The major shift in automotive aesthetics isn't just the size: it's the openness. If you look back at British and especially American cars from the late 20th century, especially pre-'90s, they all had massive windows, broad, tall windshields, and in America half of them were convertibles where you just drove around without a roof at all most of the time.
Windows have gotten steadily smaller and narrower as vehicles have gotten bigger, and they're also much more likely to be tinted now to the point where cops are pushing for laws against it.
I honestly think this corresponds with declining levels of social trust in the West. In 50 years, we've gone from having wide open cars, unlocked front doors and yards with no fences to building houses like fortresses and cars like tanks.
The window tint is a serious problem, especially on the windshield. Dumb faggots get darker and darker windows, brighter and brighter headlights to compensate and now nobody can drive at night without getting their retinas burned out or wearing sunglasses.
The mundane explanation is just safety regulations. If you want to survive a side impact, you need a thicker and taller door. Then you want side curtain airbags to deploy from the pillars, so those have to be thicker and they can't be as tall. That makes all cars heavier so you have to increase the thickness of everything, and it just snowballs.
Cars all look the same because of EPA regulations. There's only so many ways you can make a car aerodynamic to squeeze as much MPGs as possible.
The biggest exception in recent history is Elon's retarded Cybertruck, where it can ignore all fundamentals of chassis design simply because it's an EV.
I'm with the yanks and their tanks on this, infrastructure should expand, they blame these things on the congestion charges, but that's just their excuse to curtail your freedoms. Your freedom to have space, your freedom to have a car that goes beyond a '15 min' boundary.
If I want a tank I should be able to have a fucking tank. Your trains never fucking work and are always on strike, can't rely on that, so your roads should be far better. Far bigger.
You can have a tank. But then don't expect to be allowed to drive on a street through the old city core or a old small village, that was build 200+ years ago. No, we are not flattening houses to be able to expand the road to accomodate your tank.
It's probably a bit of lack of perspective thanks to history.
It's hard for a lot of people to see Britain as such a small island when you travel the entire span of it in less than a day when the British Empire once owned most of the world.
America being global considering It's size makes sense but a lot of people can't wrap their head around how that little island was once so powerful.
My wife and I were discussing the scale of the U.S. compared to European countries with our daughter yesterday.
If one were to drive west across Texas from Orange to El Paso the journey is about 870 miles or 1400 km.
The distance from Sennen Cove on the south western tip of Cornwall to John o' Groats the most north eastern point of Scotland is only 840 miles or 1350 km.
The total land area of Texas us 268.82 thousand square miles or 696.24 thousand square kilometers, with a population of 25.6 million in 2011
The total land area of Great Britain is only 80.8 thousand square miles or 209.33 square kilometers, with a population of 61 million in 2011
So Texas has more than 8 times the area but only about 41% of the population of Great Britain
This information is important to consider when discussing things like public and private transportation differences between the States and European countries.
Even states where public transportation would make sense have third-world shithole levels of corruption. How long has California worked on its high-speed rail connecting Sacramento to San Diego?
I'd agree but "infrastructure should expand" in this case probably means demolishing historical buildings and areas to throw up globohomo "looks like every metro area but somehow uglier" architecture.
If you want a tank, you should be able to have a tank - but part of the freedom to do that means knowing it's not going to fit everywhere and making that compromise.
Roads in Britain have always been too small. All the better to box you in, while the Poe-lease bend your daughter over for their muslim and pedophile overlords.
Get you a Raptor and go dinosaur there. Or give up your regulation size kitchen knives for 'safety'.
This is what happens when one country expects the rest of the world to adjust their products to cater specifically to them. You have to be a superpower to do that, which Britain hasn't been for over 200 years now. You can either build your own cars or widen your roads. Our cars being too big for your roads isn't our problem. It's yours.
The increased size of trucks has nothing to do with consumer demand and has everything to do with increased EPA standards completely fucking over everyone and anyone trying to purchase a vehicle nowadays.
But there still is demand for it. I live in an area where women literally fight tooth and nail to save up money for a truck they can barely even drive because its size is so massive compared to their capabilities. The kind who literally shiver when a big engine revs near them.
They are women, so I'm sure they got market psyopped into getting into it, but there is legitimate demand for it from them (and the guys who want to fuck them) now.
