You are looking at it the wrong way. Driving something so large that it would require a commercial license to transport your family around is ridiculous
They don't require commercial licenses though, because they're not large enough to and don't serve a commercial purpose when transporting families / their things. Plenty of families have the need for third-row seating and the ability to haul things around.
Toyota Camry curb weight is ~3300 pounds. The minivan based on the Camry is the Sienna, curb weight ~4600 lbs. Lincoln Navigator curb weight ~5600 lbs. If the difference between the first two is marginal (~30%), the difference between the second two is less (~20%).
By comparison, actual CDL-requiring commercial trucks weigh up to 80,000 pounds.
Now look at the front end of a toyota sienna vs a lincoln navigator. One slopes down so that you might actually see what is in front of you and allows for pedestrians to impact and roll up and off. The other is effectively a brick notorious for making it difficult to see obstructions in front of you as well as creating an impact that would sooner see the pedestrian explode into a bloody mess over just rolling up and off.
Which has nothing to do with the weight of the vehicle. The Audi SQ8 E-Tron has a sloped hood and weighs more than the Navigator. There are vehicles with a square grille that weigh less than the Sienna.
Time for all of the crossover drivers to admit that they are also part of the problem. They aren't safe just because they are somewhat better than some jacked up bro truck.
The real issue is that the hood on the Sienna is basically the same height as the one on most crossovers, because that's the nature of a vehicle with tall roof (necessary for cargo capacity). The hood/windshield has to ascend quickly to reach that height unless you want the hood to be longer, but a longer hood would negatively impact the ability of the driver to see children directly in front of the vehicle.
A lot of this is also dictated by the safety requirements for vehicle collisions, because a vehicle where the front of the hood is lower than the bumper on the other vehicle (which could be a pickup truck) causes the hood to act as a ramp instead of a crumple zone, and then the occupants get hit in the head by a truck.
That's not the issue. The issue is how tall these grills are and to a lesser extent curb weight. You don't need either to have third row seating or the ability to haul things.
I'd go a step further and say the high hoods reduce utility by making the vehicles harder to work on. I'm 6' and needed a step-stool to change the battery on my uncle's Silverado. The truck manufacturers leave that inconvenient detail out of their macho ads on TV.
I remember when changing spark plugs meant flipping down the front-plate bumper step, taking one step to hop up on the fender, and putting your legs inside of the engine bay while you wrench.
There were adequate engineering solutions for towing even as far back as 2008. The high-hood trend on US passenger trucks is unique to US market vehicles and is factually cosmetic.
Not only do they not need to, they need to actively stop doing that. These are the folks who light brakes & tires on fire, which then spreads to the mountains. There are dozens of spot, brush, and outright wildfires every year from these people.
Not if you need to tow a trailer / camper. Maybe there's a reason different kinds of vehicles exist? To fulfill different requirements of their drivers?
But families towed tent trailers back in the 80s behind their sedans and station wagons, too.
Maybe there's a bit of circular reasoning going on here where people bought giant vehicles because they liked the aesthetics and internal roominess, and then the prevalence of giant vehicles opened up the market for larger and heavier towables— rigid body RVs, seadoos, a trailer full of gas dirt bikes, whatever it is.
I also feel like in past times, it was much more common to see a two car household with two very different cars, with one being a hatchback or sedan for getting the family around down and doing grocery runs, and the other a truck or van for those occasional "hauling" requirements. Nowadays I feel like many times it's two big SUVs, just tuned to his and her brand tastes rather than two shared vehicles for different usages. I'd be interested to know if the stats on multi-car households would bear this out.
I think you're romanticizing that era a bit. The most commonly sold CUV's today are smaller length and width wise then station wagons or sedans way back when. The Crown Victoria was considered a regular sized sedan for it's day and it's as long as a crew cab F150. The land yachts easily match the footprint of the super cab F150 with shorter beds today, they just seem smaller because they're lower.
The article says height of the hood and massive A pillars. People like big and boxy.
Increased hood height kills people and creates an absurdly large blind area. Massive pillars add roll safety but create horrible blind spots in left hand turns.
As elsewhere in the thread, I drive a V60, and r/sportwagons host regular threads bemoaning the lack of good wagon options stateside. With the death of the focus and golf wagons, it's basically just luxury cars left, and not everyone wants to have a Mercedes, BMW, or Audi as their canoe trip vehicle, much less a freaking Porsche Panamera Turismo.
And nevermind that often these cars come with other compromises that signal they aren't really intended for "utility" use, for example the Taycan can't fit a regular tow receiver so forget about using a bike carrier with it other than the overpriced two-bike one that is available from the manufacturer.
