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We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size. There'
by LarryDarrell 3y ago
We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size.
There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.
Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.
I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.
- tootie 3y agoThere was a brief and futile anti-SUV movement in the 90s. Manufacturers generally got much better about size and safety compared to what they were, but they still sell based primarily on looks. For anyone who actually needs all that interior space, you're always better off with a minivan. And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan. I've got a wife and two kids we can fit ourselves and enough junk for a 4-day vacation in a compact pretty easily (which I rent as needed because I live in a walkable city).
- masklinn 3y ago> And really most people, even families, can make do with a regular sedan. That’s still the norm in Europe. Every summer you see the Dutch migrating through France in station wagons. A roof carrier or a small trailer does wonder (when you don’t just go with a camper).
- Scoundreller 3y agoEven the same sedans are built with different engine options between North America and Europe. Europe models will start with smaller engines that are just unavailable in US models. No idea why given Europe has mountains too and 120 and 130km/h speed limits are the highway norm but often with shorter on-ramps.
- masklinn 3y agoAmerican cultural sensibilities making small engines a hard sell? Historically the torque converter gearboxes were a big problem for small euro engines, but nowadays I’d assumed the gearboxes either are DCT or have lock-up clutch so it should be a non-issue.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAmericans are just terrible and inattentive drivers in general, because the culture is that driving is a necessary thing, and therefore a right. They also like to merge onto highways in the stupidest possible ways, so you "need" 200 horsepower even in a damn corolla so you can accelerate to 80mph from 30 because you don't understand the concept of an on-ramp or smooth merging.
- apexalpha 3y ago>Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up. Doesn't this work both ways? If you focus on MPG then lighter, smaller variants of the same model will win out over bigger, heavier ones.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWhat does weight matter on a road trip? Unless you are exclusively driving at 30 mph uphill I don't see it mattering much. Wind resistance is the dominant force. This is the same reason why most railroads put limitations on the maximum grade they have to climb. They are mainly working against wind resistance, not gravity.
- apexalpha 3y ago>Wind resistance is the dominant force. Hence, smaller cars have better MPG. Smaller cars also tend to be lighter.
- aidenn0 3y agoThere are two numbers on the sticker for fuel efficiency. In-town and highway. For in-town weight matters greatly (both because you essentially throw away energy every time you break, and because rolling-resistance matters more at low speed). For highway, up until 2008 the maximum speed tested was 55, which disadvantages heavy-vehicles, as rolling resistance is a higher component of energy used at lower speeds (as a simple approximation, rolling-resistance is linear, and air-resistance is quadratic).
- sidewndr46 3y agoThe thread was specifically about a road trip. I can't imagine anyone taking a road trip entirely in town.
- aidenn0 3y agoI've done road-trips entirely off of limited-access highways.
- CaptainMarvel 3y agoDon’t forget there have been massive loopholes in vehicle emission regulations which favour larger SUVs and pick-up trucks. If regulations actually focused on MPG, these vehicles would not be the size and weight that they are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-loophole-could-lead-to-bigger-cars/2011/12/14/gIQA3bGLuO_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo... Right target. Bad implementation. Going forwards, with widespread electric vehicles, focusing directly on size and weight makes a lot of sense, in addition to MPG (or more generally, energy efficiency).
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoHang on! I was there in 2008 during carpocalypse. I’ve typed this before in detail, but this is NOT A LOOPHOLE! In 2008 Obama came in and made changes to CAFE and CARB with Californias very willing help. The news headline you might have seen, and just saw again this year with Biden Admin pushing it was “All vehicles to be XX MPG by 20YY”. To which people who know absolutely nothing about vehicles clap for. People who understand vehicles or politics know it’s something else. What happened was Obama Admin came in and wanted to push towards an economic future that wasn’t technically possible for stoichiometric reasons. The end result was in meetings with MFGs, the admin knowingly compromised and said “We’ll just judge a vehicle based on its size”. A single vehicle’s emissions could be 1.3 or so if it was 1.3 the footprint of a vehicle at the time. The MFGs replied and said ”If you are going to grade us on size, we are going to give you size”. And they/we have. Look at vehicle bodies from 2008 on. Larger every single revision. You can’t actually legislate technological advances. What you can do is knowingly change the game so “your people” have an advantage. There is a WHOLE lot of bullshit with CAFE and CARB (which is not just California when you understand the market), and even NHTSA anymore. But… Do not call an intentional “gift” a loophole. Everyone involved knew exactly what was going to happen.
- jackmott42 3y agoSounds like a loophoole to me. You just wanted to get in a swipe at Obama, which is fine, he screwed up here.
- sidewndr46 3y agoFrom what I understand if you outlaw anything heavier than 3000 lbs you've basically banned most EVs other than the tiny ones resembling a city car.
- pc86 3y agoI don't think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether it's an EV or not.
- SllX 3y ago“My life is flashing before my eyes but at least it was an environmentally conscious Rivian that took me out and not a gas-guzzling RAM. My life may be over but the Earth is in good hands. Nice color too, really like the yellow.”
- ghostpepper 3y agoI don't upvote jokes out of principle but this was pretty funny
- camdat 3y agoI dont think the pedestrian getting hit cares whether the car is 2,999lbs or 3,0001lbs.
