luxury trucks, suvs, crossovers and the death of the sedan

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/idbFlkN1DI9k/v2/800x-1.png

why do you still drive a sedan?

how do you think about mileage and safety?

are the rise of the compact SUV and the luxury truck even related?

lots of interesting points in this thread

The trend of sedan sales collapsing and being replaced by sales of compact SUVs and the trend of gigantic, jacked-up pickup trucks as the luxury vehicle status symbol of choice in much of America are often collapsed together, but I think are basically unrelated?

— Michael Tae Sweeney (@mtsw) March 7, 2022

e.g.

Yes. I would need to see more data on this but I think there's a reasonable case to be made that car seat regulations killed the sedan, and I wonder if they've led to more death.

— Joel Wertheimer (@Wertwhile) March 7, 2022

minor scandal that kieth drives a rav 4 btw https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/who-needs-suvs-dear-keir-walk-to-the-tailor-next-time

i didn't realize child seat laws went so high in age, obviously i don't have a kid. like i know my parents had child seats for me and my brother, but i don't have strong memories of being in them.

you might be able to disentangle these trends somewhat, but i think there's definitely an arms race aspect to it. new trucks are basically designed to shine their extra-bright headlights directly into the rear view mirrors of smaller cars. a lot of things that are functionally passenger cars are still absurdly tall in ways that i don't think make them easier to get in and out of.

i sometimes i wonder if the mega trucks trend is partly the fallout from a bunch of american soldiers driving giant armored vehicles on patrol around iraq and afghanistan for a couple decades. dead pedestrians are acceptable collateral damage for protecting ourselves with our badass mech suits.

Several cars were vandalised in Dulwich last night with tyres deflated and this poster left on windscreens. We are environmentally friendly but this is not who we are as a community. pic.twitter.com/mTvBjPLz6p

— The Dulwich Society (@DulwichSociety) March 4, 2022

i sometimes i wonder if the mega trucks trend is partly the fallout from a bunch of american soldiers driving giant armored vehicles on patrol around iraq and afghanistan for a couple decades.

That's certainly a component of the marketing that drove the trend. 1990 is the year of the Gulf War, Arnold Schwarzenegger constantly complaining that he couldn't buy a military truck (until he could), and the introduction of the Ford Explorer.

Behind the scenes, auto manufacturers figured out that SUVs were a very profitable way to game the fuel economy standards in their favor. Nothing has really changed since.

x-post

One tactic against monster trucks I learned from some Earth First! folks is to deflate the tires on opposite corners. If the truck sits there long enough (like overnight), the sag is enough to permanently warp the frame and body assemblies.

whenever i visit my parents in the "suburbs," i note that each of the houses on their cul-de-sac (except for my parents who both drive small cars), has one luxury truck and one SUV. The truck is the daddy car, and the SUV is the mommy car.

minor scandal that kieth drives a rav 4 btw

I drive a rav 4 ... i haul stuff on a regular basis. i suppose i could have tried to find an old minivan from the 80s that was in decent shape instead of the small SUV, but almost all of those have been cash-for-clunkered out of the area.

xp:

Adding that to the running for best piece of tire-spiking advice on ilx, along with ukilxors arent u posh?

thanks to calzino (in another thread) I had my mind blown about the existence of posi screws (and drivers) ... which up until then, if I had seen any posi screws, I probably thought they were slightly malformed Phillips heads

the sag is enough to permanently warp the frame and body assemblies.

(evil cackle)

there certainly are sedans bigger than say a rav4 which isnt nearly the smallest "suv" so the categories arent that meaningful but thats all kind of pedantic in the face of the fact that vehicles on average are getting bigger which isnt great

we all just need to go back to the humble station wagon, the best kind of car, and its little brother the hatchback

i feel very alienated

luxury truck/suv/crossover owners are living in a different world. even getting to think about being in that world is a different world. it's fine but wtf

what kind of luxury houses are trending? who cares

luxury truck/suv/crossover owners are living in a different world. even getting to think about being in that world is a different world. it's fine but wtf

