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Comment by canpan | Hacker News Reader

If you see an old car next to a modern car, the size difference is extreme!

It's ridiculous: Put a modern SUV next to a WW2 M4 Sherman and you will be surprised, the SUV is the same size. Some a bigger.

All that weight needs power to get into motion. It is incredibly wasteful from a money and resource perspective.

But because the person next to you drives a big car and you don't want to get crushed, you also need a big car..

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> If you see an old car next to a modern car, the size difference is extreme!

Apparently modern BMW 3-series are as big (on the outside?) as their 5-series from the 1980/90s.

> It's ridiculous: Put a modern SUV next to a WW2 M4 Sherman and you will be surprised, the SUV is the same size. Some a bigger.

Bit of a meme/trope that main battle tanks have better forward visibility than pickup trucks:

* https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...

A new 3 series is wider, has a longer wheelbase, and approximately equal length of a 5 series from 2001. It's also ~500 lbs heavier, depending on options.

I drive a 1998 Lexus SC, a car that was built to compete with the contemporary 8-series and Mercedes SL. My car is comparable in size to a new Corolla. I'm longer, but I'm 4 inches shorter. Every other dimension is basically the same.

>The main reason kids get run over is unsafe crossing behaviors, such as running into the road after a ball. Older gets get run over because they're distracted by a smartphone.

(from the link)

Insane victim-blaming here. What is wrong with car people?

Agree, but in this case the new 2CV is shorter than the original and I imagine if the original was built now with today's safety and EPA requirements there wouldn't be that much difference

>It's ridiculous: Put a modern SUV next to a WW2 M4 Sherman and you will be surprised, the SUV is the same size. Some a bigger.

That would be what normal people would call a "bold faced lie" in normal conversation and is only above average levels of misleading compared to what's typical around here (which reflects upon the character of the people on HN, IMO).

A sherman is approx same length as the biggest modern SUVs but wider, taller and 10x the weight.

You may as well compare rowing shells to fishing vessels.

An M4 Sherman is about 6m long which production SUVs don't reach. That's about the length of an L3 delivery van, which is usually the longest version they make.

The M4 is 2.6m wide. No car is 2.6m wide. That's wider than a coach bus.

The M4 is 3m tall. Even the fattest SUVs do not come close.

The M4 weighs 30+ tons.

Even the Hummer H2 is only 2m wide and 2m tall. And it's 5m long. It's about 3,000 kg.

The HMMWV is somewhat heavier in many of its configurations. but that's an actual military model. It's still a bit under 4,000 kg.

Those are some of the biggest SUV models extant.

My parents ID4 makes my old e39 touring look small by comparison. Funny thing is, it does not feel bigger on the inside, suppose modern safety standard have demanded a sizeable increase in vehicle size over time, and the battery bank also makes it grow on the, i suppose, x-axis

Fun size comparison thread: https://bsky.app/profile/threadinburgh.scot/post/3mdfh4e63xc...

> But because the person next to you drives a big car and you don't want to get crushed, you also need a big car.

My position on this changed to "ah, now I see" after seeing a video where a Miata got run over from a standing start by a lifted truck. They were both stopped at the lights, but because the truck driver lacked both forward vision and object permanence, when the lights went green he set off .. directly over the car in front.

US size escalation will continue until legislated against. It's creeping into the UK, but fortunately you can't go too large until you start colliding with solid objects. And the max weight is limited to 3500kg unless you're on a Boomer license.

I think the trend towards SUVs was mainly because some car tax code incentivized it. If cars were taxed by weight (as they should - heavy vehicles cause so much more wear for public roads), the trend could reverse. (Plus you get better mileage with a lighter vehicle)

I am sure the profits from selling SUVs more than compensates for the campaign donations needed to enact favorable law.

It is tax code and efficiency standards; SUVs are legally speaking light trucks and have lower fuel economy standards, so the Big 3 in the US just made their cars bigger rather than try to compete with the likes of Toyota and Honda on fuel efficiency.

> If cars were taxed by weight (as they should - heavy vehicles cause so much more wear for public roads)

The problem with this argument is that because of the 4th power law, essentially all road wear due to vehicles is caused by 20+ ton commercial trucks and the difference between the different sizes of personal vehicle is immaterial.

If you want a tax that accurately reflects road wear it ends up being around $0.10/year for a 2500 pound subcompact, $1/year for a 4500 pound SUV and >$6500/year for a 20 ton commercial truck, assuming they all travel the same number of miles. And in practice the commercial truck will typically see ~10x more miles too.

A difference of $0.90/year in tax is probably not going to provide much incentive to anyone.

Boomer? There are people under 50 with a grandfathered C1 licence.

It is a race to a bottom, where everyone loses, except perhaps the car companies.

What do the car companies gain from having a higher materials cost?

More profit on bigger cars?

The correlation between larger vehicles and profit margins is mostly because larger vehicles also cost more to operate, and then people with less money tend to avoid vehicles they can't afford to put gas in, so the people who buy larger vehicles usually have more money. In other words, nearly all large vehicles are premium vehicles whereas some small vehicles are the economy segment.

