luxury trucks, suvs, crossovers and the death of the sedan

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/idbFlkN1DI9k/v2/800x-1.png

why do you still drive a sedan?

how do you think about mileage and safety?

are the rise of the compact SUV and the luxury truck even related?

lots of interesting points in this thread

The trend of sedan sales collapsing and being replaced by sales of compact SUVs and the trend of gigantic, jacked-up pickup trucks as the luxury vehicle status symbol of choice in much of America are often collapsed together, but I think are basically unrelated?

— Michael Tae Sweeney (@mtsw) March 7, 2022

e.g.

Yes. I would need to see more data on this but I think there's a reasonable case to be made that car seat regulations killed the sedan, and I wonder if they've led to more death.

— Joel Wertheimer (@Wertwhile) March 7, 2022

minor scandal that kieth drives a rav 4 btw https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/who-needs-suvs-dear-keir-walk-to-the-tailor-next-time

i didn't realize child seat laws went so high in age, obviously i don't have a kid. like i know my parents had child seats for me and my brother, but i don't have strong memories of being in them.

you might be able to disentangle these trends somewhat, but i think there's definitely an arms race aspect to it. new trucks are basically designed to shine their extra-bright headlights directly into the rear view mirrors of smaller cars. a lot of things that are functionally passenger cars are still absurdly tall in ways that i don't think make them easier to get in and out of.

i sometimes i wonder if the mega trucks trend is partly the fallout from a bunch of american soldiers driving giant armored vehicles on patrol around iraq and afghanistan for a couple decades. dead pedestrians are acceptable collateral damage for protecting ourselves with our badass mech suits.

Several cars were vandalised in Dulwich last night with tyres deflated and this poster left on windscreens. We are environmentally friendly but this is not who we are as a community. pic.twitter.com/mTvBjPLz6p

— The Dulwich Society (@DulwichSociety) March 4, 2022

i sometimes i wonder if the mega trucks trend is partly the fallout from a bunch of american soldiers driving giant armored vehicles on patrol around iraq and afghanistan for a couple decades.

That's certainly a component of the marketing that drove the trend. 1990 is the year of the Gulf War, Arnold Schwarzenegger constantly complaining that he couldn't buy a military truck (until he could), and the introduction of the Ford Explorer.

Behind the scenes, auto manufacturers figured out that SUVs were a very profitable way to game the fuel economy standards in their favor. Nothing has really changed since.

x-post

One tactic against monster trucks I learned from some Earth First! folks is to deflate the tires on opposite corners. If the truck sits there long enough (like overnight), the sag is enough to permanently warp the frame and body assemblies.

whenever i visit my parents in the "suburbs," i note that each of the houses on their cul-de-sac (except for my parents who both drive small cars), has one luxury truck and one SUV. The truck is the daddy car, and the SUV is the mommy car.

minor scandal that kieth drives a rav 4 btw

I drive a rav 4 ... i haul stuff on a regular basis. i suppose i could have tried to find an old minivan from the 80s that was in decent shape instead of the small SUV, but almost all of those have been cash-for-clunkered out of the area.

xp:

Adding that to the running for best piece of tire-spiking advice on ilx, along with ukilxors arent u posh?

thanks to calzino (in another thread) I had my mind blown about the existence of posi screws (and drivers) ... which up until then, if I had seen any posi screws, I probably thought they were slightly malformed Phillips heads

the sag is enough to permanently warp the frame and body assemblies.

(evil cackle)

there certainly are sedans bigger than say a rav4 which isnt nearly the smallest "suv" so the categories arent that meaningful but thats all kind of pedantic in the face of the fact that vehicles on average are getting bigger which isnt great

we all just need to go back to the humble station wagon, the best kind of car, and its little brother the hatchback

i feel very alienated

luxury truck/suv/crossover owners are living in a different world. even getting to think about being in that world is a different world. it's fine but wtf

what kind of luxury houses are trending? who cares

luxury truck/suv/crossover owners are living in a different world. even getting to think about being in that world is a different world. it's fine but wtf

― the world's undisputed #1 fan of 'Spud Infinity' (Karl Malone), Monday, March 7, 2022 7:47 PM (eight minutes ago)

i got mine used, and I drive less than 5k miles a year so idk ... maybe I do live in a different world, a world where construction materials and music gear are large and bulky and heavy and someone needs to transport them from one physical place to another ...

