Funny…when I was growing up, the coupe or sedan my parent’s had at the time was plenty big enough to haul our junk, or go to the grocery store. Now, everyone NEEDS that space to go on a trip once a year. It’s funny how different times are now vs then.
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I’m the same way… I used to be convinced that I NEEDED an SUV for grocery runs, etc… Until I managed to fit two carts of groceries into my Malibu one day when my CR-V wasn’t available to me that particular day.
Not only did I just buy a sedan but I bought an Accord 1.5 Touring an unpopular model in a declining segment, so I clearly am not anti sedan.
That said, trunk opening of sedans is the big issue. Just this weekend we were unable to fit a new carseat in its box into the Accord’s trunk. This is a common enough problem we need a car with a bigger trunk opening. Even with an MDX I’d have bought/leased a full sized wagon if I could, but I didn’t want an Outback, tourX was outrageous lease and you can’t get a full size wagon (passat wagon for example) in US from non luxury maker.
Flip side to this is that I might have bought a small SUV if it had been practical. But trunks of car like CRV and Rogue have fairly small useable space. You put a stroller in the trunk and that’s it, you can’t fit anything else without stacking. Stroller fits into Accord’s trunk vertically leaving significant space on either side.
I think the real problem here is that my kid’s stroller and car seat are bigger than my first car. I really shouldn’t need a u-haul to carry this kind of stuff, but it feels like I do most days…
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Everything is big nowadays. 15 years ago, 32 inch lcd tv is the norm for every household. Now its 50-65 inch 4k tv. The only one thing shrinking right now is ownership of house/land and probably my take home pay.
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Lord yes. We just bought a convertible car seat. That thing is humongous. Even in the fairly wide Accord it takes up the middle seat.
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You probably paid megabucks for it as well. I have a big britax conv carseat that cost $300+. I wonder if that is 3 times better than the smaller $100 carseat?
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That’s the “problem” with car seats - you pay for the best and hope to never find out if it is really the best.
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I’m in the same boat. The my rear facing car seat barely fits in my 3 series. Luckily, I’m not very tall, so my seat just grazes the back of it.
The other problem is, we were out of car seats and bouncing around the back of the car (or front seat) at age 2. Nowadays, you need some sort of car seat until they are practically teenagers 
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True story. My wife informed me that our son needs to be rear facing until he is 4. Uh, wut?
Anyway, where I was going with this is that in the name of safety, families need everything to be bigger in the hopes of never finding out just how necessary it was. I’m the first to admit that I’m completely irrational about it, too. I will end up buying the big car to hold the big stroller and the big car seat, all in hopes that I never need to find out it wasn’t necessary.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go move our City Mini stroller (that has absolutely nothing mini about it) into the X1 and play tetris to fit it.
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Until I was about 10 years old we managed with one of these for a few years. A Peugeot 205 (the fancy 4 door kind!) for a family of 5. Plus a dog. Of course this was the UK, where journeys are generally much shorter and if my mum hit a curb whilst parking I’m sure we’d all have been instantly killed because it was basically made of paper, but I don’t recall it being that tight.
(quietly mutters after age 10, we got a Volvo 960 and it honestly felt like a palace with hundreds of acres of space, and probably why now, as a double-income-no-kids-ever-thanks household we drive a Highlander and never use even a fraction of the space. What was my point again? Oh yeah. GM. Space. Good. etc)
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My dad hauled my sister and I around in one of these from 82-86…I think I have you beat…maybe not, but it’s close.
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Passenger cars don’t (practically speaking) cause road wear. It’s almost exclusively caused heavy semi trailers. I agree we should have a fair solution to this problem, but to do so we have to consider the road damage is heavily correlated to the weight of each vehicle and assign the costs accordingly.
Here’s an old GAO report but here’s the relevant part:
The road damage caused by a single 18-wheeler was equivalent to the damage caused by 9,600 cars. The study seems to have based its calculations around the number of axles per vehicle. The study found that essentially, road damage was related to the 4th power of the relative loads. That means that if one vehicle carries a load of 1,500 pounds per axle and another carries a load of 3,000 pounds on each axle, the road damage caused by the heavier vehicle is not twice as much, but 2 to the 4th power as much (2x2x2x2 = 16 times as much road damage as the lighter vehicle).
Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)
[Edit: Sorry for the off-topic post.]
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I agree that trucks cause road wear more so than cars. That said, I’m paying gas tax to help fund the roads in my ICE while the EV driver doesn’t + gets a (theoretical) 7500 tax incentive on their lease to entice them to be early adopters. Something’s not right there. Eventually, the gas tax has to go up to continue to pay the cost of increasing infrastructure repairs…with more and more EVs beginning to hit the roads, it’s a double-whammy for the ICE driver. Less tax collected + higher cost of road maintenance, while the EV driver gets a pass.
Those truck drivers pay that tax as well, so when the inevitable happens, that means the truck driver is going to pass that cost onto the consumer.
Yeah they can use his hair care products to glue tires onto rims…Thanks Trump!
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Even with the bailout, they still can’t seem to do better.
I just test drove a GMC AT4 and found that a $65K truck interior inside was terrible compared to their RAM competitor: Rebel for $60K.
Also, GM is not competitive in pricing, incentives and important feature: MF - same model year…
While Chrysler Cap offers 0.00083 MF, GMF offers 0.0282 MF!!!
Everybody knows the Sedan is dead. Long live the trucksuv…
Fiat Chrysler Unveils Jeep-Branded Pickup Truck
The Gladiator, a mashup of the Jeep Wrangler SUV and a midsize truck, tests auto maker’s push into pickups under new CEO
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Now does Jeep throw a Hellcat engine into it and give the world a Raptor killer?