- pc86 3y agoI mean this is obviously false. The heavier a vehicle is, the slower it needs to be going to cause a certain amount of damage, up to and including death. How many pedestrians are hit every year? If you can lower the average weight of vehicles on the road you're directly saving lives.
- tm-guimaraes 3y agonot only that, but the height of the vehicle front also matters A LOT. A SUV is perfect for killing pedestrians, it has the perfect triple combo: * Weight * raised front to perfectly shatter a chest * low visibility for the perfect "i didn't saw him" excuse.
- jacurtis 3y ago> There's no reason a 1/2 ton pickup should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150 It is funny that we still call trucks like the F150, Ram 1500, Silverado 1500, etc as 1/2 ton pickups. Even though they are still officially categorized like that by all the manufacturers, Edmunds, Motortrend, KBB, and so on, they are actually essentially 1 ton pickups. Our "light-duty pickups" (which is their official classification) are actually 1 ton pickups. The whole tonnage designation refers to the payload capacity of the truck (people and gear in the bed for example). Traditionally a 1/2 ton pickup could carry 1,000 lbs (half a ton roughly). This was the light-duty, "everyman's pickup". But take the 2023, F-150. It has a payload capacity of ~2,200lbs on all trims above Lariat. And just shy (~1,800-1,900 lbs) on lower trims. These are literally 1 ton pickups being sold as 'light duty' 1/2 ton pickups. They are way more power than the average person needs, yet they are the best selling vehicles in america. When I look at my neighbords, of the 18 houses on my street, there are 14 pickups (3 of which are 3/4 ton pickups, the rest are 1/2 ton). There is one guy that carries a small trailer a few times each summer with a dirt bike in the back. The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary. Not only are they more dangerous to pedestrians, and are worse for the environment, but they also clutter up the streets because they often don't fit in garages,so more and more people park on the street. For fun, I looked up the current payload of the Ford Ranger, which is Ford's 1/4 ton pickup. And it clocks in at 3/4 of a ton. So again, we have moved up two notches in truck size.
- olyjohn 3y agoThey are called 1500s. So they should be 3/4 ton trucks, no? 1500lbs is literally 3/4 of a ton.
- masklinn 3y agoIIRC it’s basically a different generation of naming. 1/2 ton trucks got bigger and increased to 3/4, manufacturers labelled them 1500 (but the 1/2 ton informal naming remained), then they kept growing but the class remained. So now you have light duty trucks with >2000 lbs payload, badged 1500, and called half ton.
- 3y ago
- CalRobert 3y agoThe 240 is a beast. And yet, having just Googled it, it's 400 pounds _lighter_ than a 2022 VW Golf.
- aidenn0 3y agoThe other day, I saw a 1990s Chevy S-10 that had been raised to the height of a modern step-up pickup. It looked ridiculous. Similarly I was on my bike at a red-light looking to turn right with a (stock height) late-model F-150 next to me going straight. I couldn't see over its hood.
- ramesh31 3y ago>There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150. Sure there is. Those 90's pickup trucks were absolute death traps. Bench seating, no airbags, drum brakes, no ABS, no crunch zones. There are very good reasons that cars have become much heavier in the last 30 years.
- jackmott42 3y agoMPG regulation would have had the same effect if there wasn't a loophole to avoid it by making the truck bigger :(
- josephcsible 3y ago> There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. Because batteries are heavy. Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever? > There's no reason 1 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150. Did that have a back seat big enough for adults to sit in? If not, then there's your reason.
- vel0city 3y agoMaybe F-150's should be considered impractical family vehicles instead of trying to shoehorn them into a do-everything-everywhere-all-the-time kind of vehicle?
- klyrs 3y agoOnly the new ones fail at being pickups because their beds are short they can't fit much and so high off the ground you'll blow your shoulder out trying to load it with anything but groceries.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago> Or do you mean you want sedans to stay fossil-fuel powered forever? why not? At least until bateries are good enough. Heavy EVs are not exactly more environmentally friendly than ICEs, they just make different trade-offs. Instead of thinking of the dangers of an ICE sedan, and showing an abomination called an EV sedan, just have a simple EV city car, or invest in actually humane mass transit, propper city planning, etc. If you use just your ICE sedan for longer trips, that's decent enough. EV replacement for our current type of car types are just an hacky way that doesn't really help, just changes the problems.
- klyrs 3y agoYes, my dad drove exactly that truck and we did several roadtrips with 5 adults, 5 bikes, and our luggage in back.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoOnce a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up. The 240 was a good car for its time, but its time was the late 70s. A 2023 Camry hybrid is rated at 53 MPG highway and is much safer for everyone involved. When the 240 was sold you could still buy a new car where you were unlikely to survive a 35 mph head on crash into a wall (e.g. crashing into something roughly the same weight). Meanwhile Euro NCAP rates cars based on the risk to pedestrians (and NHTSA has proposed following suit). A 240 is going to be far less forgiving.
- rhaway84773 3y agoEuropeans also focus on MPG. Their cars haven’t ballooned in the way American cars have.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agompg is directly correlated to size and weight. I don't know the details but apparently some concession was made to big auto on mpg that meant there was a loophole and bigger heavier trucks didn't count against your mpg targets as much. That, not a focus on mpg, is the cause.
- kaonashi 3y agompg wouldn't be as bad as it is if they didn't allow the giant light truck loophole -- regulating on weight would have the same problems if they excepted a class of vehicles that everyone would then flock to