― the world's undisputed #1 fan of 'Spud Infinity' (Karl Malone), Monday, March 7, 2022 7:47 PM (eight minutes ago)

i got mine used, and I drive less than 5k miles a year so idk ... maybe I do live in a different world, a world where construction materials and music gear are large and bulky and heavy and someone needs to transport them from one physical place to another ...

i have a subaru outback which some say is a station wagon while others a crossover, it cannot be identified, i am therefor innocent, perfect really

xp

it is a different world

suburus should basically be their own category

everyone always takes that in such a judgy way

i have been in that different world. you're right, there are good reasons to own one, where it makes sense.

i think i run into trouble with this kind of thing, all thing time, frequently at least. it's like, yeah, i do get it. i totally get that

suburus should basically be their own category

― call all destroyer, Monday, March 7, 2022 11:02 PM (fourteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

its sort of a cult vehicle, like a toyota but different

the outbacks used to be station wagons and now they pretty much look like RAV 4s. My RAV is almost 20 years old and looks like the Honda equivalent from that era, just like how the Honda Accords and the Toyota Corrollas all looked the same back in the 80s

like the subaru outback, the toyota rav4 and the honda CSV (or whatever the fuck honda calls theirs) are now all the same car ... kinda creepy when u really ~think~ about it? ... meanwhile last time i went to the suburbs (i went to a suburban Lowe's ... you really get a sense of what cars real Americans own when you go to a Lowe's in the suburbs) ... I did see a sweet-ass 70s El Camino, and ... now that was a car

whats funny is crossovers came out and they looked like mini real suvs, the original rav4 was like a tiny 4runner it looked like a truck, and people loved them so much they drove station wagons out of business, now most crossovers dont look anything like trucks, the new rav4 looks like a tall station wagon, they are slowly reinventing the station wagon

el camino was the best car truck of all time

the outback does look even more like a station wagon than the rav4 etc tho, its a station wagon, thats just my opinion, and its a fact

the new rav4 looks like a tall station wagon, they are slowly reinventing the station wagon

yes!!! mine is like the mini-4runner type

but seriously, cargo vans are even getting bigger. the classic Ford Econoline that bands toured in ... now there are those Sprinter things with the tall ass roofs.

https://i.imgur.com/Tm2cVMo.png

this is an outback which is a station wagon

https://i.imgur.com/nsOq4u4.png

where this is a forester which is a crossover, obviously

el camino was the best car truck of all time

― the world's undisputed #1 fan of 'Spud Infinity' (Karl Malone), Monday, March 7, 2022 8:10 PM (two minutes ago)

it was ... when I was a kid, my mom's best friend, Vern, had one. I think it probably transported just about every single household appliance

lol last time we were buying an ICE car i think the main reason we didn't check out suburus is because i couldn't figure out how to differentiate their models

I deal with a TON of Sprinter vans at work, followed in popularity by Dodge Promasters and Ford Transits

#vanlife

if the sedan dies, will that mean the death of ILX?

its a huge failure that no one from this board has ever bought one of those

it's a huge failure that Acura doesn't subsidize this board

they should be giving us free sedans

theres also a special offroad edition of the outback, which idk might be something for the post modernists to delineate

https://i.imgur.com/TlF0UCG.png

but the thing is ... with these new, bigger vehicles, it limits where you can actually live and own one of these things. Like, I have to park my little mini-suv almost right against the retaining wall so I can make sure that I can get in and not be blocked by my neighbor's car in our off-street parking.

i think there's one of those special offroad edition of the outback that I see semi-regularly ... in the parking lot of Whole Foods. ... definitely requires such a rugged vehicle

you'll have to pry my little Prius hatchback outta my cold dead hands, and yeah ease of parking is key

aren't there these custom window jobs you can get on the rear window that fuck with the high-headlight people by revealing scary ghosts or something like that?

there's a fellow ilxor who i know IRL and for years we both had late-80s Toyota Corrollas ... right around the same time each of our Corrollas met their ends and he got some small Honda thing that is quite environmentally friendly and easy to park, and I got the RAV4 ... anyway, if at some point I stop being a "hauler of things," I would totally go for a little Prius hatchback.