My mother likes to ride in my dad's SUV over my brother's sedan because it sits higher over the road and it's less claustrophobic. I wouldn't be surprised if women buy xboxhueg trucks just to "feel safe" (as women are wont to do).
And yet that extra large size means they can drive it even worse than normal "women drivers" and now can just skirt by by destroying everything they hit and driving away fine instead of getting crushed like they would in a smaller car.
The "feel safe" line is the one they always use, and they are much safer in it. Its just everyone else is far less safe in exchange, and their lack of safety prior was a result of their own poor abilities.
When my Ford Focus broke beyond repair and I had to shop for a new vehicle, I ended up replacing it with a big ass SUV. Why? Because:
It's 1000% more comfortable. I had no idea how cramped I was in sedans until I actually got to test drive pick-up trucks and SUVs.
It's a much more pleasurable driving experience sitting high off the road. You get to see a lot more than you do in a sedan.
I feel safer driving around tractor trailers, other large vehicles, and EVs (which weigh as much as large pick-up trucks despite the smaller profile).
I can absolutely understand why a mother who has to haul children around would opt for one of these. I encourage the critics to test drive a pick-up or large SUV so that they can better understand the appeal.
All valid, I loved my old Dodge Ram and miss all those exact things that you listed among others compared to my current smaller shitter.
The ones I was specifically talking about up there goes well beyond that, because you get all of that without massively jacking the truck up, getting tires that extend 8 inches off the side of your vehicle, and having the turning radius of a semi without the driving capability of a CDL.
Yet I see a well above zero number of women behind the wheels of those for no reason other than pure hedonism. Especially as their height relative to the truck means its useless for children or errands because they need a two step letter minimum to get in and out.
And the demand for trucks like that has certainly effected the "minimum size" of a vehicle slowly rising and slowly pushing the average towards "beyond what many parking lots and streets are made to handle."
I yearn for the days of big V8s in coupes and sedans. Dodge were the only ones doing it, and now they switched to electric because of the EPAs horseshit.
Back before my Charger died because of electrical problems (thanks MoPar you pieces of shit) that thing barely had to work to do daily commute shit. It was awesome, now my I4 has to constantly sit at 7k RPM just to get me down the road. Fuck, Ford puts turbo'd I3's in their shitboxes just to get the power necessary to have any performance whatsoever.
Besides putting turbos in shitboxes, you have car manufacturers adding shit like engine start-stop or cylinder deactivation just to min/max their company-wide average MPG, all of which destroys the engine with extra mechanical wear.
That doesn't make any sense. Increased EPA standards would put pressure on the manufacturers to make smaller, lighter cars. Larger cars are being bought despite those standards because of demand for them. The market for anything is driven by demand from the bottom. If they try to force change from the top by offering more smaller cars, people just won't buy them and they will go out of business.
The issue is car companies lobbied to get those gas-guzzling retardmobiles classified as "light trucks," which places them in a contrived category between consumer vehicles and commercial vehicles. Hence the regulations don't apply to them.
This isn't anything to do with US vs English manufacturing. There's plenty of small cars sold in America. The denizens of the UK are choosing to buy the large vehicles despite there being no room for them. Many of those buyers aren't English. I believe that's his main point.
Now add the problem of house building taking place with new couple and family households requiring 2+ cars. Councils are more than happy to make these new housing developments get built for all that lucrative Council Tax cash they'll recoup from the new households. The problem is, they've failed to invest in the transport infrastructure that is required to keep traffic flowing smoothly at busy times. Cue gridlock at busy times and it isn't going to get better. If anything, drivers are choosing to drive around the problem so the gridlock just spreads outward.
This is why you're seeing congestion charging and ultra low emission zones, they're an acknowledgement that the local authority failed to invest in the transport infrastructure and are now pricing the poorest off the roads in the hope they can reduce the number of cars. What it does is price the working class out of jobs and adds overheads to businesses who pass those costs onto consumers.
Manufacturers want to advertise more legroom every single year which is why the Civic is now larger than the Accord was not too long ago. Also, NPC masses have naturally flocked to the most ridiculous and inefficient vehicle type, SUVs, which only makes things worse.
