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The end of cool small cars - The Taliban has fresher trucks than us. The Honda Fit is dead. U can’t find a sauced-out 2-door to save your life. How did we get here??
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- Title
- The end of cool small cars
- Authors
- Blackbird Spyplane
- Word count
- 2266 words
Oof. That's so on point that it hurts.
So yesterday I watched this youtube video video about EAV cargo ebikes. And while it's very much a fluff piece full of idealism, I was just struck by how much "This couldn't happen here" I was feeling from it (here being the US, of course).
I mean just look at the thing. It's exactly what it needs to be: no more, no less. They're even customized for the application they will be used for! The only comforts it has are the only ones that it arguably needs. The steel frame is perfectly minimal, and the majority of it is made from simple plastic that has been reinforced with natural fibers that are cheap and easily sourced instead of unnatural and unnecessary carbon fiber, while I would generally scoff at lease-only schemes, they legitimately plan to refurbish and reuse those vehicles so it's actually a good solution.
But then look at the roads out there and what people are driving. This writer just called the Chevy Bolt small! It's not a small car by any stretch of the imagination; it's notably bigger than my old Leaf and that was still much bigger than my old Ford Escort (which, fun fact, got totaled by an impact with a gigantic truck)! That 40KM standard range is actually smaller than my one-way ride to work. If I were to buy something like that, it could only barely be used for my weekly trips to the grocery store. Barely because even though this is more "car-like" than a regular bike, I still don't trust drivers around me to drive safely around a low-speed vehicle.
And the thing about this car is that that idealism they bring up in that video is what we should all be striving for. The part that really got me is how they were saying that within a year (ha!), the car will be driven out of the city center. But here in the US, we are going so far in the other direction that it doesn't even seem like it's possible to go that way.
A while back Low-Tech Magazine published a comic. The final page revealed the publication's author's pessimism. "Civilization will never change it's trajectory. So, why bother? History has never seen humanity make a U-turn. As my mother says, 'You can't fight the wind'."
Transportation is a relatively tiny part of humanity's problems with sustainability. We go to the store and buy crap that is useless and is destined to be disposed. Almost everything we buy is unnecessarily packaged, often with plastic that isn't reused and is rarely recycled. Even the very food we eat is terrible for the environment!
A lot of people these days say that individual action doesn't matter because it's the corporations who are doing the vast majority of the damage, but that's so short-sighted. The reason why the corporations have such an impact on the environment in the first place is because millions of individuals demand products that are produced in such matters. We wouldn't have deforestation caused by palm oil harvesting if we stopped buying products with palm oil in it. But nobody wants to make those kinds of changes. So we're fucked.
Even so I find it hard to put all the blame on people. The world is constantly yelling at them to consume. It's so much easier to buy processed crap instead of cooking sustainable meals. Heck, even ignoring all of that, the world isn't fucked up because of individual actions; it's us collectively that are the problem. Even if it were all a corporate scheme, 99% of the people are complacent in it, and nothing will change until and unless we can get a majority of people to change their ways first.
Sorry for this rant. I'm just really frustrated about everything lately.
Dude don't be sorry. I have felt the same way for a long time. I want a small EV but God dang they are nearly impossible to find where I am. Weird combination of lack of availability, price gouging and car companies really not making them.
I would pay stupid amounts of cash for an EV Kei-type truck in Ohio and it's just not a thing and probably won't ever be one. Sucks but that's kinda how it is.
I get where you are coming from as well, our whole life we have been told, if you and enough people have a need - the market will answer. Well I know I'm not alone (this thread proves it) but where is my small and cheap EV? Why won't my state let me drive a Kei Truck? What if I just want a simple pickup that is the size of the old Ford Ranger? All of these are rhetorical questions. I know some options exist but not really in the price I can afford or what I'm looking for. It's a crappy feeling and it's even worse when you consider nothing will really change.
The thing that bugs me (on the car side) is that in theory they already do exist on the market in the US. They're just handicapped. There's a class of vehicle called an NV or NEV - Neighborhood (Electric) Vehicle. You might have even driven one at one point, since golf carts count under that designation. Golf cart maker Polaris makes them under the GEM brand. The problem with them is that they're dangerously slow, and so it's only legal to drive them on streets that have speed limits of 35mph or less. They're also made in very low volumes so they're quite expensive for what you get.
There are tiny trucks in this category if you're interested; here's one I saw not too long ago, and I found this fun-looking model from a Chinese manufacturer.
