Definitely notice a difference since buying the car I currently drive back in 2012. In my state around 70% of vehicles on the road are trucks or SUVs, while I'm out here driving a car that only weighs around 2500lbs.

Kinda worried about what would happen if I ever got in an accident, don't know if I would fare very well against the majority of vehicles sharing the road with me. Luckily I only live a couple miles from my work, so I'm not in my car very often.

I had a Fiesta, was a smaller commuter car compared to the rest of the USA. Save for a few technical issues, it was great. The only reason I would see a need for a larger one is if it's moving a large family but that's not the case with SUVs and trucks I see around me. There might be another passenger but it's one person in a massive vehicle and often times they drive them like crap.

interesting that it went down after 1975! what happened there?

So does the average American.

Meanwhile, the average parking stall is smaller than a 1978 Honda Civic.

The size of vehicles around me in the US is absurd. I live in a pretty white & republican area, with a mix of rednecks in their compensators and temporarily embarassed billionaires in their 2-3 ton $100K luxury grocery getters.

I'm a big guy and I drive an old Mazda3 sedan that we've had for almost almost a decade and a half. It's what some Europeans might call a family car. It has fun driving dynamics which I care about and enjoy, though that seems to put me in a tiny minority. It's even practical enough that I have hauled home 8-foot lumber dozens of times with the back seats folded down, because I actually build shit unlike most of the truck drivers.

It sucks knowing all the SUVs with their rushed & distracted drivers weigh 50% more than my vehicle, sure. But the pickup trucks have become caricatures of themselves. I'm sure most folks in this community have seen the charts showing how terrible the forward-looking visibility is in modern pickups versus everything from older trucks to heavy construction equipment. It's like the number one feature driving sales is how fucking high off the ground they can get the hood/bonnet.

It's like driving around mobile buildings. The front grilles of these vehicles are just a vertical wall. And even for how large and high the entire bodies of these vehicles are, the new look seems to be having the hood/bonnet in the front sitting even higher than the edges of the bed in the back. I might think that automakers were in competition to see who could get the most customer's children run over, but I am all too familiar with our garbage culture where everything is a competition and every other person must fall on a spectrum somewhere between rival and mortal enemy.

Oil is too cheap

Did you change the first graph from weight to horsepower?

Look, give us come kind of civilized measurement. Like how many pygmy marmosets is that?