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How the heck did we get here? Most best selling "cars" are now superzied pickups and SUVs.
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Disclaimer: I am not a car person. I do not know the difference between a hatchback and an SUV, except that SUVs are bigger.
This is entirely anecdotal so take this how you will.
Having lived in another nation for a few years, the cars you are calling "compact crossovers" are huge compared to the sort of cars sold in other nations. I don't want to give too many details about where I used to live, but in that nation, roads that we would consider to be one-way, one lane roads were used as two-way roads. If you meet oncoming traffic, the rule is the smaller vehicle pulls aside for the larger one. This is in urban areas. There is no shoulder to pull onto, there is a building there. If everyone with a car owned a huge American-style car or SUV there, it just wouldn't work. Many parking places just don't accommodate for them.
Another anecdote: Despite every house on my street having a two-car garage, there are huge vehicles parked on either side of the road, making our road wide enough for one lane of traffic. These two-car garages were built in the 70s and are too small to fit two vehicles now. Either one car is in the garage and one is on the street, or both cars are now on the street and the garage is full of misc stuff. Why would a road with with two car garages for every house have such congestion problems?
IMO, More people are buying SUVs than they used to. And their "cars" are simply much larger than they used to be.
I appreciate your perspective. I've spent enough time in other countries now to vouch for your anecdote generally speaking. Though to be honest sizes are increasing in places outside the US as well. It's noticeable on repeat trips over years. Still not as big on average, but it feels like the trend is upward. The gap is not what it used to be. Something like a Corolla Cross or CR-V is taller than what you see in Europe but the footprint really isn't much larger.
Some of it I think is people being actively unreasonable, some of it is larger safety and crumple zones on newer cars, some is the simple fact that the market has shown people like bigger vehicles.
In the end though I guess my point was just that of all the vehicles on the market in the US, it looks to me like the top 25 list is dominated by those in the midrange and smaller categories relative to other vehicles on the market. Whether these are still too large objectively is a topic that can be fairly debated but the fact remains that people are buying things on the smaller end of what is available to them which runs a bit counter to the title of the post.
Only speaking to the garage thing, I think a lot of people like to think of their garages as a unfinished part of the house, rather than car storage. Same for the basement. So it's sort of luck of the draw which one gets a TV, old refrigerator, and selection of tools and craft projects and which one is used for storage.