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The Chevy Suburban is about the same weight now as in 1973 (5837lbs then, 5785-5993lbs now, according to Wikipedia).
It was huge then, it's huge now.
The BMWs pictured are not the same class of car either
one is a coupe/sedan, one's an SUV, so of course they will be radically different.
Don't get m wrong, I think modern cars are too big and, in the case of BMW, way uglier than they used to be.
Exactly. This pic is comparing apples with oranges to get a rise out of us. There are irrefutable arguments for saving the planet, we don't need this low IQ rage bait.
People would find some way to complain no matter what cars were chosen for the comparison, but the fact is cars have been getting bigger on average.
@mondoman712 @Jilanico This is ironically due to the emissions rules. Bigger vehicles are classed as commercial and allowed to burn more gas and pollute more.
My dad has a 1999 Chevy S-10 with a small cab, a 4-cylinder engine, and a long bed. Nothing like that is made today. Handy when you need to move stuff though.
In the US, but worldwide car companies push consumers towards larger vehicles because they are more profitable.
Sedans were the default back in the 80s, now SUVs and pickups account for around 75% of all new sales (in the US, at least).
So, in terms of what the average car looked like then versus now, it's a perfectly valid comparison.
That's not an average representation of the increase in the size of pickup trucks, though.
Just look at the Ford F150:
Even if you compare like with like, pickups are around 30% heavier than they were in the 90s, and around 10-15% taller.
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/23/pickup-trucks-f150-size-weight-safety
Nah the actual space you can use shrunk while the truck got bigger. That's insane
Compare a '90s F-150 to a 2024 Ranger. Then compare a '90s Ranger to a 2024 Maverick. Arguably, what Ford really did was that it added a third, bigger-than-full-size, truck and shifted the names one notch up.
The Maverick is new and while it does buck the trend of "bigger is always better", all it signifies to me is that Ford are diversifying their range of pickups now that they don't make any small cars or sedans in the US any more, which is kind of emblematic of the whole problem.
The point is the smaller model was popular what was popular then, and the giant SUV (or even worse those massive truck things) are what's popular now.
Here's a link if you want to include in your comment.
It's a site that compares car sizes. This link is for the 3 series
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bmw-3-1997-sedan-vs-bmw-3-2018-sedan/
And here's a dodge challenger which surprisingly is fatter but slightly shorter and higher
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/dodge-challenger-1969-coupe-vs-dodge-challenger-2015-coupe/
You're telling me that tiny little sedan on the left is 3 tons!?
For those who are actually curious, this is because of the Light Truck Exemption in the US. long story short, the us made emissions requirements on cars. Car companies said "fine well do cars, but we can't do it for trucks". At the time, trucks were only used for, you know, actual truck things, so they made the Light Truck Exemption.
So of course car companies created the SUV, popularized it, and made it the standard. Now, so interestingly, everything is a light truck! Even most sedans are. Who would have guessed car companies found a way out of emissions standards yet again.
Great not just bikes video that goes more in depth: https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?si=y38n9OQz8gC5RLBq
The weird thing is that it even rubs of to the rest of the world, cars are getting bigger and higher in Europe, without the tax dodge, or even the contrary. Where I live cars are taxed by weight and even here the fuckers get bigger...
The old BMW looks so much better too.
It's bigger. Does that mean it burns more fuel or has more emissions than a 40 year old car? I'm all for saving the planet, but I'm not sure big automatically means worse. I could be wrong.
They are still gonna be less effecient than smaller, lighter models with modern technology.
Another factor is bigger vehicles are deadlier.
the 1984 BMW 318i gets 24 mpg the 2024 BMW x7 gets 24 mpg
Thank you for sharing actual data 🤝
i was guessing the actual models pictured, anyone know better?
The small one is an E30 3 series and the big one is an X7 (pre-2022). The X7 does get slightly better fuel consumption than that, 27-29 mpg on the petrol engine. The 3 series is probably somewhere in the low 20s based on forum posts but I'm not sure where to get actual data for that one, and I've got no idea which engine is in it
Bigger does almost always mean more emissions/worse economy for a given technology. In this case someone else pointed out that the economy is about the same for both, which is due to the fact that technology has improved; if you put the engineering effort of the big car into the form factor of the little car, it'd be much more efficient.
It weighs more and definitely could use a lot less space on the road and costume less fuel if it didn't grow to this size but stayed small and with less weight
They’re bigger specifically so they can qualify as “light trucks” instead of regular vehicles, which means they have more more lax emissions standards.
I replaced my old Ford Focus stationwagon with a Nissan Qashqai, an SUV. It has much better milage so it'll probably have less emissions.
means it’s easier to claim you didn’t see the kid you just ran over
cellphones have been reversing the trend, we’ve gone back to phablet sized devices (but this time removing the smaller options)
With cellphones, at the very least it's more a question of screen size more than anything. Phones got smaller, but screens got bigger. I'm guessing this is why - in part at least - folding phones are trying to become a thing; increasing screen size whilst staying small enough to fit in a pocket.
except phones are big again because we noticed we can watch porn on them
Yeah that meme/graphic up there seems circa 2013, judging by the size of that smartphone.
Actually, I'd like a bigger and thicker laptop
Gaming laptops are thicker and have quite a few ports. I have one and the only port i am missing is Displayport instead of hdmi
You don't know what I'd do to get massive chunky brick laptops back from the 90's again. Look at all those ports!
If you like chunky and portful check out the MNT Reform
whoa
regretting my framework laptop about now
Counterpoint: you needed all those different ports because we didn't have USB-C and wifi yet.
Does anyone know what that laptop is?
Courtesy of /u/idiot206's sleuthing work when this was posted to reddit a couple years back, it's a modded Mac SE
https://www.cultofmac.com/229732/this-13-pound-vintage-mac-laptop-was-killed-by-the-sony-walkman/
What you carry and what carries you don't really compare though.