i have a subaru outback which some say is a station wagon while others a crossover, it cannot be identified, i am therefor innocent, perfect really

xp

it is a different world

suburus should basically be their own category

everyone always takes that in such a judgy way

i have been in that different world. you're right, there are good reasons to own one, where it makes sense.

i think i run into trouble with this kind of thing, all thing time, frequently at least. it's like, yeah, i do get it. i totally get that

suburus should basically be their own category

― call all destroyer, Monday, March 7, 2022 11:02 PM (fourteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

its sort of a cult vehicle, like a toyota but different

the outbacks used to be station wagons and now they pretty much look like RAV 4s. My RAV is almost 20 years old and looks like the Honda equivalent from that era, just like how the Honda Accords and the Toyota Corrollas all looked the same back in the 80s

like the subaru outback, the toyota rav4 and the honda CSV (or whatever the fuck honda calls theirs) are now all the same car ... kinda creepy when u really ~think~ about it? ... meanwhile last time i went to the suburbs (i went to a suburban Lowe's ... you really get a sense of what cars real Americans own when you go to a Lowe's in the suburbs) ... I did see a sweet-ass 70s El Camino, and ... now that was a car

whats funny is crossovers came out and they looked like mini real suvs, the original rav4 was like a tiny 4runner it looked like a truck, and people loved them so much they drove station wagons out of business, now most crossovers dont look anything like trucks, the new rav4 looks like a tall station wagon, they are slowly reinventing the station wagon

el camino was the best car truck of all time

the outback does look even more like a station wagon than the rav4 etc tho, its a station wagon, thats just my opinion, and its a fact

the new rav4 looks like a tall station wagon, they are slowly reinventing the station wagon

yes!!! mine is like the mini-4runner type

but seriously, cargo vans are even getting bigger. the classic Ford Econoline that bands toured in ... now there are those Sprinter things with the tall ass roofs.

https://i.imgur.com/Tm2cVMo.png

this is an outback which is a station wagon

https://i.imgur.com/nsOq4u4.png

where this is a forester which is a crossover, obviously

el camino was the best car truck of all time

― the world's undisputed #1 fan of 'Spud Infinity' (Karl Malone), Monday, March 7, 2022 8:10 PM (two minutes ago)

it was ... when I was a kid, my mom's best friend, Vern, had one. I think it probably transported just about every single household appliance

lol last time we were buying an ICE car i think the main reason we didn't check out suburus is because i couldn't figure out how to differentiate their models

I deal with a TON of Sprinter vans at work, followed in popularity by Dodge Promasters and Ford Transits

#vanlife

if the sedan dies, will that mean the death of ILX?

its a huge failure that no one from this board has ever bought one of those

it's a huge failure that Acura doesn't subsidize this board

they should be giving us free sedans

theres also a special offroad edition of the outback, which idk might be something for the post modernists to delineate

https://i.imgur.com/TlF0UCG.png

but the thing is ... with these new, bigger vehicles, it limits where you can actually live and own one of these things. Like, I have to park my little mini-suv almost right against the retaining wall so I can make sure that I can get in and not be blocked by my neighbor's car in our off-street parking.

i think there's one of those special offroad edition of the outback that I see semi-regularly ... in the parking lot of Whole Foods. ... definitely requires such a rugged vehicle

you'll have to pry my little Prius hatchback outta my cold dead hands, and yeah ease of parking is key

aren't there these custom window jobs you can get on the rear window that fuck with the high-headlight people by revealing scary ghosts or something like that?

there's a fellow ilxor who i know IRL and for years we both had late-80s Toyota Corrollas ... right around the same time each of our Corrollas met their ends and he got some small Honda thing that is quite environmentally friendly and easy to park, and I got the RAV4 ... anyway, if at some point I stop being a "hauler of things," I would totally go for a little Prius hatchback.

seriously, why do I always draw a blank on the models of vehicles made by Honda????

if i lived in the big city i would like to have a small sedan or hatchback, preferably one thats zippy, to zip around in

would you be calm and debonair?

