Americans love big cars.
Big cars are. They're fun, they're roomy.
I mean, this thing, when you go down the road in it, people notice it.
The U.S. Is the country of Cadillacs with massive tail fins and oversize
pickup trucks.
We are all about wide open spaces here and we drive big cars because we can.
Compared with Europe or countries like Japan, the market for bigger cars in
America is just, well, bigger.
In Europe, for example, small cars like city cars, subcompacts and compact cars
made up more than 35% of sales in 2021.
In the U.S., the same three segments made up just over 10% of sales.
Consumer demand has driven automakers to make vehicles bigger and bigger.
Regulatory loopholes favoring trucks say some industry analysts, have helped
the shift. Big cars are more expensive, often much more.
And especially if they burn gasoline more harmful to the environment.
They take up more space on the road and in parking lots.
They are also much more fatal in car accidents.
Our current system of regulating safety of vehicles is not providing a check on
the weight of vehicles and the disparity of weight across the fleet.
CNBC looked into America's obsession with big cars and why it matters.
This car is huge.
It's almost 20 feet.
Why are they so big?
Because they could be.
Gas was a quarter when this car was made.
Who cared what the gas mileage was?
And we wanted comfort and we wanted style and we wanted space.
This is Rick Patton.
He is a General Motors loyalist.
He loves Cadillacs, and especially Cadillacs from the brand's heyday in the
fifties, sixties and seventies.
At that time, big cars meant something similar to what they mean today luxury,
comfort and status.
Driving a lumbering Cadillac or Lincoln, Continental signified that you
are a person living the good life.
My aunt had a 79 Coupe de Ville and I remember that car as a kid and fondly
remember it.
He has two classic Cadillacs and a Buick in his garage in Eau Claire, Wisconsin,
and several more such cars in a shop a few towns away.
This is a Cadillac Eldorado.
This was the king of the heap in 55.
So this was the most expensive car they made.
This is the second most expensive car they made in 55.
This is a 55 Fleetwood.
So cool things about this.
Where would you put gas in this car?
It's about probably 19 feet something.
His collection shows the American obsession with big vehicles stretches
back decades.
Cars such as his Cadillac Fleetwood were the most desirable rides of their
day.
This was the king of the heap.
I mean, they didn't make a more luxurious car in the United States in
1961 than this.
This is one of the biggest cars that you could buy at the time.
This was the SUV of the day.
This is the closest representation of what an Escalade is back then.
Ed Kim runs AutoPacific, which conducts surveys and other research for
automakers, suppliers and others in the auto industry.
One of the things that researchers commonly ask is What size of vehicle do
you want next time?
And there will always, almost always be a significant number of people that say,
I want something bigger next time.
Customers express preferences for bigger vehicles.
Automakers respond to that.
Take, for example, the BMW three series, an iconic performance sedan.
When it was first introduced, it was far smaller than it is today.
A lot of people kind of consider the E 36 generation which came out in the
early nineties to kind of be the ideal embodiment of what a three series should
be. But it just kept getting bigger to the point where now it's not so far off
from what the five series was not that long ago.
Kim says that this kind of size creep, where automakers bulk up a specific
model over time, might result from misinterpreting survey data.
Automakers take that data very literally and take that to mean, okay, we need to
make the next generation of this vehicle bigger.
And then because automakers always benchmark each other.
Other automakers end up doing the same and they make their vehicles bigger and
the cycle goes on and on and on.
Researchers at Consumer Reports have found evidence of size creep, especially
among pickup trucks.
The group found that the hood height of passenger trucks, such as the top
selling Ford F-150, the Chevrolet Silverado and even midsize trucks, has
increased by an average of 11% since the year 2000.
New pickup trucks grew 24% heavier, on average from 2000 to 2018.
On some of these these what they call heavy duty trucks like the Ford F 250,
the 2500 series Ram and Silverado, the front edge of that hood is now 55 inches
or more off the ground, and that's as tall as the roof of some sedans.
The reintroduced Ford Ranger is bigger than the outgoing version that was
discontinued in 2011.
In fact, when Ford dropped the old Ranger in 2011, it said it did so
because not enough people were buying small trucks to keep producing it.
It isn't necessarily that that trucks themselves are getting bigger.
It's more that when a bigger option is available, more customers buy it.
SUVs, crossovers and pickup trucks now dominate car sales.