seriously, why do I always draw a blank on the models of vehicles made by Honda????

if i lived in the big city i would like to have a small sedan or hatchback, preferably one thats zippy, to zip around in

would you be calm and debonair?

no i would be caffeinated and whimsical

im a truck guy now. well i guess two trucks... got a 07 gmc sierra z71 as my car and a 08 suburban z71 for the fam car. use both for camping and road trips quite a bit. love having a big car that sits up high tbh. the gas mileage thing is rough tho.

used to be a sedan guy but a drunk driver hit my wife head on ten years ago with two oldest kids (newborn and 2.5 y/o) in the car. the buick sedan (le sabre?) held its own but there were broken bones, cuts, concussions, trauma... so we immediately bought a suburban cos i wanted my family to be in the biggest (practical) car possible.

if the sedan dies, will that mean the death of ILX?

ILX was killed last month

Years ago a musician friend had a Volkswagen Squareback from the early 70s and in it's own way, it was the ideal ur-crossover for someone who needed to carry stuff but not 500kg of it. It also had a front trunk (I HATE the word "frunk") which gave it a surprising amount of cargo space.

https://www.ambassadorautomobileco.com/imagetag/53/11/l/Used-1968-Volkswagen-Squareback.jpg

I used to obsess over this Mustang station wagon one-off/concept from 1966. Boomers that give me "that's not a Must..." shit when I tell them that I have a Mach-E on order usually stfu when I show them this. It's a great design that should have been built.

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/amv-prod-cad-assets/images/media/51/ford-mustang-wagon-inline-7-photo-562256-s-original.jpg

Oh wow, I had to look up Mach-E. I saw one outside my grocery store a month or two ago and thought somebody was being cheeky by slapping a Mustang horsie emblem on their electric.

wow selfish

interesting how thats the bmw equivalent of the audi rs6 which is also in the usa as a wagon

i was at a campsite in france last week and let me tell you guys, european campsites are where station wagons come out to play

thats whats up

Audis are stupid

thats actually not true

the first time I took my eldest to the uk we rented an audi wagon. it was the best two weeks of my life

So many Chinese EV wagons crush the overpriced, overengineed Audis. The NIO ET5 Touring, NETA's S Wagon, BYD's Han wagon

damn i didnt know audi had been crush by chinese evs

NIO ET5 Touring (YT link) is probably the best car out there. If you want to know why US and Euro car makers are in total fear of Chinese EVs...

i visited a few chinese ev showrooms last year and rode in a couple via rideshare. the fit and finish was very very good

As of this week I'm leasing an Ioniq5 for a few years - sort of fitting for this thread because it's considered a "compact SUV" but it's kind of hard to see what makes it that and not a sedan with a wagon-type hatch.

Wasn't a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs recently enacted in the US? That will kill any potential market for NIA, BYD, etc. in the US, unless they shift production to North America or find some other workaround. I'm not a fan of protectionism; previous efforts, particularly in the automotive sector, have had unintended and negative consequences.

its not really protectionism if china is pursuing a dumping scheme, which is the claim, idk if its true, obvs theres some gray area when say an industry gets a lot of government investment which is whats going on with chinese evs, are they selling them at effectively subsidized prices, i mean they are really cheap

China also has long had a policy where non-Chinese manufacturers couldn't sell their cars in China, or at least couldn't set up Chinese manufacturing plants (can't remember which) except by forming 50/50 "joint venture" companies which were half Chinese. This, amongst other things, gave the Chinese a close-up look at foreign production methods which they have since copied.

As of this week I'm leasing an Ioniq5 for a few years - sort of fitting for this thread because it's considered a "compact SUV" but it's kind of hard to see what makes it that and not a sedan with a wagon-type hatch.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, August 31, 2024 8:56 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

did you look at the kia ev6 too? just curious as these are the models i'm considering when my kia niro ev lease ends in november

thats actually not true

the first time I took my eldest to the uk we rented an audi wagon. it was the best two weeks of my life

you can take an audi to a normal mechanic they are more expensive to repair than say a japanese car but thats the case for any german car, idk about the over engineered counter initiative part ive personally found them to be nice to drive around in

The Audis we have had have been great. I had a 2011 that had over 120,000 (hard) miles and never had any issues until it got totaled. It held up well in the crash. My wife's A3 had to have the entire car computer replaced with just over 10k miles on it, but it was under warranty so not that big of a deal.