Glad you mentioned it. I found a brand new Kei Truck dealer here in Ohio. They sold amazing looking 4-wheel drive Kei trucks with a dump bed and plow. Super overkill for what I would want, but it was nice to know they had it.
Read the fine print. Illegal on the streets of Ohio, kneecapped to 25MPH and could only be used on basically farms or big lots of land. Sad.
This is something I think of often. Not just as a driver of an older Fit, but someone who would like to see a Fit that can keep up with a Golf GT. I often want to see features or configurations in consumer electronics or hobbyist things that are omitted because they're not profitable and the majority don't particularly care, despite there being demand for them.
Simply, it's a big, fundamental hole in market theory: you can't vote with your wallet if the options presented deliberately exclude what you want and the means to enter the market are nearly insurmountable. Or if the people with the greatest means to participate are another demographic (55+, luxury-focused and terrified of driving).
We've had a combination of market-steering by decades of advertisements and product placement by US car companies (who were incredibly noncompetitive toward the Japanese and Korean brands in the 90s and 2000s), lobbying for regulations that favor larger vehicles instead of smaller, and the demographic with the most disposable income having poor taste in vehicles.
My solution is to tax the fuck out of gasoline and incentivize smaller, lighter cars that way. Or at least maliciously enjoy its price going up.
I think a tax based on curb weight, levied either at point of sale or during vehicle registration, would probably accomplish this while also discouraging bloated EVs as well.
I'm a fan of doing it at registration. I think EVs necessitate a shift to taxes based on odometer readings anyway, since a shift will reduce road funding otherwise. It makes sense to implement a system like that, and have different tiers based on curb weight.
But I'm also for carbon taxes as well. So I guess, ideally, we'd have both.
I think a problem with the internet is you can find a bunch of people who agree with you (I want a small EV too), but thousands of people still might be a statistically tiny minority in a country where there are hundreds of millions of cars. I know I want a smaller car (I have a VW Golf), but I look around and see all my peers buying SUVs and crossovers even though their households have only 3-4 people with no plans to expand. I don't really agree with their reasons for buying them, but it's undeniable that most people I talk to seem to favor owning larger cars. So it seems to me that the market is answering. We who want small cars are just in the minority.
This struck me right away, that the "small cars" they bemoan not being available are massive hulking beasts. I feel reminded of the intro of the Top Gear episode about the Peel P50, where they also mention that modern small cars are, in fact, massive.
And if we are in the "actually massive but sold as the smallest in the lineup"-territory, then electric vehicles in particular have tons to offer, although I would not know whether this happens in the US. But they exist in large numbers, and one frustration if you're looking for something else in electric cars is that they only really come in two flavors: Compact and Sedan. Good luck finding station wagons for example.
But again, this loops back to the problem that these aren't small cars, and like you say, it doesn't seem like humanity as a group can change course no matter how much we should all be rationally aware that there's no upside to our current behavior. Even for something as inherently superficial as the car we buy.
Another piece of the puzzle that I can see is safety gear and design methods. I don't see a feasible way to design a new car, with all of the current north American safety standards included, that would fit within the footprint of a gen 1 civic. The same could be said for trucks. Back in the mid 80s when the Toyota pickup got famous, airbags and crumple zones were still a new thing and largely unregulated. In order to fit all of that stuff into a vehicle, the body panels and other bits need to be expanded to make the room. Cars like the Smart and IQ show that it is still possible in a way, but aesthetics take a back seat at that point.
But this happens in other parts of the world, no? Including the EU, who, as far as I understand, have even more rigorous requirements. Though I admit the actual specs might be expressed differently and add more inherent bulk in the USA.
Cars have bloated in the EU as well. Renaults and Citroens aren’t any smaller than American cars for the same seating capacity and cargo space. The American market just prioritizes having a lot more of those things and also having front grills designed like walls so you can really be absolutely sure that anyone you hit with it dies gruesomely.
To get what I'm on about in European spec, put a gen 1 Golf next to the latest gen. The latter is nearly twice the car. Now, they've made up for the bulk by injecting heaps of horsepower to compensate, but physics dictates that need.
So 2 door coupe is my go to car, and at the very least Toyota/Subaru have the 86/BRZ (and the new GR 86 looks amazing). For reference I went from my FRS(86) to a RC 350 just because life/work demanded something that was slightly less of a warcrime to put someone in the back seats in, but I still wanted something fun.
In general I think the market is about right for this? The average person wants a crossover suv because it's not huge like a full sized suv, but still fits basically any/all needs. Comfortably transporting people and enough space for those days where you need to move larger objects.