no i would be caffeinated and whimsical

im a truck guy now. well i guess two trucks... got a 07 gmc sierra z71 as my car and a 08 suburban z71 for the fam car. use both for camping and road trips quite a bit. love having a big car that sits up high tbh. the gas mileage thing is rough tho.

used to be a sedan guy but a drunk driver hit my wife head on ten years ago with two oldest kids (newborn and 2.5 y/o) in the car. the buick sedan (le sabre?) held its own but there were broken bones, cuts, concussions, trauma... so we immediately bought a suburban cos i wanted my family to be in the biggest (practical) car possible.

if the sedan dies, will that mean the death of ILX?

ILX was killed last month

Years ago a musician friend had a Volkswagen Squareback from the early 70s and in it's own way, it was the ideal ur-crossover for someone who needed to carry stuff but not 500kg of it. It also had a front trunk (I HATE the word "frunk") which gave it a surprising amount of cargo space.

https://www.ambassadorautomobileco.com/imagetag/53/11/l/Used-1968-Volkswagen-Squareback.jpg

I used to obsess over this Mustang station wagon one-off/concept from 1966. Boomers that give me "that's not a Must..." shit when I tell them that I have a Mach-E on order usually stfu when I show them this. It's a great design that should have been built.

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/amv-prod-cad-assets/images/media/51/ford-mustang-wagon-inline-7-photo-562256-s-original.jpg

Oh wow, I had to look up Mach-E. I saw one outside my grocery store a month or two ago and thought somebody was being cheeky by slapping a Mustang horsie emblem on their electric.

Yeah I was on the oebdient/careful end of the spectrum but the idea of 12-year-old humans still in car seats is just, um, wow

― jenny from the blockchain (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, March 9, 2022 4:38 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

IMO there's a tradeoff between the very minimal additional amount of safety you get vs not humiliating your child.

What’s it got to do with 12 year olds? Unless you have two kids more than five years apart, you need two car seats, which means the back row is unusable for anything else, and lowering the back row to use the trunk takes like 20 minutes of in installation and installation. This is why parents get 3 row cars and suvs with extravagant cargo space.

the minivan is back again awooooo

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/03/vw-unveils-adorable-electric-id-buzz-us-sales-begin-2024/

it's sort of cute, but weirdly commercial looking, like a commuter van

feel like making a mini van is kind of disrespectful to their #vanlife roots, it is cute tho

maybe theyll make a full size one with a pop top and so forth

yeah it looks like a sienna with a cute front, rather than a combi. tbh i'm fine with that.

this is the short wheel base version. the 3 passenger row one is coming later.

if the long one is more full sized will be cool to have it electric cause the battery cld lower the center of gravity which is always an issue w vans

guessing its gonna be a long mini van tho

we need to get back to this

Now live at BaT Auctions: 1960 Volkswagen Double Cab Type 2 Transporter. https://t.co/NdOW70fKWG pic.twitter.com/bIZIrH2qYm

— Bring a Trailer (@Bringatrailer) March 10, 2022

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/03/17/study-megacar-drivers-up-to-4x-more-likely-to-hit-walkers-while-turning/

finally know what kind of car i want pic.twitter.com/3BPHwrHPGI

— justin jacoby smith (@hoosteen) April 8, 2022

Needs flame decals

I discovered my neighbourhood was developed in the 1840s so decided to add an 1840 section to my ‘cars are getting bigger’ drawing.

All the same scale. pic.twitter.com/fhg2oDgDc3

— Michael (@baoigheallain) March 11, 2022

In the land of the free, why can’t we have mini-pickup trucks like the Taliban and ISIS?

kind of a silly piece considering compact or at least smaller pickups are trending hard right now, i understand they might not be small enough for that guy but i feel like it wouldve been worth exploring that on the heals of the maverick doing so well that there are strong rumors that the toyota stout and the subaru baja are making a comeback, gotta think chevy will make one too, the light truck is back baby

its a ridiculous vehicle category imho, but if people want a pickup shaped car they should be able to have it

it's a good headline though.