But that wouldn't stop them from making high margin vehicles that are low to the ground. The automaker with the highest margins is Ferrari.

The real problem is the nonsensical CAFE rules. If you want to make a high production volume small car with premium performance, you're going to blow your fuel economy target for that vehicle class, so they're de facto banned from making those. But >300 horsepower mid-sized SUVs? No problem. So premium performance cars are banned but premium performance "trucks" are fine, what are the premium buyers going to buy?

The companies are just making the thing people are buying. Pass stupid laws, get stupid cars.

>The real problem is the nonsensical CAFE rules.

A classic case of badly thought out rules/incentives getting perverse outcomes? But CAFE rules seem to be a US thing and we are seeing car size inflation in the UK, even if not to the same extent.

>The companies are just making the thing people are buying.

It is not clear to me to what extent the car companies are catering to the demand for big SUVs or creating the demand for big SUVs.

UK roads and parking spaces aren't getting any bigger. It is all going to end very badly.

> Put a modern SUV next to a WW2 M4 Sherman and you will be surprised, the SUV is the same size. Some a bigger.

The M4 Sherman tank weighs over 30 tons. The average modern SUV is around 2. The exterior dimensions aren't what makes a tank heavy.

If you see an old car next to a modern car, the size difference is extreme!

My daily driver is 220 inches long and 80 inches wide, weighs around 4000 lbs and over 50 years old. Most cars of that era were roughly the same size. It is definitely larger than most other cars I see today, although it also has much better visibility.

It would also likely result in your death if you hit anything solid. Cars are bulkier and visibility has been compromised by better crash protection. I'm reminded of that test they did years ago between a 1959 Impala and a 2009 Malibu. It did not go well at all for the Impala.

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

There's also a good Fifth Gear video with the same concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDyeWofcLY

I've always wanted to restore an old car. If I ever do these videos will haunt me!

That's an even more compelling video. Very small newer car vs a Volvo from the 90s, I would not have predicted that the Volvo would have done as poorly as it did. I totally expect cars from the 50s to basically disintegrate, but (showing my age) I had better opinions of 90s cars.

That was also a "specially engineered to show how far we've come" comparison. That generation of the impala was unconventional (in a bad way) for the time and considered particularly unsafe in a crash even by 1950s standards and they did a partial overlap with something much newer. They always do partial overlaps in these marketing videos (this is not a "test", they knew exactly what would happen when they spec'd it out) because that's where the biggest disparity is.

GM's X-frame cars were definitely weaker than average for the time, but going back to the original topic, I don't think a 2CV would stand a chance against one.

By the 70s, which is what I have, they were already much better, largely due to big shock-mounted bumpers and very long front ends that make for a gradual crumple zone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6DCWhjdjE

... although certain models were still much worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgOxWPGsJNY

Notably those two cars weigh around the same amount and the 1959 one is slightly heavier, so this isn't the "modern cars weigh more" thing.

Yeah, that's why I said bulkier, I was trying to address the observation that visibility has gotten worse. I agree that it has, and a big reason is that A-pillars today are way wider than they used to be, because they are a critical part of the crash structure. They also typically have airbags, though in my experience those are compact and much narrower than the pillar itself.

I wonder if that difference is actually the safety standards rather than the efficiency ones though.

If you look at a modern vehicle, it's wide at the base and narrow at the top. The older ones were basically square, which is aerodynamically rubbish. But since the glass is at your eye level rather than below your waist, it meant you had a lot more glass.

I like to compare the 1960's Plymouth Suburban to the current Chevy Suburban both because of the name coincidence and because they cover roughly the same market segment (family hauler).

The Plymouth suburban is 9 inches shorter in length and well over 1000lbs lighter. I couldn't find specifications on height for the Plymouth, but the Chevy is obviously much taller.

Most likely European vs American perspective? E.g. put an old and new Mini next to each other and it's almost unbelievable how tiny the original Mini actually is. While when you see a vintage US 'street cruiser' in a European city it's longer and wider than most modern cars.

Have a look at the original Fiat 500, it's comically small. You need to remember that the average adult Italian man in 1955 was about 8 cm shorter than today's average, and it's probably similar in other european countries.

Everytime I see a new Mini, I wonder if they could be sued for false advertising.

"Smart", known for extremely small cars with just two seats, now seems to sell huge ugly SUVs. It's truly ridiculous.

Indeed - their original design language doesn't really scale. A bit like Ferrari and Porsche - their 4-door monstrosities scream mid-life crisis louder than a red convertible.

MINI Countryman

If BMW Group made a Maxi, maybe it'd be tiny car. They do have history in that sector too.

When interviewed about the new (BMW) Mini circa 2001, the designer of the original BMC Mini's hydrolastic suspension, John Moulton, said that calling it 'Mini' was ridiculous: "For heaven's sake, it's the size of an Austin Maxi!"

> All that weight needs power to get into motion

I doubt that modern SUV is heavier.

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