Someone else already pointed out the tax loopholes that skew things more than they should, and that does need to be closed so we can get smaller trucks, but I think ultimately the average person wants a cheap car that will fill all their needs, and the small/midsized SUV will often be that choice.
The thing is, a lot of crossovers are surprisingly cramped and have anemic trunk capacity despite their size. The Honda Civic hatchback is basically undefeated in trunk space compared to any crossover you'd pick up instead. They keep deciding to make the trunks sloped to look fast or for aerodynamics or whatever, but they should just make it look like the old rav-4.
I mean the "aerodynamics or whatever" part is because it needs to meet certain gas efficiency standards.
The space maximization most people want doesn't actually mesh with our current regulations, and maybe shouldn't.
I'm holding onto my 2007 Fit as long as I can, but if I had to buy a new car, my number one pick would be the hatchback Civic Sport Touring. It's still a bit heavier and larger than a Fit, but it's close and has the same sort of folding seats for cargo capacity...and it has power approaching that of the Civic SI, but with more practicality and extra luxury features.
If I'm going to have to pay over $30K for a new car anyway, I might as well get a very nice one that ticks all of the boxes for the long term.
Plus it’s one of the few cars that can still be had with a manual transmission, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Tentatively, yes, but reality probably says no. I think the CVT with paddles is more my kind of compromise, because I realistically would be aggravated by stop and go traffic on my commute (or SUVs turning at 3mph, wide across two lanes, out of parking lots into 35mph traffic).
Same with the fuel type: my understanding is the current generation requires 91 octane fuel for all manual models (not just the SI) but all CVT models are designed for 87 octane (but can still accommodate higher). It's definitely more practical to save $1/gallon.
Yeah, fair enough, stop and go traffic tends to be the reason most people give even if they're in the relatively tiny subset of people who'd otherwise prefer a manual in the first place. I am of the even tinier subset who find that a manual actually makes stop and go somewhat more interesting, but I am well aware that almost nobody else thinks this.
Interesting about the higher octane for the manual Civic, I had not heard of that. I cannot fathom why it'd be the case unless they have a higher tune/effective compression ratio on the manual. The owners manual page 672 mentions that models without a capless fuel filler should use 91, models with one should use 87, maybe the manuals are all without? Very odd distinction though.
They seem to pick some odd distinctions. I seem to recall on a prior generation it was "models with turbos use 91," but that has obviously changed. (I think back then it was just SI or the equivalent of the sub-EXL models though, so it effectively just meant premium for SI.)
Though, at least, the feature comparison page on Honda.com does list "regular unleaded" for the Sport Touring. But it doesn't seem to suggest a difference based on transmission. And the SI has "Regular Unleaded (Premium Recommended)"
Yep, keeping a vehicle around is a considerable expense even if you only buy used, so naturally many people want to be able to squeeze as much utility as they possibly can out of a single vehicle to help make that expense worth it.
What would help a lot in smaller cars is if hatchback versions were more common and if the back seats could easily be temporarily removed (a feature commonly found in minivans). Taking myself as an example, I'm rarely carrying more than two people so if I could set the back seats aside and turn the entire rear half of the car into pure stowage, something like a Bolt or Prius would be more than enough to meet my needs and turn even compact SUVs into unnecessary overkill.
My Pontiac Vibe (twin of the Toyota Matrix, they came out of the same factory) is exactly this, and I've been wondering why vehicles like this are so hard to find nowadays. The back seat even has enough headroom to comfortably fit my very tall friends, something very few compact cars accomplish.
My other car is a 2011 RAV4 which fills a lot of the same niche, but isn't nearly as fun to drive and had a much higher starting price. The newer RAV4's are just too crazy expensive and appear to have even less usable trunk space.
The Matrix/Vibe is an interesting little car that I didn't know existed, thanks for mentioning it. If I can't get a reasonable deal on a Bolt lease in the coming months I might have to see if I can hunt down a deal on one in decent condition.
Hatchbacks and wagons were quite common until the SUV trend came along. Full size SUVs quickly replaced wagons and crossovers replaced hatchbacks, and now we’re left with these less economical, more expensive (and higher margin) vehicles that are a lot less fun and engaging to drive. Which most people don’t care about, but I do.
Hold on. I googled that car. That is massive. How is that a small car exactly?