My only complaint about the newer ones is that the technology is getting more and more complicated, but I think that is a general car trend and a me getting older trend. They also look way better than the BMWs from the last 15 years and the A4 is very fun to drive.

tbf my mechanic did say that he hated my the audi i owned at the time, which i guess could be "over engineering" but i mean thats german performance baby, i def wouldnt recommend buying a high milage one tho

and yeah tech in cars is out of control, think audis bad take a look at a new mercedes its a farce in there

I have had mechanics make comments about Audi's reputation for reliability, but I think that is lingering from many years ago.

I rented a Mercedes two years ago and I could not get into it when I picked it up because the drivers seat was so far forward (like up against the steering wheel), I could not find the switches to operate it, and the owners manual in the car did not match that model.

my mechanic was complaining about how fiddly they were to work on iirc

did you look at the kia ev6 too? just curious as these are the models i'm considering when my kia niro ev lease ends in november

― call all destroyer, Saturday, August 31, 2024 9:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was considering them but didn’t go test drive or anything. I’m told they are fairly close to the same car and I think some people even like the EV6 trim options better. I kind of needed to resolve our car situation within a very limited amount of time, but would have done more comparison otherwise. Friends of ours love their EV6.

https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/BMW-M5-Touring-leak-profile.jpg

I was just in the UK for a couple of weeks and our rental was a volvo xc60. very nice but a bit big for the country lanes, and my first time driving a touchscreen climate control situation.

I gave one wheel curb rash on the first day. got a mobile refurbisher to come out and make the wheel like new for £95, better than the £500+ the rental place would have charged me. took about an hour. worth considering and much easier than I realized if you care about such things.

i wish audi and bmw would bring their smaller middling performance wagons to the usa i want s4 wagon or idk what the bmw equivalent would be a 340i, their high end performance cars yr Ms and RSes are so fast and expensive now that m5 upthread is $100k+ and has 700 horsepower thats some fantastical shit you just want something a little zippier than the normal ones you dont need some crazy track car

the usa can have a little wagon if it wants

the hatchbacks for their small cars would be nice too

we cant have it cause everyone wants tall car

S3 hatchback would be sick.

would be such a good city car

aren't you basically after a golf then?

yeah basically the same car but doesnt have the nice audi design

all cars are a little small for english country lanes ime

all british car youtubers talk about how poorly the roads are over there whats up with that

ya cannae pump yer brex

The ioniq is slightly taller than sedans and wagons I guess, but low for an SUV. Part of its visual appeal I think.

https://i.redd.it/4a7lt4zl7gld1.jpeg

just read about the audi 48v "mild hybrid" start/stop system, that's crazy, who needs 48v? apparently audi

let audi cook

48V is a sweet spot for battery voltage fwiw

lots of vehicle lithium systems using that now, esp vans

yeh i'm guessing audi chose 48V because of availability of parts from EVs. but apparently the audi 48v system is only used for a smoother start/stop (hence "mild" hybrid) and the rest is pure ICE

is also apparently broken / subject of a recall and leaving audi owners stranded often

im watching a doc on the calabrian mafia and the cops there have bmw wagons

https://www.thedrive.com/news/overweight-ford-f-750-plunges-through-historic-wooden-bridge-in-maine

The picture is perfect

looney tunes ass plunging into the river ass hole

the ford f750 is a commercial truck fwiw, spec'd out i think they go into the 6 figures

we drove a normal subaru outback over a wooden bridge to a pier in astoria oregon... never really feels like cars are meant to go over wooden bridges

theres a covered bridge near me that has a similar weight limit i have driven a much smaller truck over it

https://www.tiktok.com/@creiser36/video/7414259011106671903?lang=en