Man, this blows. It used to be I could get a Smart Car, Scion iQ, Mini, Fiat, Subaru hatchback, Ford Focus, the options for small cars were many. Consumer versions of rally cars were amazing. City commuter cars can turn on a dime and park anywhere.
Now out of the remaining Mini, Fiat, and Smart, they’ve discontinued or are about to discontinue gas vehicles altogether. My speedy turbo Mini will soon be a thing of the past, and that makes me sad.
Bring back small fun to drive cars!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Take road safety: Unlike peer nations, the US has endured a steep rise in traffic deaths, with fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists, who are at elevated risk in a crash with a huge car, recently hitting 40-year highs.
Although the tariff was initially aimed at Germany’s immense auto industry (Volkswagen in particular), it also applies to pickups imported from newer automaking powers such as Japan and South Korea, where carmakers are often adept at building vehicles much smaller than those available to Americans.
“The Chicken Tax has prevented competitive Asian or European truck makers from entering the US market,” said Jason Torchinsky, a co-founder of the Autopian, a media outlet focused on the auto industry.
But the bill included a giant loophole: To protect those who need a heavy-duty vehicle (think farmers or construction workers), Congress made an exception, known as Section 179, for cars that weigh over 6,000 pounds when fully loaded with passengers and cargo.
A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with tall, flat front ends (common on big pickups and SUVs) are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes.
The negative externalities of supersized cars — in emissions, crash deaths, and the erosion of tires and pavement — are what economists call a market failure, since their costs are borne by society writ large, not the people who buy big pickups and SUVs.
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In a country without special half-sized parking spaces for kei cars/city cars/smart cars, all cars are the same size (one parking space each) and are therefore equally bad.
I mean, sure, bigger cars are more dangerous to the people they crash into, but that’s beside the point because crashes are the least of the harmful things about cars! The real problems with them are things that are inherent to the nature of cars – all cars – and cannot be fixed merely by making them 1980s-sized again.
Specifically, the biggest problem with cars is the way the built environment has to be absolutely ruined to make space to accommodate them, and how that not only destroys walkability and transit viability, but also causes stuff like obesity and lack of housing affordability. All these things are inherent problems of car-dependency, and it doesn’t make the slightest shred of difference whether those cars being depended upon are Isettas or F-250s.
