Why We Can't Have Small Trucks Anymore - Blame the EPA

so if you're like me and thousands of other Americans you wonder why we can't have the small trucks like we used to have here in America those old Toyota trucks the original S10 Ranger Isuzu Mitsubishi Nissan hard bodies why did they go away why won't manufacturers bring us small four-cylinder five-speed basic trucks well because the government doesn't want them to but they don't exactly mandate it welcome back to all cars y'all I am John and if you've wanted these small trucks to make a return like I have you have to blame the cafe standards now Cafe stands for the corporate average fuel economy and it came about in the 70s with the gas crises and a rising concern and how much gas mileage individual Vehicles got the EPA came out they started putting in emission standards but they also put in fuel economy standards and that's the reason we can't have these small trucks which is counterintuitive because those small trucks had typically little four-cylinder engines single cab long bed extremely useful Tradesmen love them and they were very efficient and trucks today are so much bigger I actually did a study that things like the Ranger and the Colorado are the size of the full-size pickup trucks from the 80s and the 90s so why can't we have these small ones again we thought it was going to be with the Maverick we all celebrated I love it sure it's a different take it's a unibody based on a sport utility and only has four doors but that is as big as it needs to be to meet Cafe standards and the Maverick is not a compact it is about the size of at least in length of a Ford Explorer so it's actually quite large and it has to be that size because the government makes it that way now this is not a mandate on high that says you shall not sell small pickup trucks but what they've done is over the decades the government has been changing those Cafe standards always making them a little bit more strict and normally in the past what they would do is they say well cars and light trucks here's the standard you have to meet for this year and then they tell the automakers what it needs to be in the coming year so they can plan ahead but these standards have changed over the decades and back in about 2008 they started to change it rather dramatically and as a matter of fact instead of just saying here's a number they came up with a really simple formula to determine what gas mileage a model needs to hit and here's the formula just in case you needed to see how our government thinks and it's based on an average maximum minimum but it's based very importantly on the footprint of the vehicle and so if you plug in this formula and you graph it and the standards change over years and you can see it here it goes up to 2024 2025 2026 the standards are constantly shifting as the minimum miles per gallon are getting stronger but that footprint is based not on the shadow that the vehicle casts but based on the wheelbase and the track now it's important here to note that you can sell a vehicle that doesn't meet the mile per gallon requirements but auto manufacturers have to pay a penalty for it so it becomes a question of well if we're missing it by one or two and we're going to sell 30 000 Vehicles is it worth paying this fee to the government so they can sell it if they don't meet this but this graph illustrates why we don't have the small trucks like we used to and it's going to be obvious here in a minute so first off let's start off with the Maverick now with the Maverick it is 121 inches long 63 inches wide and that is wheelbase and track and that calculates to a footprint of 53.1 so when I graph it here and follow the line over that's the minimum miles per gallon it has to get and that's why you can see that the Maverick starts with a base hybrid because it jumps that fuel economy up so high well if you know anything about graphs you can look this and see that as your Footprints gets bigger well the minimum miles per gallon you can get starts to drop so let's take as a example here a 1984 Toyota truck and we'll do the long wheelbase version so this is the better situation 112 inches long 53.3 inches track gives us a footprint of 41.53 well if we plot it here you can see how much better gas mileage a smaller truck would need to actually get so if you want one of those small trucks that's a little bit tidier in dimensions and a little bit narrower your fuel economy jumps up so high it's almost unattainable with an ice engine even maybe with a hybrid so we might see a return of small trucks with EVS because they don't have to meet these standards that's why we don't then you can stop the video here if you want to because that's why we don't have small trucks anymore because they have to be big to follow that curve down and get the gas mileage to where the automaker can actually achieve the gas mileage or at least be reasonable enough to pay a penalty for it now very big in the conversation right now now that the Maverick here is here and now that the Santa Cruz is here of course Chevy has got this Montana down in South America and it's a big hit it's quite a bit smaller than the Maverick and there's a lot of people like why won't Chevy bring this thing up here well the first thing is it is quite a bit smaller with maybe not a usable bed I'm not sure if that matters to everybody or not but it's so small even with a 1.3 liter engine they can't meet fuel economy standards now I have