them feel more protected, and the ride height lets them see the road much better. (Lest it go unsaid, women are on average less tall than men) These are the reasons my wife cites preferring her Honda Pilot to her previous cars.
- asfgioandfionio 3y ago
  I'm sure nothing I have to say is news, but it bears repeating that the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational. The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. Aside from size, the characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians and cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. People buy SUVs to avoid being killed by SUVs. It's a negative-sum arms race. SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground that it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover. SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    When I'm driving on the road, I'm totally cool with being selfish. Driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things we do in life, and someone else being drunk/high/distracted/overly tired can end your life, or the life of a loved one, in an instant. I don't feel bad driving a larger vehicle than other people. I will prioritize my safety.
    - asfgioandfionio 3y ago
      I understand being afraid of a car crash. I can understand doing the wrong thing out of fear. Driving an SUV is wrong, but hardly an unforgivable sin. But I don't think you can be let off that easy. You seem to have come up with some way to technically admit you are in the wrong without really confronting it. What is "totally cool" supposed to mean? Does being "totally cool" with something mean it is moral, or does it just mean you don't feel angry about it? Why would you defend a decision based on whether or not it makes you "feel bad"? These words are weaselly. They dismiss the moral element of your actions without really addressing it. If you're in the right, prove it. If you're in the wrong, admit it.
      - GMoromisato 3y ago
        That's not how it works. You can't prove morality the way you can prove math. Not unless everyone involved accepts an infallible point of reference, like a book or a pope--and even then there are differences in interpretation. All moral questions, like, "is it moral to drive an SUV?", are variants of the Trolley Problem. Whichever choice you make ends up hurting some people and helping some others. But different people have different moral axioms about how to calculate the balance of that equation. For example, I could probably save 5 people right now by sacrificing myself and giving away my organs. The fact that I don't means that I value my own life more than those of 5 strangers. In the same way, driving an SUV to reduce one's own risk is not surprising. Your own morality may lead you to different choices. That's OK. My whole point is that there is no "correct" morality. You can try to convince others to adopt your morality (which we call "proselytizing"); you can say that some beliefs are unpopular in this society (and thus demonized); you can even look down on people who don't share your morality (we all know people like that). But you can't say that they are objectively wrong. That's not how morality works.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > SUV's are very popular among women Heavy marketing was done to make them popular, and once they reached a certain threshold, their size created an arms race, since they blocked visibility for everyone not also in an SUV.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Disagree on the take. Was a small car fan until family. Now SUV fan because it makes loading the kids in and hauling their stuff that much easier. Could survive with a Toyota Corolla? Definitely. Does the Highlander make life better? Yes. Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid. Nah, but that marketing, and the financial incentives which motivated it, and the arms race from a critical mass of larger vehicles affecting visibility because of it are why minivans and SUVs (the former popular first and then the latter later because of when each worked as a regulatory dodge) bevame the choice for those needs, which were once filled by station wagons. I’m an SUV owner myself for very similar immediate reasons to the ones you cite. Nothing about that interferes with my ability to understand that the market context within which those preferences call for that result is a product of specific, well-documented interplay between regulation and profit-seeking business behavior over several decades.
      - xyzelement 3y ago
        You sound like you know what you are talking about but I am not following. As a consumer I had a choice of vehicle (I could have bought a sedan or a station wagon or a minivan) and I picked what I wanted.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        You are not following because you are looking only at your decision at the moment of buying, and not everyone else's decisions over the past 35-ish years that have shaped, (even if we assume for a minute that the massive marketing investment has had no direct impact on your personal preferences): 1. The set of vehicles on the road and thus what your experience in different vehicles will be like, e.g., in terms of road visibility, and 2. The mix of specific vehicle models and features of each that are actually manufactured and available at the time you made thaf decision.
- acidioxide 3y ago
  It is ironic because SUVs have much worse visibility, especially right in front / back of the car.
  - yourusername 3y ago
    All modern cars have terrible visibility due to improved crash standards (wider A and C pillars).
  - fooker 3y ago
    Honest question: do you actually drive a car on a regular basis? I have only seen this claim made by people who don't.
- pers0n 3y ago
  I use my suv as a cheap truck. I’ve hauled a lot of furniture and other stuff with the back seats down.
  - kps 3y ago
    I do the same with my Honda Fit. Desks, doors, 2×4s, bicycle, 44U rack… It's true I can't fit a whole sheet of plywood, but most SUVs have the same skinny-door problem.
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    I've done the same with Hyundai i30cw (wagon/combi)... SUVs don't have more spece, it's mostly just an impression...
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  > and the ride height lets them see the road much better. Ah... and then everyone will get a SUV with similar mentality and then we will get SUV-extra even higher and "sturdier" to feel even safer? FFS... world is not hostile, riding in compact city-car is not harmful. At best it's the mentality that "everything outside wants to kill me" o_O Get a tank maybe?
lolinder 3y ago
> most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium... This has to do with the power they're trying to cram into the phones. We've pretty much gotten transistors as small as we can, but manufacturers still need to sell new phones and the way they've done that for years is increase compute and camera power.
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  AFAIR the CPU/APU size is quite small. What takes quite a lot of space is battery. And because things are less and less optimize we need more computing power which needs more juice. What's more - bigger screens require more power as well. Why those big phones popular? Because CPU efficiency doesn't sell well but number do, so we have a race: more storage, more ram, more MP camera... and bigger screen. Those are the most visible and easiest to adjust things. And many people associate size with being "better"...

