[twoWhlsGud]

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

[PaulHoule]

Auto journalists keep repeating in the same deadpan voice as the brainwashed soldiers from The Manchurian Candidate that Americans exclusively want big vehicles. It's not that there isn't some truth in that but the real truth is that (a) the publications won't get any chance to review vehicles if they don't toe the line [1] and (b) since the 1970s if you went to an American car dealer trying to buy a size S car they would try to sell you an L, looking for a size L they would try to sell you an XXL, etc. I remember going to car dealerships with my dad, there was a brief moment after the 2008 financial crisis that this wasn't the case, but by 2015 the major Japanese brands of Honda and Toyota were doing the same.

[1] One take on the fall of Intel was that they were "high on their own supply" for the last 15 years and journalists were too intimidated to tell them they were wrong with the exception of Charlie Demerjian

[wombatpm]

But the vehicles today are dumb big.

My second car was a 1978 Buick Riviera. 17.5 feet in length, two doors, rear wheel drive, 403cuin 8 cylinder. It weighs in at 3500 lbs, had 15 mph rated bumpers with shocks attached to the frame. Steel roll cage, double steel doors.

The car was a beast. You could fit 7 adults in the car and two dead bodies in the trunk.

My grandmother was t-boned in it. They straightened the door and replaced the glass and it was good as new.

That was a big car!

I wish I could buy a car like that with modern antilock brakes, transmission. Instead it’s all trucks and SUVs because people like my mother feel “safer” and like seeing from up high.

Look at the specs of a modern vehicle. Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.