One of the dumbest hills that the right dies on is defending these ridiculously oversized retardmobiles that are the product of auto manufacturers getting themselves a loophole for CAFE standards. They're not even useful, plenty of older trucks are more reliable and have more storage capacity than the aforementioned gas-guzzling retardmobiles, without giving drivers a huge blind spot that leads them to running over kids.
Building out bigger and bigger roads for these retardmobiles is also a huge waste of taxpayer money, nevermind that their sheer weight places a level of wear and tear on current infrastructure that was designed for vehicles that were in turn designed for non-retards. I'm frankly amazed at how so many people will dilate over big government when it comes to building high-speed rail without realizing how big government is what's enabling them to drive their retardmobiles where they don't belong.
These things are so heavy they're more likely to get stuck in an all-terrain environment, they guzzle fuel which makes them less reliable when you're far away from any gas station, meanwhile they cause nothing but problems when they're being driven by some fatass office worker who wants to LARP as working-class. Meanwhile dudes who do the kind of work that actually requires trucks almost never drive these monstrosities, because why the fuck would you pour all that money down the drain of always needing more gas and always needing more maintenance since their huge engines have more wear and tear?
Electric vehicles have the problem of being a firefighter's nightmare, lithium-ion batteries are basically fire bombs and when shit finally hits the fan electric cars will be the perfect car bomb. What's more is that cars these days can be hacked and remotely driven.
Now Idk enough about electrical engineering to know if these batteries can be overloaded remotely or if they need manual modification, but even if it's the latter it's just gonna be a 21st Century upgrade of traditional car bombs.
Nevermind how heavy batteries are, electric vehicles are way heavier than their ICE equivalents which makes them way more lethal even if they don't explode. Combine that with the aforementioned ability to remotely operate them, and the way they can accelerate incredibly fast, and you'll be able to bowling ball pedestrians and make the batteries explode through sheer kinetic impact.
The major shift in automotive aesthetics isn't just the size: it's the openness. If you look back at British and especially American cars from the late 20th century, especially pre-'90s, they all had massive windows, broad, tall windshields, and in America half of them were convertibles where you just drove around without a roof at all most of the time.
Windows have gotten steadily smaller and narrower as vehicles have gotten bigger, and they're also much more likely to be tinted now to the point where cops are pushing for laws against it.
I honestly think this corresponds with declining levels of social trust in the West. In 50 years, we've gone from having wide open cars, unlocked front doors and yards with no fences to building houses like fortresses and cars like tanks.
The window tint is a serious problem, especially on the windshield. Dumb faggots get darker and darker windows, brighter and brighter headlights to compensate and now nobody can drive at night without getting their retinas burned out or wearing sunglasses.
The mundane explanation is just safety regulations. If you want to survive a side impact, you need a thicker and taller door. Then you want side curtain airbags to deploy from the pillars, so those have to be thicker and they can't be as tall. That makes all cars heavier so you have to increase the thickness of everything, and it just snowballs.
Cars all look the same because of EPA regulations. There's only so many ways you can make a car aerodynamic to squeeze as much MPGs as possible.
The biggest exception in recent history is Elon's retarded Cybertruck, where it can ignore all fundamentals of chassis design simply because it's an EV.
I'm with the yanks and their tanks on this, infrastructure should expand, they blame these things on the congestion charges, but that's just their excuse to curtail your freedoms. Your freedom to have space, your freedom to have a car that goes beyond a '15 min' boundary.
If I want a tank I should be able to have a fucking tank. Your trains never fucking work and are always on strike, can't rely on that, so your roads should be far better. Far bigger.
And don't get me started on the welsh...
You can have a tank. But then don't expect to be allowed to drive on a street through the old city core or a old small village, that was build 200+ years ago. No, we are not flattening houses to be able to expand the road to accomodate your tank.
You don't have to flatten houses, that's what the tank is for.
It's probably a bit of lack of perspective thanks to history.
It's hard for a lot of people to see Britain as such a small island when you travel the entire span of it in less than a day when the British Empire once owned most of the world.
America being global considering It's size makes sense but a lot of people can't wrap their head around how that little island was once so powerful.
The UK used to ship excess people to the colonies. Now, they can barely maintain their native population.
My wife and I were discussing the scale of the U.S. compared to European countries with our daughter yesterday.
If one were to drive west across Texas from Orange to El Paso the journey is about 870 miles or 1400 km.
