- It's no secret that
cars have been getting bigger and bigger for the last 40 years. My grandpa used to have a 2004 ranger. It was considered a
compact truck back then and it felt like it. If you could look up a new ranger now, and that thing's big. A 2000 ranger XLT, regular cab
had a length of 187 inches. Whereas the 2021 ranger is around 210 and it was a
full eight inches wider and six inches taller than my grandpa's. That might not seem like a lot, but that's only over one generation. You look back at Rangers
from the early 1980s, and they seem like toys in comparison are cars and trucks going
to keep getting bigger? Big old thank you to
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Canada, Australia, and the UK. Go check it out guys. Your balls will thank you. I guarantee it let's get back to the show. There are a lot of different reasons why
cars have gotten so bloated but one of the main reasons is safety. Not very sexy I know, but stay with me. Cars have gotten significantly faster, in the last couple of decades and the faster they become, the safer they need to be as well. We take modern safety features for granted because most of the time it's out of sight and we're
not worrying about it. But all those safety
features need real estate crumple zones, airbags, safety cells. It all adds up to the size of the vehicle. Back in the day, safety technology
was relatively primitive. Hell it took more than 50 years for seatbelts to become commonplace. Cars were a little more
than sheet metal boxes. Nowadays, there are much stricter
regulations when it comes to keeping the drivers safe In the event of an impact. Cars are divided up into sections 'some that are supposed to
collapse called crumple zone and sections that are
supposed to stay intact called safety cells. But the safety cell itself
doesn't do too much to slow down someone in the event of a crash. And for that car manufacturers
rely on a gang of airbags. Once it's packed in, an airbag, doesn't take up that much room. But door mounted in front
facing airbags require 10 inches of deployment distance from the body. So all of that has to be accounted for when designing the cabin. And it's one of the specific reasons that cars have gotten wider. A front impact airbag for both the driver and front passenger is
required in all modern cars. However, six airbags is the standard the BMW five, six, and seven
series offer up to 12 airbags and auto makers are following
suit to include knee, head, and pelvic protection systems. Pelvic airbags sounds like
something I could have used in high school when
people thought it was fun to give a little nut check. Yeah, they're there. And yeah. Now I have a stomachache
for 10 minutes. Thanks. Even things like door panels have to be fitted to accommodate airbags and extra enforcement that
wasn't there 30 years ago but it's not just safety
equipment that takes up space. It's also new technology. Another reason cars are bigger and why it costs so dang much
to do relatively minor repairs on stuff like doors and bumpers is because nowadays those parts of the car are packed with a ton of new tech that wasn't in them a few decades ago. Door panels are just filled with Zunes where'd they go? Why can't you buy a Zune? It's because all manufacturers are dumping them in their body panels. Cameras, sensors, and
housings for all that takes up quite a bit of space in
whatever part of the car it's in, engineers do a great job
making it as low profile as they can, but they can only do so much. Accident avoidance
systems, braking assist, forward collision warnings,
automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection,
adaptive cruise control. You get it. There's a lot. Each one of these safety
systems has a sensor. Maybe even multiple sensors. Everything is being
regulated by a computer. The size of these sensors range anywhere between one and five inches which again, one or 10
doesn't take up that much room but there are at least a
hundred sensors in a car. This number will continue to grow. As more features are added. Features that we haven't
even thought of yet like, taco bell proximity sensors. How close am I to my next Baha blast? This is critical information. I need to know why I'm driving on the i5 also where's the closest bathroom. Those are all features that made cars like the Honda civic go from being one of the smallest cars on the road to being virtually indistinguishable from other sedans and coupes. When the Honda civic
came to the United States in 1973, it's styling was
considered cute and quirky. Like me. The slogan was "it'll get
you where you're going" One of the slogans for Honda's 2020 civic is "the true definition
of luxury... yours". That's not the only thing that
has changed about the civic. It's also three feet
longer and one foot wider. Honda wasn't trying to compete with its domestic counterparts because they knew they
were gonna be smaller. Americans don't like small
cars for some reason. Well, actually we'll
get to that right now. Speaking of room, what has more space and luxury than the sport utility vehicle? Not much, SUVs have been
dominating the market for the last 30 years. Thanks to literal trailblazer models like the Chevy blazer, Ford
Explorer, Jeep grand Cherokee, land rovers. You don't need to be-- (sad music) You don't need me to keep listing SUVs. The rise of the SUV fueled competition between car companies to make the biggest, most utilitarian, most
capable vehicle out there. The average size of SUV has gone up significantly since the
onset of the first models. And there's a reason for that. At least in America, there is a mentality
that bigger is better. Why wouldn't you want a vehicle with seven seats and a thousand