Maybe it's a very german thing, but a common type of car over here is what we call a "Kombi". It's a non-SUV car, normal size, but the back is boxed a bit and elongaed to drag the roof back to the very tail end of the car. Like this Peugeot 308SW, my current car. And the car is still quite compact (in fact it's shorter than most cars I've owned before) but even before you fold the back seats down, it fits quite a lot of stuff due to the higher roof and hence the ability to push large objects in. Once you get rid of the seats, everything gets easy-ish to put in.
Is that just not a common make of car in the rest of the world?
Which car are you talking about?
The FRS/86/BRZ is smaller than your car. The 350 is not, although i'd hardly say it's massive given it's slightly smaller than the BMW series 4, which is a pretty easy comparison being another luxury coupe, and more specifically, german. It also happens to be less wide and tall than your 308, so i'm not sure if you googled the right car?
For reference- L x W x H
86 - 4240mm x 1775mm x 1285mm
Peugoeot 308 - 4367mm x 1852mm x 14141mm
RC 350 - 4695mm x 1840mm x 1395mm
Series 4 - 4768mm x 1852mm x 1383mm
It's basically an online 'zine with a distinctive writing voice.
I like it because of that. It reads like an old school blog, one of those personalised and specialised websites we have too few of these days when they're all replaced by large hub sites.
This Civic Hybrid would be in the running for my next car if I were buying a car.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42639792/2024-honda-civic-hybrid-confirmed/
I am on my second Fit, when my first one was totaled for the second time I wanted to buy a new one but they were sold out. The dealer told me the factory that made them had washed out in a flood, but there was a row of 50 HR-Vs made in the same factory that nobody wanted. They had exactly one used Fit that had just come in that morning, they just couldn’t keep them in stock. We walked out with it.
My hunch is that Toyota wouldn’t mind ending the Corolla and Honda wouldn’t mind ending the Civic but they know the consequence is that people will be paying new car prices for vehicles with 100,000 miles on them.
(The automobile press repeats incessantly, like the brainwashed veterans in The Manchurian Candidate that Americans are obsessed with huge cars. It may be true for some of them. But dealers are even more obsessed with selling you the biggest car they can, something I remember my father dealing with in the 1970s.)
Been driving my 1st gen Tacoma for over 20 years now and I fear for the day that it bites the dust. We take it 4x4'ing and backcountry camping a lot and I'd prefer to purchase a similar-sized truck for tight trails, but the options just aren't there without a huge bump in size.
Back when open source left programming, a company called Local Motors made a car, the Rally Fighter. I might be misremembering... but I recall that it was "open source" in a weird way, the people who bought into it could vote on what parts it would be made of, how it would look, etc. I thought it was the beginning of a cottage industry of all kinds of varied cars and even more kit cars. Instead, since then, the car market has become a copycat game of all the worst trends. Bloated, expensive behemoths with giant touch screens instead of dashboards. I really would love to see a back to the basics auto maker come out with inexpensive, minimalist cars and trucks that are lightweight and easy to work on. Or maybe the same as above with kit cars. Just four wheels plus whatever the IHSA requires. Modifying my RC cars makes me think I could almost figure out how to build one!
I think that's due in large part to just how expensive it is to make stuff bespoke like that. Over the past 20 or so years the level of optimization to every piece of the production process, starting from the supply chain, has been insane. Doing such a thing now would probably cost you something in the range of an Aston Martin, and you'll be getting a much less precision-engineered vehicle for the money. It's like the guy who made a sandwich "from scratch" and it cost him $1.5k and 6 months.
Unrelated but maybe not really, as I’m sure it’s all chicken tax-adjacent: why can’t we have sub-100k camper vans in the US? I’m looking at 40 year old Vanagons or 120k Mercedes vans, while every country across the Atlantic can get any of a dozen options of fully usable camper vehicles, getting ridiculous gas mileage, for nearly reasonable prices. Just sell me a VW California already.
Isn’t the VW electric bus coming stateside?
Though I guess that’s more of a minivan than a camper.
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They died because no one bought them. “No one” is metaphorical, of course. If people in the US don’t want to buy small cars, they don’t want to buy small cars. It’s not because of an oppressive regime, and unlike with an oppressive regime, there’s no big bad to depose of.
If you want small cars back you’ll need to convince American buyers to want small cars. In terms of policy, the two aspects that can be done is a tax on gasoline (but fat chance of whatever government does that living to see another term - also regressive) to increase gas prices or lowering our vehicle tariffs so competitors from China and elsewhere can sell their cars, broadening the market as a result.