RajT88 3y ago

> do you think that everyone wants them? SUV's are very popular among women - 43% of buyers. The industry research says that women feel safer driving them - the size makes them feel more protected, and the ride height lets them see the road much better. (Lest it go unsaid, women are on average less tall than men) These are the reasons my wife cites preferring her Honda Pilot to her previous cars.

asfgioandfionio 3y ago
I'm sure nothing I have to say is news, but it bears repeating that the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational. The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. Aside from size, the characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians and cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. People buy SUVs to avoid being killed by SUVs. It's a negative-sum arms race. SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground that it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover. SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  When I'm driving on the road, I'm totally cool with being selfish. Driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things we do in life, and someone else being drunk/high/distracted/overly tired can end your life, or the life of a loved one, in an instant. I don't feel bad driving a larger vehicle than other people. I will prioritize my safety.
  - asfgioandfionio 3y ago
    I understand being afraid of a car crash. I can understand doing the wrong thing out of fear. Driving an SUV is wrong, but hardly an unforgivable sin. But I don't think you can be let off that easy. You seem to have come up with some way to technically admit you are in the wrong without really confronting it. What is "totally cool" supposed to mean? Does being "totally cool" with something mean it is moral, or does it just mean you don't feel angry about it? Why would you defend a decision based on whether or not it makes you "feel bad"? These words are weaselly. They dismiss the moral element of your actions without really addressing it. If you're in the right, prove it. If you're in the wrong, admit it.
    - GMoromisato 3y ago
      That's not how it works. You can't prove morality the way you can prove math. Not unless everyone involved accepts an infallible point of reference, like a book or a pope--and even then there are differences in interpretation. All moral questions, like, "is it moral to drive an SUV?", are variants of the Trolley Problem. Whichever choice you make ends up hurting some people and helping some others. But different people have different moral axioms about how to calculate the balance of that equation. For example, I could probably save 5 people right now by sacrificing myself and giving away my organs. The fact that I don't means that I value my own life more than those of 5 strangers. In the same way, driving an SUV to reduce one's own risk is not surprising. Your own morality may lead you to different choices. That's OK. My whole point is that there is no "correct" morality. You can try to convince others to adopt your morality (which we call "proselytizing"); you can say that some beliefs are unpopular in this society (and thus demonized); you can even look down on people who don't share your morality (we all know people like that). But you can't say that they are objectively wrong. That's not how morality works.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> SUV's are very popular among women Heavy marketing was done to make them popular, and once they reached a certain threshold, their size created an arms race, since they blocked visibility for everyone not also in an SUV.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Disagree on the take. Was a small car fan until family. Now SUV fan because it makes loading the kids in and hauling their stuff that much easier. Could survive with a Toyota Corolla? Definitely. Does the Highlander make life better? Yes. Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid. Nah, but that marketing, and the financial incentives which motivated it, and the arms race from a critical mass of larger vehicles affecting visibility because of it are why minivans and SUVs (the former popular first and then the latter later because of when each worked as a regulatory dodge) bevame the choice for those needs, which were once filled by station wagons. I’m an SUV owner myself for very similar immediate reasons to the ones you cite. Nothing about that interferes with my ability to understand that the market context within which those preferences call for that result is a product of specific, well-documented interplay between regulation and profit-seeking business behavior over several decades.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      You sound like you know what you are talking about but I am not following. As a consumer I had a choice of vehicle (I could have bought a sedan or a station wagon or a minivan) and I picked what I wanted.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        You are not following because you are looking only at your decision at the moment of buying, and not everyone else's decisions over the past 35-ish years that have shaped, (even if we assume for a minute that the massive marketing investment has had no direct impact on your personal preferences): 1. The set of vehicles on the road and thus what your experience in different vehicles will be like, e.g., in terms of road visibility, and 2. The mix of specific vehicle models and features of each that are actually manufactured and available at the time you made thaf decision.
acidioxide 3y ago
It is ironic because SUVs have much worse visibility, especially right in front / back of the car.
- yourusername 3y ago
  All modern cars have terrible visibility due to improved crash standards (wider A and C pillars).
- fooker 3y ago
  Honest question: do you actually drive a car on a regular basis? I have only seen this claim made by people who don't.
pers0n 3y ago
I use my suv as a cheap truck. I’ve hauled a lot of furniture and other stuff with the back seats down.
- kps 3y ago
  I do the same with my Honda Fit. Desks, doors, 2×4s, bicycle, 44U rack… It's true I can't fit a whole sheet of plywood, but most SUVs have the same skinny-door problem.
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  I've done the same with Hyundai i30cw (wagon/combi)... SUVs don't have more spece, it's mostly just an impression...
ktosobcy 3y ago
> and the ride height lets them see the road much better. Ah... and then everyone will get a SUV with similar mentality and then we will get SUV-extra even higher and "sturdier" to feel even safer? FFS... world is not hostile, riding in compact city-car is not harmful. At best it's the mentality that "everything outside wants to kill me" o_O Get a tank maybe?

lolinder 3y ago

> most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium... This has to do with the power they're trying to cram into the phones. We've pretty much gotten transistors as small as we can, but manufacturers still need to sell new phones and the way they've done that for years is increase compute and camera power.

ktosobcy 3y ago
AFAIR the CPU/APU size is quite small. What takes quite a lot of space is battery. And because things are less and less optimize we need more computing power which needs more juice. What's more - bigger screens require more power as well. Why those big phones popular? Because CPU efficiency doesn't sell well but number do, so we have a race: more storage, more ram, more MP camera... and bigger screen. Those are the most visible and easiest to adjust things. And many people associate size with being "better"...