- It's no secret that cars have been getting
bigger and bigger for the last 40 years.
My grandpa used to have a 2004 ranger.
It was considered a compact truck back then
and it felt like it.
If you could look up a new ranger now,
and that thing's big.
A 2000 ranger XLT, regular cab had a length of 187 inches.
Whereas the 2021 ranger is
around 210 and it was a full eight inches wider
and six inches taller than my grandpa's.
That might not seem like a lot,
but that's only over one generation.
You look back at Rangers from the early 1980s,
and they seem like toys in comparison
are cars and trucks going to keep getting bigger?
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let's get back to the show.
There are a lot
of different reasons why cars have gotten so bloated
but one of the main reasons is safety.
Not very sexy I know, but stay with me.
Cars have gotten significantly faster,
in the last couple of decades
and the faster they become,
the safer they need to be as well.
We take modern safety features
for granted because most of the time
it's out of sight and we're not worrying about it.
But all those safety features need real estate
crumple zones, airbags, safety cells.
It all adds up to the size of the vehicle.
Back in the day, safety technology was relatively primitive.
Hell it took more than 50 years
for seatbelts to become commonplace.
Cars were a little more than sheet metal boxes.
Nowadays, there are much stricter regulations when it comes
to keeping the drivers safe
In the event of an impact.
Cars are divided up into sections
'some that are supposed to collapse called crumple zone
and sections that are supposed to stay intact
called safety cells.
But the safety cell itself doesn't do too much to slow
down someone in the event of a crash.
And for that car manufacturers rely on a gang of airbags.
Once it's packed in,
an airbag, doesn't take up that much room.
But door mounted in front facing airbags require 10 inches
of deployment distance from the body.
So all of that has to be accounted for
when designing the cabin.
And it's one of the specific reasons
that cars have gotten wider.
A front impact airbag for both the driver
and front passenger is required in all modern cars.
However, six airbags is the standard
the BMW five, six, and seven series offer up to 12 airbags
and auto makers are following suit to include knee, head,
and pelvic protection systems.
Pelvic airbags sounds like something I could have used
in high school when people thought it was fun
to give a little nut check.
Yeah, they're there.
And yeah.
Now I have a stomachache for 10 minutes. Thanks.
Even things like door panels
have to be fitted to accommodate airbags
and extra enforcement that wasn't there 30 years ago
but it's not just safety equipment that takes up space.
It's also new technology.
Another reason cars are bigger
and why it costs so dang much to do relatively minor repairs
on stuff like doors and bumpers is because
nowadays those parts of the car are packed
with a ton of new tech that wasn't in them
a few decades ago.
Door panels are just filled with Zunes
where'd they go?
Why can't you buy a Zune?
It's because all manufacturers
are dumping them in their body panels.
Cameras, sensors, and housings for all that takes
up quite a bit of space in whatever part of the car it's in,
engineers do a great job making it as low profile
as they can, but they can only do so much.
Accident avoidance systems, braking assist,
forward collision warnings, automatic emergency braking,
pedestrian detection, adaptive cruise control.
You get it.
There's a lot.
Each one of these safety systems has a sensor.
Maybe even multiple sensors.
Everything is being regulated by a computer.
The size of these sensors
range anywhere between one and five inches
which again, one or 10 doesn't take up that much room
but there are at least a hundred sensors in a car.
This number will continue to grow.
As more features are added.
Features that we haven't even thought of yet like,
taco bell proximity sensors.
How close am I to my next Baha blast?
This is critical information.
I need to know why I'm driving on the i5
also where's the closest bathroom.
Those are all features that made cars
like the Honda civic go from being
one of the smallest cars on the road
to being virtually indistinguishable
from other sedans and coupes.
When the Honda civic came to the United States
in 1973, it's styling was considered cute and quirky.
Like me.
The slogan was "it'll get you where you're going"
One of the slogans for Honda's 2020 civic
is "the true definition of luxury... yours".
That's not the only thing that has changed about the civic.
It's also three feet longer and one foot wider.
Honda wasn't trying to compete
with its domestic counterparts
because they knew they were gonna be smaller.
Americans don't like small cars for some reason.
Well, actually we'll get to that right now.
Speaking of room, what has more space
and luxury than the sport utility vehicle?
Not much, SUVs have been dominating the market
for the last 30 years.
Thanks to literal trailblazer models
like the Chevy blazer, Ford Explorer, Jeep grand Cherokee,
land rovers.
You don't need to be--
(sad music)
You don't need me to keep listing SUVs.
The rise of the SUV fueled competition
between car companies to make the biggest,
most utilitarian, most capable vehicle out there.
The average size of SUV has gone
up significantly since the onset of the first models.
And there's a reason for that.
At least in America,
there is a mentality that bigger is better.
Why wouldn't you want a vehicle
with seven seats and a thousand cubic feet of trunk space?