to guess a little bit here the Montana's new enough and there's not a great amount of information out there it seems that it has about 110 inch wheelbase that's two inches shorter than that old Toyota long wheelbase and the track I don't know now it's based on the gem platform done some research I think 61 inches is probably fair but may not be exactly right so this is a hypothetical do that footprint 46.6 and you can see that if we plot that out here it means this truck would need to have a minimum of somewhere around 44 44 and a half miles per gallon to meet the EPA standards the last one I want to do is just for a comparison let's look at the F-150 now what I did was I picked an XLT that's a two-door version not the four-door and with a long wheelbase and you've got a wheelbase of 145.4 with a track of 68.1 that gives you a footprint of 68.76 so if we graph that out here well you can see this thing only needs to make about 31 miles per gallon now it's still higher than it gets with its engines and you start to see why manufacturers are starting to squeeze down in the size of the engines but again they are not prevented from selling they just have to necessarily pay a penalty except it gets even more complicated the EPA changes their standards over time for how auto manufacturers will test the vehicles to determine the gas mileage City and Highway and combine that goes on the window sticker they've changed this test over the years and typically auto manufacturers do the test by the EPA standards and then self-report the EPA tends to cherry pick vehicles and test it themselves but for the chart it's a different test the test is actually an older test so I think that from what I've heard that means the difference between can be 10 to 20 percent higher allowed on this chart so it's not quite as restrictive as it seems and certainly in terms of calculating the penalties that they have to pay if they don't meet the requirements it is still rather onerous and you can see that over the years that chart keeps shifting upwards making it harder and harder for automakers to meet it and this because does kind of bring out at the end here two relatively big points the first is the government in trying to do this and trying to help manufacturers by saying if you've got a bigger vehicle you don't have to meet the same standard as everybody but also I think you're trying to focus the penalties in on individual models not just a truck Fleet but what the unintended consequence is the EPA the government is incentivizing bigger vehicles so the agency that's trying to get better gas mileage trying to get more fuel efficiency and at one time our interest was to be energy independent from the OPEC nations well they're incentivizing manufacturers saying just make the bigger vehicle because you don't have to meet as strict a standard that's part of the reason we see the ram the Chevy the Ford trucks getting bigger and bigger and bigger and certainly most of the SUVs as well getting bigger and bigger because it makes it easier to meet the gas mileage requirements but while doing this and I've wanted to do this video for a long time had a lot of questions about small trucks and the EPA and I knew this and I just needed to get it out there and try to put it in a format that makes sense for us it does leave me with a question why is there not a manufacturer that could do a smaller truck still with two doors but a really long bed and I think that is where we start to get into consumer preferences most consumers unless you're talking about contractors they the market is not huge I believe for a two-seat bench seat truck there'll be some people who take it up but I think there's not a lot of longevity there the second one is is the platform they don't have dedicated platforms for this and it's easier to take that SUV platform and modify it and cheaper than to go try to create their own small truck platform that might have a really really limited sales for a limited number of years until they bump into the technology of providing that gas mileage that's going to be required in the future I'm not really sure but I think that that one Rings true that passes the smell test for me except for EV again EVS don't have to meet this they don't have a mileage requirement for EVS they don't have to meet the greenhouse gas emissions that ice engines have to meet so I think there might be eventually a move for smaller trucks I wonder if the Stout isn't going to be like this smaller but with an EV all of a sudden the footprint doesn't matter anymore and I think that gives somebody an opportunity to go tap into that market that exists for people who want small trucks again so I hope this helps explain how the EPA and the cafe regulations in our government came up with a system that accidentally incentivizes bigger vehicles thereby penalizing the smaller the lighter and the more fuel efficient by making the standards so onerous nobody can meet it thanks for your time let me know any questions below

Channel: All Cars with Jon

Views: 579,741

Keywords: car, cars, automobiles, trucks, All Cars, All Cars with Jon, smal trucks, epa, CAFE standards, fuel economy, chevy s10, ford ranger, nissan hardbody, isuzu pup, chevy luv, ford courier, mitsubishi mighty max, why can't we have small trucks, where did the small trucks go, why we wont get the Chevy Montana, why cant we have small trucks

Id: azI3nqrHEXM

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023