cubic feet of trunk space? Aside from major cities, lanes are wide and parking is plentiful. If the infrastructure can handle it why not? knock yourself out. Sure, you don't have kids. You don't have dogs. Treat yourself, get an
enormous car you don't need. Quick sidebar and infrastructure. When doing research for this,
we were comparing the size of roads and we found
something interesting. You would think the only thing that would never change is the width of a lane, but that's not true. City planners made lanes wider
in order to decrease traffic. Turns out though the opposite is true. There's research about how wider lanes not only increased traffic, they're more dangerous. Cities like Amsterdam,
Copenhagen, and Tokyo with lane widths,
between 9.2 and 10.6 feet have the lowest crash fatality
rates per 100,000 residents. While in cities with wider lanes, the rate of fatalities on road crashes is significantly higher. No joke there's a concept
called road dieting. Not sure if that's gonna work in America 'cause everyone has a problem
with even the smallest of changes, but it would
probably cut down on accidents. Another reason that car
manufacturers put effort into making SUVs bigger, is because SUVs are the cash
cow of the respect of lineups. SUVs along with full sized trucks, have some of the biggest profit margins of any vehicles sold. Car manufacturers can sell
luxury high end trim levels and charge an extra 20 grand
for just a few upgrades and people will still buy them. The 2021 Lincoln navigator
black label is literally $21,000 more expensive than the base model for features like automated running boards
and some extra Chrome trim I'm trying to generalize a little bit, but I mean that's still a lot of money, compared to the razor thin
profits of a sub compact car this incentivizes manufacturers
to make cars bigger. The other thing is gas, for the consumer gas prices
are less of a concern now than they were a decade ago. The national average for
a gallon of gas in the US hasn't taught $3 since 2014. Hybrids and fully electric
cars are expensive at least for now. So you get more car for your dollar with an internal combustion engine. And that feeds right back into the bigger is better mentality, but not to put it on the consumer. There are other reasons cars
continue to get guffier, compact, subcompact, midsize
truck, light duty truck. The classification of a car
dictates what restrictions and regulations it is subject to meaning that if you make a small car it's subject to stricter
regulations than a bigger car. So a smart car which is
classified as a micro car has to meet stricter fuel
efficiency standards and say I don't know, a midsize Honda accord. One of the reasons that a
certain model grows in size is to increase the size of
the footprint of the car, specifically the length and width. Why do car companies do this? Well, sometimes it's easier
to grow your footprint than to meet new fuel
efficiency regulations. Bigger cars ironically, are held to less strict regulations when it comes to fuel efficiency. It's an inadvertent side
effect of a legitimate means of fighting climate change
and car manufacturers use it as a little bit of a loophole, but it feeds into the
consumer's needs needs for something bigger,
faster, better, stronger. (mumbles) Car buyers continually
demand more power from cars. And as a manufacturer, it's difficult and expensive to develop new technology that one meets those power demands and two meets fuel efficiency regulations. So it makes sense why
cars are getting bigger but just because the average
car is getting bigger doesn't mean the engines
are getting bigger. Car companies are pushing the boundaries of how much power can be made with small displacement engines. Turbocharged three cylinders
are the newest hottest thing in the internal combustion world. Cars like the BMW i8, mini Clubman, and sadly the discontinued in the US Ford Fiesta, all have
powerful three bangers. The new Toyota gr yaris, has the most powerful
three cylinder engine which makes 257 horsepower and 266 foot pounds of
torque, that's insane. So what does that even mean? Well, it means we've hit a
point where the old adage of "there's no replacement
for displacement" doesn't really ring true
anymore unfortunately, it's more of a matter
of personal preference. Smaller cars are becoming more appealing because you can get much
more power per pound than those big old honkers. We don't need a gigantic engine, beta house, a huge VA
anymore to make a fun car. Plus, there might be a future where a car like the expedition is powered
by four cylinder Eco Boost because it saves weight, it saves money, and
there's a good chance that the expedition won't have to go anywhere but flat public streets. Are cars going to keep getting bigger? It's difficult to say. As long as gas prices stay relatively low and consumers are telling the market they still wanna buy big cars. Yes, we'll probably see something bigger than the 2021 Ford expedition come out in the next couple of
years, at least in the US. It makes more sense here than
it does the rest of the world. Going back to my grandpa's truck from the beginning of this episode, I would love if manufacturers came out with compact truck that
was actually compact. The ranger, those old
Mazda B trucks, the S10, all those early 90s trucks were so cool and perfect for the city. There's certainly a demand for it. So if you're listening
Ford, Mazda, Chevy Dodge please make a real compact truck again. Thanks for watching. Be kind. See you next time. Have not seen these yet. So ,No, Boost creeps hoodie. Who's that handsome boy? Man, what a good looking hoodie. We reworked the logo a little bit now it's in yellow, really
pop skins that black, we added an arm head, so
you fly that donut flag. I'm gonna rock mine all fall, all winter, go to donutmedia.com and get you one they're
probably gonna sell out. So I would get it sooner than later.