The distance from Sennen Cove on the south western tip of Cornwall to John o' Groats the most north eastern point of Scotland is only 840 miles or 1350 km.
The total land area of Texas us 268.82 thousand square miles or 696.24 thousand square kilometers, with a population of 25.6 million in 2011
The total land area of Great Britain is only 80.8 thousand square miles or 209.33 square kilometers, with a population of 61 million in 2011
So Texas has more than 8 times the area but only about 41% of the population of Great Britain
This information is important to consider when discussing things like public and private transportation differences between the States and European countries.
Even states where public transportation would make sense have third-world shithole levels of corruption. How long has California worked on its high-speed rail connecting Sacramento to San Diego?
How many Historic city centres were demolished post war up until the 70's in the name of the car?
Here is Stockholm.
https://i.ibb.co/Kw6sYRZ/klara.png
I'd agree but "infrastructure should expand" in this case probably means demolishing historical buildings and areas to throw up globohomo "looks like every metro area but somehow uglier" architecture.
If you want a tank, you should be able to have a tank - but part of the freedom to do that means knowing it's not going to fit everywhere and making that compromise.
Roads in Britain have always been too small. All the better to box you in, while the Poe-lease bend your daughter over for their muslim and pedophile overlords.
Get you a Raptor and go dinosaur there. Or give up your regulation size kitchen knives for 'safety'.
lol
This is what happens when one country expects the rest of the world to adjust their products to cater specifically to them. You have to be a superpower to do that, which Britain hasn't been for over 200 years now. You can either build your own cars or widen your roads. Our cars being too big for your roads isn't our problem. It's yours.
The increased size of trucks has nothing to do with consumer demand and has everything to do with increased EPA standards completely fucking over everyone and anyone trying to purchase a vehicle nowadays.
But there still is demand for it. I live in an area where women literally fight tooth and nail to save up money for a truck they can barely even drive because its size is so massive compared to their capabilities. The kind who literally shiver when a big engine revs near them.
They are women, so I'm sure they got market psyopped into getting into it, but there is legitimate demand for it from them (and the guys who want to fuck them) now.
My mother likes to ride in my dad's SUV over my brother's sedan because it sits higher over the road and it's less claustrophobic. I wouldn't be surprised if women buy xboxhueg trucks just to "feel safe" (as women are wont to do).
And yet that extra large size means they can drive it even worse than normal "women drivers" and now can just skirt by by destroying everything they hit and driving away fine instead of getting crushed like they would in a smaller car.
The "feel safe" line is the one they always use, and they are much safer in it. Its just everyone else is far less safe in exchange, and their lack of safety prior was a result of their own poor abilities.
So basic woman stuff as always.
When my Ford Focus broke beyond repair and I had to shop for a new vehicle, I ended up replacing it with a big ass SUV. Why? Because:
It's 1000% more comfortable. I had no idea how cramped I was in sedans until I actually got to test drive pick-up trucks and SUVs.
It's a much more pleasurable driving experience sitting high off the road. You get to see a lot more than you do in a sedan.
I feel safer driving around tractor trailers, other large vehicles, and EVs (which weigh as much as large pick-up trucks despite the smaller profile).
I can absolutely understand why a mother who has to haul children around would opt for one of these. I encourage the critics to test drive a pick-up or large SUV so that they can better understand the appeal.
All valid, I loved my old Dodge Ram and miss all those exact things that you listed among others compared to my current smaller shitter.
The ones I was specifically talking about up there goes well beyond that, because you get all of that without massively jacking the truck up, getting tires that extend 8 inches off the side of your vehicle, and having the turning radius of a semi without the driving capability of a CDL.
Yet I see a well above zero number of women behind the wheels of those for no reason other than pure hedonism. Especially as their height relative to the truck means its useless for children or errands because they need a two step letter minimum to get in and out.
And the demand for trucks like that has certainly effected the "minimum size" of a vehicle slowly rising and slowly pushing the average towards "beyond what many parking lots and streets are made to handle."
I yearn for the days of big V8s in coupes and sedans. Dodge were the only ones doing it, and now they switched to electric because of the EPAs horseshit.