> The Crown Victoria was considered a regular sized sedan for it's day [...]
Are you sure about that? In North America, other than the Crown Vic in its heyday, Ford also had the Escort, the Festiva, the Tempo and the Taurus for sedans, all of which were smaller than the Crown Vic, which was the largest car they sold.
As far as I was aware the others didn't sell in any close to the same numbers. The Crown Vic and it's Panther platform siblings were the basis for taxis and police cars across the US and Canada for a long time, and they could be had second hand for for a few months pay cheque back in the day.
> As far as I was aware the others didn't sell in any close to the same numbers.
Per wiki, Crown Vic sales peaked at 114k in 1999. In the same year, the Taurus sold 368k and the Escort sold 260k. (The Tempo was discontinued by then, but was typically moving 200k+ per year.)
Hmm, curious, I remember seeing way more Crown Vics and other Panther platform vehicles from the 90's onward then Tauruses, even into the late 2000's. Wonder if it was just a regional thing where I lived...
Maybe you just knew more cops? At one time that often seemed to be the way to spot an off duty cop was a civilian dressed Crown Vic that probably parked at home next to the work provided Crown Vic. Though I also knew someone that bought used cars solely from cop auctions partly because they weirdly liked the "harshly restored to civilian use after several years of work abuse" aesthetic about a former cop Crown Vic and also supposedly because they were incredibly cheap at auction if you didn't mind being a lifetime mechanic because those cars were in awful shape coming out of the auction.
In terms of platform variants the Taurus outsold the Crown Vic by a fair amount. The latter was certainly hugely popular as fleet vehicles, but the Taurus was Ford's best selling sedan for quite a while. The Taurus was never rated for anything more than fairly light-duty towing (<= 1500lbs).
More to the point - at least for automatic transmission variants in the early 90s - even the base F150 could certainly out-tow Crown Vics of the time, unless the latter had a tow package, which would push the rating up to 5000 lbs (..same as the lower end F150). Later on the delta was a lot greater (in the truck's favor) as the tow packages for the cars were phased out.
Nowadays the minimum ratings of F150s (even with shorter beds) is 5000lbs, or more. The smaller CUV/SUV platforms are usually rated ~1500lbs *max*, with some of the larger truck-based models obviously running in the same range as the trucks.
TL;DR - Even back in the day the "typical" sedan was still only rated for towing small loads, unless specially ordered with towing packages. Now..all that said, the frequency with which typical F150 owners ever actually tow anything is a whole other question.
It always amazes me when I see USians banging on about needing a 7.5 tonne truck to pull a tiny little camping trailer that you'd stick on the back of a Ford Focus anywhere in Europe.
Yes but Americans commonly tow massive fifth wheels at over 120 kph (regardless of tire rating and including up and down steep grades, transmission and brakes be damned) because why wouldn't you, and the sum total of the training they receive for operating such rigs in this manner is a rubber stamp at the DMV.
Some of the "fifth wheel" setups they have in the US are terrifying too.
Over here a "fifth wheel" coupling is a massive horseshoe-shaped plate that sits on the back of an artic tractor and is rated for some unholy loading and drawbar pull.
Over there it looks very much like a standard 50mm towball welded to the end of a metre or so of scaff tube sticking up from the floor of a pickup.
I used to do auto electrics for a guy who imported American cars to the UK and I was always amazed at just how janky the towing setups often were. It's no wonder people think they need a huge heavy truck when the towball is just bolted to thin sheet metal.
See I don't mind "not level" so much, for myself. If I'm towing a trailer and it's not level it's because it's probably for a small car so it's probably in the sub-500kg range and its axles are lower than my towball even with the air suspension down as low as it will go.
The weight balance can be all to hell, it won't matter - it's not going to be long enough or heavy enough to push a two tonne Range Rover around.
Anything that's an appreciable fraction of my wheelbase between the hitch and axle, and over a tonne? Yeah I'll take a little care over getting that set up.
I tow 3500kg on a braked twin-axle trailer fairly often. You'd notice it was there, especially braking for a junction at the bottom of a hill, but with the weight a little forward and maybe 50-70kg on the hitch the major sign that anything is there is the trailer light telltale blinking when you indicate ;-)
LOL. Americans have lost the plot. They've used SpaceX to leave reality.
The typical Dutch trailer is pulled by stuff like Volvo S60 and smaller, and it weighs around 3000lbs in freedumb units. They generally migrate about 1000km - 1500km to the South of France and then back North to the Netherlands.
