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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

The other issue is that due to the crumbling state of U.S. infrastructure, normal cars with ~5.5 inch ground clearance are basically impossible to drive without ruining them by bottoming out all the time. I have zero desire to have an SUV or crossover with ~8.5 inches of ground clearance, but unfortunately there are very limited options with 6.5 or 7 inches.

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> ruining them by bottoming out all the time

My daily driver has a spec of 5.9” ground clearance. In 21K miles, I don’t think I’ve ever scraped the bottom (except on snow piles, which aren’t an infrastructure issue).

Where do you live? My factory spec 4-door sedan has 5" clearance at the front and I've never had a clearance issue. It's pretty low but it's not even a sports car

Connecticut. To be fair the most common issues I have are where the bottom of driveways meets the road, and also going over manhole covers during road milling. In the latter case you can obviously also just go around them, but it's much safer if you can just drive over them rather than swerving erratically between lanes.

So basically impossible = on private driveways or when they're doing improvements? This seems like a mindset I see a lot of thinking you need more car than you really do

I mean don’t most people use private driveways and milled roads on a near daily basis?

Most SUVs or crossovers (especially crossovers) don't even have very good clearance compared to smaller cars, it seems.

My wife's daily driver is a kia optima with 5.3" of ground clearance. Road quality has never been a problem and we have driven it to at least a dozen states, and to get to our house requires driving 1/3 a mile of gravel road.

I drive a Hyundai Veloster with 5.6in of ground clearance and in five years of ownership I've never bottomed it out once in either urban or rural driving. I'm not sure this is a reasonable characterization.

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