i mean we all want to be like isis but its just not always realistic

My new car

in case anyone is looking for a JDM dragon hearse https://t.co/LZK9EQe7b5

— marginal idea (@marginalidea) July 9, 2023

saloons still live

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31069594/station-wagons-disguised-suvs/ (2000)

i didnt know about that jaguar, pretty sick

wish audi wld bring the s4 wagon over

the new mazda cx-90 could probably qualify as a station wagon disguised as an suv

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cvw_oMsAsaE/

hyundai finally coming into its own design-wise, for better or for worse

i like what theyre doing generally, now if they could just make their cars harder for children to steal

on the contrary all cars should be made very easy for children to steal - just my humble opinion

tough but fair

We are gradually starting the process of looking into an eventual replacement for the 12-year-old accord and want an electric, but not an SUV. It's surprising how few options there are, esp if you don't want a Tesla. Nissan Leaf maybe?

Or maybe one of these electric "compact" or "sub-compact" SUVs is close enough to a sedan that we won't feel the difference. Also just don't want anything too ostentatious looking or that we will be too afraid to ding bc H is gonna commute to the Bronx in it.

i would totally get the MG EV wagon if i were getting a car but i am not, so

probably not available in the US sadly

reason why so many electrics are crossovers is cause the battery goes in the floor raising the height of the car and a crossover is basically just a tall car

and then theres just that america has abandoned the car

i like the hyundai ioniq 5, its bigger than an accord but not super big about the size of a subaru forester

https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/CP/50143/2022-Hyundai-IONIQ%205-front_50143_032_2400x1800_SAW.png

its gotten good reviews

i gotta say in defense of the crossover a hatchback is so much better than a trunk, you can fit so much more stuff in there especially when you consider putting the seats down, you can even sleep in there, tho it is too bad there arent more wagons which is the true sweet spot

i keep a sleeping kit in my subaru outback (wagon shaped crossover) at all times, tho tbh ive never slept in it without planning ahead to sleep in it, still i like having the sleeping bag sleeping mat camping pillow in there i feel ready, this is my version of prepping thinking that i might go on a fun spontaneous drive some day

Yeah, both a neighbor and a relative have one of those and seem to like them. And I think they look kinda sharp.

I hear you on the hatchback too, other car is a CRV, have managed to haul pretty large pieces of furniture from facebook marketplace and such, good for the occasional music gig, oversized duffle bags to sleepaway camp etc.

yeah i like how they look feel like hyundai is blazing a trail away from the super cut madface look that dominates the industry which is nice

St. Louis Police told my parents to keep their Prius keys in a lead-lined box.

I do not know whether this is even remotely* true, but there is apparently an idea out there that a decently clever person can clone your keys from a distance.

* no pun intended

You don't need a lead-lined box, just an RFID pouch. Ten years ago these were all tech demos at hacker conferences, now it's easy enough that you can buy theft devices on the cheap. This is a legit threat - thieves here in SoCal all know which makes and models are vulnerable. Flipper Zero makes this stuff look like gaming.

I suspect we'll see ever more blurring of the sedan/crossover/SUV definitions as the manufacturers realize that you can completely rethink design. I'm fascinated by construction of the Silverado EV where the body is the battery, or the battery is the body - whichever.

One big plus to Hyundai's Ioniq 5, is that it (and Kia's EV6) have significantly faster charging rates. This could be a big deal depending on your situation, use-case, etc.

lol, apparently Toyota has now gotten into the game as well with the "bZ4X" - possibly the most "we ran out of names" name I've ever seen.

Looks cool though
https://www.toyota.com/bz4x/?srchid=SEM:700000001483645:GOOGLE:71700000105010941:58700008358242166:p76039051254:655190536031&gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=Cj0KCQjwldKmBhCCARIsAP-0rfxsLtiEAGhW0Wv1n6PuzbH1dvprgyBkjARg6rXlPLlHsZonZRvI3Z0aAt5SEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

i think thats the one they made to fulfill some regulation barely made any of them and everyone says its horrible

their ceo resigned a few months back over the whole not bothering to make electric cars situation

toyota make a compact electric pickup trust me bro

Toyota is all-in on hydrogen

think thats the one they made to fulfill some regulation barely made any of them and everyone says its horrible

― lag∞n, Thursday, 10 August 2023 22:26 (yesterday) link

Yeah, that might explain the half-assed name too