You should leave the continent and gain some context. Every summer the whole of Europe is full of campers towed by humble family sedans and wagons. Not just cheesy tent pop-ups, full-on campers with a family's worth of bikes hanging off the back. But the ads on TV said you'd be a lesser man without a truck, so I guess we can't blame you.
But that does get to the point. Maybe differentkinds of vehicles need different kinds of qualification testing. Would you trust your 16yo that just passed their driver's test in a sedan to tow a boat through town with an F250?
Fun fact - in most states a 12 or 13 year old can operate many tens of thousands of pounds of agricultural equipment “incidentally over a highway” or similar - which can be multiple miles between farm plots.
Same's true in the UK, but honestly they're some of the best drivers out there 'cause they've been hustling in farm equipment since they were tall enough to reach the pedals. I've seen farmers get picked up from my old local by their kids in a tractor before when they were too drunk to drive home.
You're going to have a hard time hiding the entire SUV and Light Duty truck market behind an airstream, especially considering neither have transmissions capable of hauling one. Statistically almost nobody tows anything. Of those that do the vast majority tow stuff that comfortably falls within the pulling capacity of a Subaru Outback (or a VW Golf hatchback if you're really feeling rude). Nobody's trying to take anyone's dually away, just reign in the excesses of the auto industry that were mainstreamed by a combination of emissions laws carveouts and aggressive marketing. Hell if this went through we all might start seeing approximately affordable vehicles on the market again and I feel like that would be a welcome change.
Oh don't I know it. I'm currently in the midst of a full blown temper tantrum over the Toyota Hilux being unavailable on the US market. I need an actual real truck for actual real truck shit and there's literally nothing on the market that's serviceable.
Yeah and that's the other horn of the dilemma facing would-be truck owners right now. If I don't want to take on a 2nd mortgage payment for a vehicle that can only barely perform the tasks required of it (and that poorly) my other option is to adopt all of the maintenance overhead and attendant reliability nightmares and problems with the parts aftermarket usually reserved for classic car projects. It's to the point now that if Edison Motors ever really gets their shit together I'm probably going to just break down and hybrid-swap a 70's era F150 and call it good but in the mean time I still need a work vehicle.
I drove an ‘86 Alfa Romeo from 1995-2008 and 111k miles that I put on it. It broke down exactly once and that was a Bosch distributor that broke internally.
I wouldn’t think twice about driving a reasonably maintained 25-30 year old Toyota if that was the vehicle that best fit your use case.
I think once cars got to closed-loop EFI and electronic ignition (mid-80s), they got way more reliable and low maintenance.
Then they can get a license for that class of vehicle and add "towing up to NNNN lbs" option.. Anything over 500 or 1000 lbs towed, for example, IMHO, should require a license.
Obviously not for a hitch-based bicycle carrier - I think most people can manage to use those reasonably safely.
For the downvoters I lost a whole-ass F150 AND THE UTILITY TRAILER IT WAS TOWING behind the goddamn A-pillar on my wife's Sorento. This kind of shit wasn't possible in any of her prior station wagons or in any of the vans I've ever driven. Y'all need to quit playing.
Sure, until you need to tow a trailer weighing more than about 1500 lbs or drive on a dirt road where the minivan bottoms out. You might not need those capabilities but a lot of families do that stuff every week.
You can drive those off-road away from where people live, or you can get properly trained and insured for driving such a dangerous vehicle where people outside vehicles will be present.
They aren't hard to drive on the freeway. They are hard to drive without running over people in neighborhoods. The leading cause of death in children 0-14 is automobiles. https://www.kidsandcars.org/frontovers/media-resources
Almost every driver is, as you say, "properly insured"
It is easy enough to avoid kids that death is is rare, and the insurance cost is quite low - even with astronomical insurance payouts for accidental child death.
> astronomical insurance payouts for accidental child death.
There's no such thing. Standard automobile insurance policies cap injury liability in the low 5 figures. If you cause an accident and someone is seriously injured, there's a good chance you'll be personally liable for the majority of damages. Ditto property--you total someone's $100,000 Mercedes and you're likely going to be paying money out-of-pocket.
If you have any significant assets it's worthwhile to buy an umbrella policy.
Mandated minimum insurance limits are often that low, but it’s quite common to get six-figure property damage liability coverage and mid-six-figure overall liability coverage. (And umbrella policies above that, but someone who needs less than half-million in coverage can readily get that on an ordinary auto policy.)
The parent comment seemed to insinuate that if the risk of injury from taller front-ends was substantially greater, it would be noticeably apparent in insurance premiums. But because of policy limits, that's not necessarily the case, and becomes less likely to be the case as the cost of medical care and damages awards stemming from pertinent types of collisions grow, to the extent they grow faster than typical policy limits.