Some researchers say that regulations have incentivized automakers to make
bigger vehicles. Kate Lightfoot is a researcher who has studied emissions
rules. She says that when the government started regulating fuel
efficiency in the 1970s, rules didn't take into account the size of the
vehicles and automakers sold.
But a lot of companies importing into the U.S.
Market were selling smaller cars that by nature burned less fuel.
So in the early 2000s, new regulations introduced what is called a footprint
based standard.
That meant that automakers that sold larger vehicles could meet less
stringent regulations.
And that was built out of this desire to kind of protect the U.S.
Based automakers and fairly distribute impacts across the different automakers.
That created an incentive to build larger vehicles in three ways.
One is that the standards themselves are based on the sizes of vehicles that
automakers are producing.
The more large vehicles they produce, the lower the regulatory target they
have to hit is that in itself can create an incentive to shift toward
larger vehicles. Secondly, the revised rules split vehicles into two categories
passenger cars and light trucks, which includes SUVs and pickup trucks.
If a vehicle is classified as a light truck, then it also has less stringent
regulations compared to if it was classified as a passenger car.
Lastly, if a vehicle is big enough, it doesn't fall under the rules at all.
It is no longer considered a light duty vehicle is now considered a heavy truck.
Whitefoot and fellow researchers did a study in 2011 that basically predicted
the repercussions of such laws.
When we evaluate those trade offs, does this incentive exist under under these
regulations for automakers to increase the size of their vehicles?
And we we did see that it could under under quite a large set of scenarios.
While the overall size and weight of the fleet haven't changed all that much,
they have taken off in certain segments, especially in pickup trucks,
since the mid 1990s.
Pickup truck weight on average has increased over £1,000.
Research has found that in the event of a crash, a £1,000 increase in weight
increases the chance of a fatality by 40 to 50%.
The problem is that other people on the road can't choose how big the vehicles
around them are.
They also can sometimes create situations where a crash that may have
been avoidable isn't as avoidable.
So we found that some trucks have front blind spots that are 11 feet longer than
in some sedans and seven feet longer than in a lot of popular SUVs.
We've seen, like what we call an arms race in vehicle size and weight, because
if I'm concerned about my own safety, I'm just concerned about is my vehicle
bigger and heavier than other vehicles around me.
And so vehicles as a result get larger and larger and larger because people
just want to outcompete each other.
Big cars tend to be more expensive than small ones.
We've seen median transaction prices rise pretty considerably over the last
few years. Part of that is due to the simple fact that small entry level
vehicles have increasingly been disappearing from U.S.
showrooms.
Automakers are axing small models.
The Toyota Yaris is gone from the US for discontinued just about all its
passenger cars, including its focus and Fiesta.
Chevrolet got rid of the Sonic and the Cruze.
The Hyundai Accent and Kia Rio are on their way out.
The Nissan Versa sells just a fraction of what it used to, and that applies for
entire brands specializing in small cars like Fiat.
They have left the U.S.
entirely. Meanwhile, Fiat's American sister brands Ram and Jeep have become
tremendously successful, selling some of the most popular vehicles available
today. Big SUVs and pickup trucks.
While small cars are tough to sell in much of the U.S., they are still popular
where roads are too narrow, gas is too pricey and parking too scarce to justify
hulking pickups or SUVs.
But SUVs are seeing serious growth in Europe, too.
An analysis from Jato Dynamics has found that in 2018, about 30% of new
cars registered were SUVs.
In 2021, that number had reached nearly 40%.
That popularity comes at the expense of small cars, which have gone from 49% of
share in 2018 to about 42% in 2021.
That trend has continued in the first half of 2022.
There's a possibility that the rise of electric vehicles could change all this.
Electric powertrains take up a lot less space and cars than do internal
combustion engines with more interior space.
Some industry analysts say it is possible Americans will seek out smaller
cars simply because new EV vehicle designs will make better use of a car's
total footprint. Tastes change, too.
Even after decades of obsession, Peyton has lately developed a fascination with
small, agile British cars.
He bought a 1961 MKG A, which is dwarfed by the size of his Cadillac.
I've always flirted with British cars.
They're interesting.
They look at a different way to do it.
American guys became obsessed with cars like these during World War Two.
That obsession unnerved American carmakers enough to prompt the creation
of a new generation of smaller, more agile American cars such as the
Corvette, the Ford Thunderbird, and eventually the Ford Mustang, each a
legend in its own right.
The whole start of the Americans love affair with the automobile and sports
cars that all came out of English cars.