Aside from major cities,
lanes are wide and parking is plentiful.
If the infrastructure can handle it
why not? knock yourself out.
Sure, you don't have kids.
You don't have dogs.
Treat yourself, get an enormous car you don't need.
Quick sidebar and infrastructure.
When doing research for this, we were comparing the size
of roads and we found something interesting.
You would think the only thing that
would never change is the width of a lane,
but that's not true.
City planners made lanes wider in order to decrease traffic.
Turns out though the opposite is true.
There's research about how wider lanes
not only increased traffic,
they're more dangerous.
Cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Tokyo
with lane widths, between 9.2 and 10.6 feet
have the lowest crash fatality rates per 100,000 residents.
While in cities with wider lanes,
the rate of fatalities on road crashes
is significantly higher.
No joke there's a concept called road dieting.
Not sure if that's gonna work in America
'cause everyone has a problem with even the smallest
of changes, but it would probably cut down on accidents.
Another reason that car manufacturers put effort
into making SUVs bigger,
is because SUVs are the cash cow of the respect of lineups.
SUVs along with full sized trucks,
have some of the biggest profit margins
of any vehicles sold.
Car manufacturers can sell luxury high end trim levels
and charge an extra 20 grand for just a few upgrades
and people will still buy them.
The 2021 Lincoln navigator black label is literally $21,000
more expensive than the base model
for features like
automated running boards and some extra Chrome trim
I'm trying to generalize a little bit,
but I mean that's still a lot of money,
compared to the razor thin profits of a sub compact car
this incentivizes manufacturers to make cars bigger.
The other thing is gas,
for the consumer gas prices are less of a concern now
than they were a decade ago.
The national average for a gallon of gas in the US
hasn't taught $3 since 2014.
Hybrids and fully electric cars are expensive
at least for now.
So you get more car for your dollar
with an internal combustion engine.
And that feeds right back
into the bigger is better mentality,
but not to put it on the consumer.
There are other reasons cars continue to get guffier,
compact, subcompact, midsize truck, light duty truck.
The classification of a car dictates what restrictions
and regulations it is subject to
meaning that if you make a small car
it's subject to stricter regulations than a bigger car.
So a smart car which is classified as a micro car
has to meet stricter fuel efficiency standards and say
I don't know, a midsize Honda accord.
One of the reasons that a certain model grows in size
is to increase the size of the footprint of the car,
specifically the length and width.
Why do car companies do this?
Well, sometimes it's easier to grow your footprint
than to meet new fuel efficiency regulations.
Bigger cars ironically,
are held to less strict regulations
when it comes to fuel efficiency.
It's an inadvertent side effect of a legitimate means
of fighting climate change and car manufacturers use it
as a little bit of a loophole,
but it feeds into the consumer's needs needs
for something bigger, faster, better, stronger.
(mumbles)
Car buyers continually demand more power from cars.
And as a manufacturer, it's difficult
and expensive to develop new technology
that one meets those power demands
and two meets fuel efficiency regulations.
So it makes sense why cars are getting bigger
but just because the average car is getting bigger
doesn't mean the engines are getting bigger.
Car companies are pushing the boundaries
of how much power can be made
with small displacement engines.
Turbocharged three cylinders are the newest hottest thing
in the internal combustion world.
Cars like the BMW i8, mini Clubman,
and sadly the discontinued in the US
Ford Fiesta, all have powerful three bangers.
The new Toyota gr yaris,
has the most powerful three cylinder engine
which makes 257 horsepower
and 266 foot pounds of torque, that's insane.
So what does that even mean?
Well, it means we've hit a point where the old adage
of "there's no replacement for displacement"
doesn't really ring true anymore unfortunately,
it's more of a matter of personal preference.
Smaller cars are becoming more appealing
because you can get much more power per pound
than those big old honkers.
We don't need a gigantic engine,
beta house, a huge VA anymore to make a fun car.
Plus, there might be a future where a car
like the expedition is powered by four cylinder Eco Boost
because it saves weight,
it saves money, and there's a good chance that
the expedition won't have to go anywhere
but flat public streets.
Are cars going to keep getting bigger?
It's difficult to say.
As long as gas prices stay relatively low
and consumers are telling the market
they still wanna buy big cars.
Yes, we'll probably see something bigger
than the 2021 Ford expedition come out
in the next couple of years, at least in the US.
It makes more sense here than it does the rest of the world.
Going back to my grandpa's truck
from the beginning of this episode,
I would love if manufacturers came out
with compact truck that was actually compact.
The ranger, those old Mazda B trucks, the S10,
all those early 90s trucks were so cool
and perfect for the city.
There's certainly a demand for it.
So if you're listening Ford, Mazda, Chevy Dodge
please make a real compact truck again.
Thanks for watching.
Be kind.
See you next time.
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