Back before my Charger died because of electrical problems (thanks MoPar you pieces of shit) that thing barely had to work to do daily commute shit. It was awesome, now my I4 has to constantly sit at 7k RPM just to get me down the road. Fuck, Ford puts turbo'd I3's in their shitboxes just to get the power necessary to have any performance whatsoever.
The EPA is retarded.
Besides putting turbos in shitboxes, you have car manufacturers adding shit like engine start-stop or cylinder deactivation just to min/max their company-wide average MPG, all of which destroys the engine with extra mechanical wear.
That doesn't make any sense. Increased EPA standards would put pressure on the manufacturers to make smaller, lighter cars. Larger cars are being bought despite those standards because of demand for them. The market for anything is driven by demand from the bottom. If they try to force change from the top by offering more smaller cars, people just won't buy them and they will go out of business.
It makes perfect sense when the EPA standards are fucking insane.
There is nothing natural about the market demand for cars in America.
The issue is car companies lobbied to get those gas-guzzling retardmobiles classified as "light trucks," which places them in a contrived category between consumer vehicles and commercial vehicles. Hence the regulations don't apply to them.
This isn't anything to do with US vs English manufacturing. There's plenty of small cars sold in America. The denizens of the UK are choosing to buy the large vehicles despite there being no room for them. Many of those buyers aren't English. I believe that's his main point.
What? I ride a motorcycle around Cornwall and meet tour busses that fill the road. Where is the bus hatred?
Now add the problem of house building taking place with new couple and family households requiring 2+ cars. Councils are more than happy to make these new housing developments get built for all that lucrative Council Tax cash they'll recoup from the new households. The problem is, they've failed to invest in the transport infrastructure that is required to keep traffic flowing smoothly at busy times. Cue gridlock at busy times and it isn't going to get better. If anything, drivers are choosing to drive around the problem so the gridlock just spreads outward.
This is why you're seeing congestion charging and ultra low emission zones, they're an acknowledgement that the local authority failed to invest in the transport infrastructure and are now pricing the poorest off the roads in the hope they can reduce the number of cars. What it does is price the working class out of jobs and adds overheads to businesses who pass those costs onto consumers.
Manufacturers want to advertise more legroom every single year which is why the Civic is now larger than the Accord was not too long ago. Also, NPC masses have naturally flocked to the most ridiculous and inefficient vehicle type, SUVs, which only makes things worse.
The SUV is the result of a loophole deliberately left open in the CAFE standards. Government strikes again.
One of the dumbest hills that the right dies on is defending these ridiculously oversized retardmobiles that are the product of auto manufacturers getting themselves a loophole for CAFE standards. They're not even useful, plenty of older trucks are more reliable and have more storage capacity than the aforementioned gas-guzzling retardmobiles, without giving drivers a huge blind spot that leads them to running over kids.
Building out bigger and bigger roads for these retardmobiles is also a huge waste of taxpayer money, nevermind that their sheer weight places a level of wear and tear on current infrastructure that was designed for vehicles that were in turn designed for non-retards. I'm frankly amazed at how so many people will dilate over big government when it comes to building high-speed rail without realizing how big government is what's enabling them to drive their retardmobiles where they don't belong.
These things are so heavy they're more likely to get stuck in an all-terrain environment, they guzzle fuel which makes them less reliable when you're far away from any gas station, meanwhile they cause nothing but problems when they're being driven by some fatass office worker who wants to LARP as working-class. Meanwhile dudes who do the kind of work that actually requires trucks almost never drive these monstrosities, because why the fuck would you pour all that money down the drain of always needing more gas and always needing more maintenance since their huge engines have more wear and tear?
Electric vehicles have the problem of being a firefighter's nightmare, lithium-ion batteries are basically fire bombs and when shit finally hits the fan electric cars will be the perfect car bomb. What's more is that cars these days can be hacked and remotely driven.
Now Idk enough about electrical engineering to know if these batteries can be overloaded remotely or if they need manual modification, but even if it's the latter it's just gonna be a 21st Century upgrade of traditional car bombs.
Nevermind how heavy batteries are, electric vehicles are way heavier than their ICE equivalents which makes them way more lethal even if they don't explode. Combine that with the aforementioned ability to remotely operate them, and the way they can accelerate incredibly fast, and you'll be able to bowling ball pedestrians and make the batteries explode through sheer kinetic impact.