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Comment by lostapathy | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame, really, that nobody makes small trucks in the USA anymore. Great vehicles.

The problem I believe is CAFE (fuel economy) regulations. For light trucks, the required fuel economy to avoid a penalty is based on the "Footprint" of a vehicle, which is width*wheelbase. [1]

An F-150 with a long bed is expected to get 25.25mpg. The new Ranger is expected to get 30.25mpg. The F-150 actually gets 22, and the Ranger gets 26.

My understanding is that it's difficult to build a smaller truck that gets the required mileage. The result is that the new Ranger is the size of the F-150 from 15 years ago or so. You simply can't buy a compact pickup truck like the 90s Tacoma or Ranger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy (scroll down to Agreed standards by model year, 2012–2025)

An excellent example of a well meaning regulation with weird real world consequences.

The new EU directive to hit 95g CO2/km is a much better regulation since it directly measures the goal: less carbon emitted. It also measures the fleet more directly, unlike CAFE that carves out tons of categories. It does allow for the double counting of EVs for a few years which incentivizes doing the R&D on EVs rather than paying penalties.

The issue with the EU directive is that it measures emissions just from the tailpipe, not for their lifetime. So an electric car always has 0 emissions even if driven on coal electricity. And a biogas car would have the same as a natural gas one. This hurts things like biogas needlessly.

There have been efforts to change this, don't know their status.

Blame (at least in part) the chicken tax for distorting the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

Light trucks abounded in my experience long after that tax. I thought the big change was that, starting maybe around 2000, full-sized trucks started getting nearly the same fuel economy for casual driving as compact trucks. I always suspected it was that, combined with the overall trend for preferring larger vehicles, that caused the relative decline of compact trucks.

I don't think that makes that big of a difference. This just means you need to build the trucks in a NAFTA facility, and everyone has one of those. It doesn't explain why the Ranger and the S10 were stopped.

I think the manufactures like building the bigger trucks cause they make more $$$, and most buyers are willing to take a bigger truck if the smaller ones aren't available. But, having owned a regular cab Ranger I bought new and now a regular cab S10; they're lovely vehicles as long as you don't need to carry people. Amazing visibility; no fiddly bits, and you don't have to worry about curbs or parking stops.

I don't know enough about the topic, so take this with a grain of salt, but I wouldn't be surprised if the market for small trucks isn't big enough to justify a NAFTA facility, but the 25% tariff on imports is enough to make importing light trucks (which are immensely popular in a lot of the world) a non-starter.

That is, consider a bare-bones light truck with MSRP of $18K. After the tax, it becomes 23K. You can get an F150 for 28K, so in America you might as well get the bigger truck. Whereas if it were $18K vs $28K that would draw some of the market towards the smaller imported truck. And if some of the market is drawn towards the import, domestic makers might be forced to compete (e.g. with the Ranger).

The real reason small trucks are dead in america is the bizarre way the CAFE standards are written. In the 2008 update the fuel economy target is based on the vehicle 'footprint', so bigger trucks have lower targets. This led to a bloating of all trucks. It also killed off small trucks as the cost of compliance was just too high.

I hope my 2010 GMC Canyon lasts the rest of my life.

I have a 2016 Colorado and I have some buyer's remorse over not getting one of the previous generation. The interior is much nicer, and it's a better truck overall (imho), but it suffers from size inflation. Taller truck =/= better truck

#iWorkForGM

...and that's not saying much. I have to punch the ceiling for the dome light to work pretty often. Compared to the Subarus I was used to, the GM interior is cheap.

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