Yeah, I’d expect EVs to get lighter over time as technology progresses. Car bloat is a much bigger problem. Totally insane that little practical city cars like the Honda Fit have gone practically extinct in the US in favor of bigger, heavier cars that don’t even necessarily bring improved cargo capacity for all that extra bulk.
I have a 2018 Fit and it's a fantastic car. It gets 36 MPG and has much more interior space than it would seem. I've had taller people ride in it comfortably and its crowning achievement was fitting a hot water heater in the cargo area with the rear seat split -- without having to remove the child car seat on the other side. Pair a roof rack and you really don't need more -- especially day-to-day.
It's a crying shame that they've stopped selling them in the US. Marketing (the real men need their Rams, thank you very much!) and the CAFE loophole seem to have won the day, though, and we're all worse off for it.
Marketing does seem to work, especially over generations. I think the main reason trucks/SUVs were marketed so much was because of a 25% tax on imported light trucks and not cars. The so called "chicken tax"[1] was imposed on light trucks in 1964 and is still with us today.
A big reason car companies push trucks so much is that they are more profitable per unit. Demand is extremely limited in terms of quantity, because you can only really sell about 1-2 cars per family, per about 10 years.
That means, all else being equal, a car company makes more profit selling a vehicle that has a higher profit margin. The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X. This means the dealer/manufacturer just outright make more money if a higher percentage of people buy trucks instead of small cars.
Consumers have "signaled" that they will be fine paying three times as much for the same exact feature set (no, they are not hauling anything, and there certainly isn't a massively higher percentage of Americans doing truck things than 50 years ago), even using longer term loans to make it happen.
When the car market has been basically saturated for decades, how else do you "make line go up" than selling the same product (transportation) for more money?
> The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X.
> ... even using longer term loans to make it happen.
I don't understand how so many people are driving these vehicles. Not only are they 2-3x as expensive to buy or lease but they're also 2-3x more expensive to fuel and maintain. (Probably to insure, too?) I don't have any data to back this up but my intuition tells me that these vehicles and their loans could be the cause of the next subprime mortgage-esque financial crisis.
It really is difficult to imagine a better vehicle for suburb/city usage than the Fit, unless you have a bunch of kids/people to move in which case I’d skip crossovers/SUVs entirely and go straight to minivans (which are also better than SUVs for most peoples’ needs).
