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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

So what did people do when they had 3-4 kids in the 80s? I see families of 4 with huge SUVs these days.

If anything they want a kei van right? It maximises the size of the vehicle, cuboid on wheels, and minimises the cost for that volume.

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Like you can't fit 3-4 kids in a sedan. Hell most people have 2 cars per family nowadays should still fit easily. Or if you really have a large family a minivan works even better and is less dangerous to other travellers and yourselfs and has a lower gas usage. SUV's and trucks are stupid for 99,99% of the use cases.

We didn't use seatbelts or booster seats. We rode in the bed of the pickup, we rode sitting backwards in the trunk of a hatchback, we crammed in 5-wide in the bench seat in the back of a sedan.

Also, there were proto-SUVs like the Chevy Suburban.

I never had a pickup truck, but I did have seat belts and booster seats. We just didn’t use them as much. But that’s not really relevant to having enough space in a vehicle. We had plenty of space in cars. There was nothing wrong with the size.

It absolutely is relevant. If you don't have to wear seatbelts you can fit four or five kids in the back seat of a sedan. If each kid needs a seatbelt then you have to buy a bigger vehicle.

They drove big station wagons.

And the station wagons got killed off by CAFE standards because they were treated as cars instead of as their own category. Taking a sedan and turning it into a station wagon is going to inherently make it heavier and less fuel efficient.

So if the auto makers are already struggling to make their sedans hit MPG goals, suddenly those station wagons have to be phased out.

Though to be fair, minivans start in the mid 80s and were very popular in the 90s instead of SUVs. Comparable MPGs to the wagons but felt a lot more roomy inside.

The big problem came in the 2000s when the auto makers started subtly turning their minivans into SUVs. Even the last wagon hold outs like Volvo took this road eventually.

But interestingly enough, a lot of new vehicles are SUVs that look like lifted station wagons...

So we like the form factor of station wagon

Station wagons are big and you could throw a couple kids in the back no seat belts no problem

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