Yes, cancer should be number one. Automobiles should be number 8 or lower, both because we can so something about it and because it's unnecessary. Cancer is a product of living and we're already devoting many resources to it.
My parents raised my brother and I in the back of a 92 Oldsmobile Cutlass. You don't need a vehicle where the hood is 48" off the ground to be comfortable.
You could buy a minivan. The Toyota Sienna has more room for people and when you fold the seats down it has similar payload capacity to most of the trucks I’ve seen.
the way I see US infrastructure, I feel like they (like most of the world) will never be able to claw their way back out of car dependence.
Even the Dutch had to fight tooth and nail for it. I've lived in Germany for a while and there are cities here where even I would be snubbing taking kids to school with a bakfiets, because the biking infra is not good enough, or in other words the mingling I'd have to do with other traffic would be too out of my comfort zone.
Urban planning should prioritize walking and biking very first, and cars and other utilitarian-but-dangerous/harmful transport methods should be integrated in a way that's not engulfing the more human-scale side of things. But I think the costs (both monetary and in terms of "cognitive shift") are so high that I don't think I'll see this change in my lifetime. And that's before accounting for the power of corporate interest
It is amazing how resistant people are to having their children walk to school in my neighbourhood.
They will complain endlessly about having nowhere to park, traffic, and dangerous driving but would never consider having their child walk. It is too dangerous.
You're free to go buy a minivan, or if you're in the quiverfull movement with 12 kids you're gonna have to buy a 15 passenger church van and take a test in this new ideal world.
I spent significant time recently in both a new F150 and a Toyota Sienna, and it isn't even close in the comfort between them. F150 wins by a mile by the sheer amount of space you have in that thing for both passengers and cargo. Not to mention the ability to tow.
> F150 wins by a mile by the sheer amount of space you have in that thing for both passengers
How much leg room does the third row have in that F150? I don't think the seats for the sixth and seventh passengers are quite comfortable.
How are the footrests on the second row? Are those Captains chairs on the second row or a rigid bench with no reclining at all? When you talk about how comfortable it is, are you saying that as all the passengers (all 6-7) or just you as the driver?
Are you comfortable letting a three year old operate the doors without damaging other cars around them and climb in and out of that F-150 on their own? My young kids manage the sliding doors just fine, their ability to largely do it on their own and the ease of access of the sliding door makes it a lot more comfortable getting them in and out. In fact, I can open the doors safely before they even reach the car. That's pretty dang comfortable.
> Not to mention the ability to tow.
The thing everyone imagines they'll do all the time but in practice practically never do.
Is this a serious question? A lot of people tow stuff all the time for work, home improvement, or recreation. Not everyone is a city dweller living in a small apartment whose only options to spend their free time is picking which restaurant to eat dinner at.
People in Europe tow stuff with 120 HP sedans or combis all the time. Driving a vehicle that you can't park, that's unsafe for pedestrians and burns 50% more every day just so you can tow something marginally easier on these 2 occassions a year when you need to tow something larger than a 500kg trailer makes 0 sense.
Same idea as American trucks, more cargo space, higher usable load, can be loaded from all sides, completely flat bed, no wheel cutouts, fits 6 people inside, burns less fuel. All because there's no ridiculously huge hood, wheels and engine.
Let's be honest here. American pickup trucks are not about the usability, they are about ego.
Yeah. All those accountants and software developers and doctors and insurance salespeople and marketing people and what not gotta tow for work all the time.
Very few jobs require people to tow with their personal daily driver all the time.
> Not everyone is a city dweller
And yet a ton of these city dwellers do drive around in these giant lifted trucks.
It's also incredible to me you can't actually imagine any hobbies that don't require driving a giant pickup truck around. It's just so overly ingrained into your identity. As if it requires a giant pickup truck to go fishing or go to a sports field or go camping or whatever.
Plenty of minivans also have tall hoods. I assume by combi you're talking about a station wagon, and in that case you're trading cargo capacity and the ability to tow boats / trailers / campers / etc... Ego has nothing to do with it - utility does. You can fit more people and things in a larger vehicle, this isn't rocket science.
I don't think the cargo capacity argument really holds water. I drive a Volvo V60 wagon which has trunk space of 23.2 cubic feet. When it was in the shop, I had a loaner XC60, and I could noticeably feel that the trunk space was about the same, despite the vehicle sitting considerably taller.
Sure enough, the XC60 crossover has a trunk space of 22.4 cubic feet.
It's the same trunk, just higher off the ground, which to me makes it less useful to me: more lifting to get stuff in, harder to rummage through items (eg camping pantry), much more difficult to access my roof box.