It isn't entirely true that they died because nobody bought them. There are a variety of regulatory and tax loopholes that have skewed the market in favor of large trucks. The market is also sufficiently consolidated that I don't think the assumption that producers are reliable tribunes of where long-run demand is holds very well. There are efficiencies of scale that means it's often way cheaper to keep doing what you've been doing than retool to do something different, even if that something different could sell marginally better, which promotes ossification. You'd need to see comparatively much bigger gains from changing course to justify the initial expense. And it's a risk, there's no way of knowing what the market will respond to until you put it out there and it's hard to make that leap of faith when you're in a difficult period of transition (supply shortages, fundamental changes in how the product you're selling actually works, macroeconomic shifts, etc).
Ultimately, it's not whether anyone buys them, it's a question of what kinds of margins can you make off selling them. If there is plenty of healthy demand for a subcompact, but you'd rather make 30% more selling fewer crossovers that's what you'll do. If you make a TON of money on impractical SUVs, and then because of parts binning in the factories it becomes easier to design an inflated crossover that can reuse many of those parts instead of needing a different bin of differently sized parts to make sedans, it might make more financial sense to just make the crossover even though people might have preferred a theoretical different vehicle.
Plus carmakers are inveterate trend-followers. For example, it's pretty clear from survey after survey that everyone thinks in-car infotainment systems are dogshit and prefer tactile controls, but they insist on not doing it. In fact, GM wants to double-down and eliminate support for Carplay and Android Auto.
Plus they market big cars because they make big cars, which induces demand for big cars. We really underrate the extent to which marketing drives a lot of this stuff, especially where status signaling is concerned. We could have marketed sexy, impractical sports cars but we don't because they don't produce the necessary margins.
To this point, the practical and utilitarian Honda Fit sold quite well in the US, but Honda dropped it largely on the bet that those buyers would move to higher margin vehicles with similar utility like the HR-V. One reason I get salty about crossovers is because they are basically killing the only vehicle I personally want, the hatchback.
I'm not sure that I completely buy that. People are always looking for affordable cars. I think it is much more to do with a "chicken or egg" scenario. If they don't offer smaller cars, the public has a harder time buying smaller cars. It could easily be skewed by anyone interested to mean "people just don't want small cars!"
Personally, I think this is just a continuation from the COVID material shortages. If Ford only has so many car chips available why wouldn't they put them in their higher/est profit offerings? They sold their stock, made quite a bit of profit doing it so they simply continue. There was such a shortage that people that needed a vehicle couldn't afford to be too picky (even used cars).
I think this ties in with all the other post-COVID economics we're seeing. We're seeing less generic brand items since the top-tier brands are making more money to bid more money at the plants for their product. If there aren't cheaper options available there is only 1 winner (and it isn't the consumer)
Maybe more the people that can afford to buy new cars don't want small cars.
Minimum ~$35-40k shuts out a lot of people. Add to that that most of the people buying new cars aren't buying them for functionality but for status. A modern F150 or equivalent is a pain to load stuff in and out of because it's so high, even before the seemingly >50% chance someone puts a lift kit on it. So older trucks are going for a premium on the used market to people who actually use them daily for more than commuting.
Then there's the whole arms race of "I don't feel safe in a small car", which, like with the headlight arms race, would be a perfect environment for some kind of regulation in a functional country.
The limited diversity of suppliers (who have a vested interest in putting the same car on the market with thirty different skins) in the market and perverse incentives that insurers drive (unintended) really complicate the conversation, though. Midsize sedans today have the footprints of 90s SUVs, small cars in the 2010s were either $50+k or crackerboxes that drive like lawnmowers and barely have cargo room for a grocery run with a single passenger. The normal coupe-appreciator was relegated to either the used market or something that came nowhere near what they love the format for.
I like to point out that if I park my Honda Fit next to a 90s Civic (be it a basic model, SI, Integra/Type R), my Fit is visually almost identical in size. That was a sufficient size for a family sedan back then (so was the Dodge Spirit my family had)...and the typical car on the road nowadays has 0-1 passengers.
It's wild how you say this and later mention tariffs without making the connection. The chicken tax killed the light truck in America; demand had absolutely nothing to do with it. So in the end, it is because of an oppressive regime - just one closer to home.
I know we're supposed to read articles on Tildes before commenting. And I'm all in on that, but what is this headline?
Is the word "you" too much of a hassle to type out? I can't reach down far enough to want to read something presented this way.
I suggest you read the article. Blackbird Spy Plane is one of the more interesting and thoughtful cultural commentaries out there.