Wide Cars

I don't think anyone doubts how much time, money, and effort are put into road infrastructure. In fact, I think about it a lot when driving.

12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride, Canyonero!

Smells like a steak and seats 35!

Top of the line in utility sports, unexplained fires are a matter for the courts

It's also literally the motto for the Pontiac Grand Prix.

"Wider is better"

And that was in 1998

Not a cheap vehicle, but that's a medium truck with presumably a pretty incredible tow rating. Not really a passenger vehicle.

I passed a Lamborghini SUV on the road the other day. I checked and it retails for about $250,000. Motherfucker really dropped a quarter of a million dollars for a RAV4-looking vehicle to haul the kids to soccer in.

EDIT: Lamborghini Urus

And to boast that it's the absolute Pinnacle of society. It's the only version they've seen but they're convinced there are zero improvements

There is a guy at my office building that routinely parks his fucking VW Golf in 4 spaces under the covered parking. Dude it’s not even that nice of a car. Assholes exist regardless of what they drive.

Lived at an apartment complex that had external garages and they had two parking spaces, two single garages, and two parking spaces in these perpendicular to the road pull offs. BMW loved to park diagonal across the two space sections. Too bad for him that apartment had a manager that must have found so much joy in towing cars. They were relentless with their parking enforcement. Pretty sure that guy got towed 3-4 times before he got the hint. Parking was always a pain at that complex…

Do you regret your choice? Do you constantly think “Fuck everyone else around me, I do what I want.”, or do you legitimately not notice how everyone else hates you?

It could easily be all of those things. Regret turns to coping poorly through projection¹, followed by just ignoring the problem.

Re: idiots and assholes. The Venn diagram for those groups have a rather large intersection.

1 Clinically known as "acting like an asshole". In this case, it's the decision that it's everyone else who is encroaching on their space, while driving a vehicle that is slightly smaller than a shuttle bus.

That requires introspection. Instead they say things like “the idiot that built this parking lot made the spaces too small.”

It is "necessary" for them to be that wide.

CAFE standards are based on "footprint" which is basically the rectangle of the tire contact patches. If you're a car manufacturer who can't meet the NHTSA's MPG requirements for the size of car you produce, you can increase the size of your cars, so they fit in a larger class that requires less of an MPG improvement.

The most effective way to increase the footprint is to widen a narrow car, increasing its footprint toward square.

They’re wider and longer because the EPA uses the area under the tires to determine fuel economy requirements.

You're stuck in the "defensive driving" mindset -- You gotta go offensive to keep safe. The Chevy Stretch offers significantly greater total mass than even large trucks, and a lower center of gravity. Now you'll be the one crossing the center line, striking fear into the hearts of the sensible!

All things considered, stability and six full seats? Look up Fiat Multipla.

Some people have an exaggerated and/or completely broken sense of personal space, and how that keeps them "safe".

Well in lots of the usa we only have wide ass roads.

Remember the times when Humvees were considered big and stupid to drive in civilian applications?

They were designed so that the wheels would be the same width as the tracks on an Abrams tank.

Pickups, SUVs, and Vans in America are getting unreasonably large because of poorly-written environmental regulation.

In the mid-2000s, automakers were classifying everything as a "truck" to skirt CAFE (fuel economy) standards. The tilling point was the PT Cruiser being regulated as a truck. So, starting in 2012, CAFE standards started to be based on vehicle footprint.

Ever notice how all the little trucks like the S-10, Dakota, and the old-style Ranger all had 2011-ish as their last year model?

Suddenly, small trucks became effectively illegal, and as fuel economy standards get tougher every few years, the automakers have learned it's easier to just make the footprint bigger than it is to make the fuel economy better. They've since re-released the Ranger, but now it's bigger than the F-150 used to be.

And now it's hit the vans. CAFE outran the small cargo van footprints, so the Nissan NV200, Ford Transit Connect, and RAM Promaster City have all been discontinued in the last 2-3 years because they can't make cargo-hauling vehicles that size any longer.

New York City's Taxi Fleet changed to NV200s a few years back to improve accessibility, and now they can't buy replacement vehicles without either dropping the accessibility and going small or moving to fuck-you-sized vehicles.

The one neat thing though is the Ford Maverick. It's a small 4-seat truck with a half-size bed that comes standard as a hybrid (trafitional ICE is an "upgrade" so it meets CAFE) for like 25 grand. The only real problem is buying one since they only made like 4 of them.

Good thing comedy isn’t mandatory. Also fuck car-centric societies that enable the nonsense this strip is parodying.

Yeah, nobody wants wide cars. Manufacturers are making them wider to make it easier for them to meet NHTSA's CAFE standards.

The standards require year-on-year MPG improvements. The problem is that they require proportionally more improvement on the smallest, highest economy cars, and less improvement on the largest, lowest economy vehicles.

The standards are based on the "footprint" of the vehicle: the rectangle between the contact patches of the tires. The larger the area of that footprint, the larger the vehicle, and the less MPG increase it needs to have.

So, they are pushing the wheels toward the corners, and widening the wheelbase, approaching a square to maximize their footprints. They are making cars bigger and boxier so they don't have to make them more efficient.

Fuel economy of the cars on the road is actually falling, because manufacturers are effectively prohibited from continuing to make their smallest, most efficient vehicles. They are compelled to either discontinue those vehicles, or embiggen them to fall in a larger class.

Yeah, I was expecting it to be a joke like:

• Introducing Longtrucks. 🚌
• Impress even more strangers of the superior person-hauling capabilities with 32 seats.
• Includes a light-up sign 🚍 so you can proudly show to strangers where you're headed.
• Access a world-wide network of pick-up bays 🚏 for you to pick up strangers from.