[Auto] The big shrink: how to cut the car down to size

[The GodFather]

 

 

Whether it was while squeezing into your garage at home, navigating the tight multi-storey car park at work or risking your alloy wheels on one of those narrow-lane Channel Tunnel train crossings recently, you will almost certainly have noticed how much larger modern cars are than their older equivalents.

 

Size has become a pressing concern of many keen drivers and Autocar readers, with few topics inspiring such regular correspondence. “How much longer can it go on,” we’re asked, “before the cars we drive are patently too large for the roads we drive on and the spaces we park in?”

It’s reasonable enough to wonder. Today’s Range Rover is more than 200mm wider and 550mm longer, in standard-wheelbase form, than the 1970 original. Today’s Volkswagen Polo is considerably larger than the original Volkswagen Golf. The current BMW 5 Series is wider across the mirrors than BMW’s seminal Rolls-Royce Phantom of 2003.

 

But the forces that have driven the physical expansion of cars over the past 50 years aren’t immutable; and by our reckoning, there’s every chance that, having witnessed this rapid vehicular growth, we will see a mirror-image contraction over the next few decades – and for a host of reasons.

 

Here, then, are 10 key things that need to change – and, in many cases, very likely will – before modern cars can be cut back down to the sizes, and the weights, that they ought to be.

Our current taste for desirable, premium-brand motoring has led cars to grow in order that they can accommodate advanced technology, among other things. But until we get back to caring more about what a car can do for us than what it says about us or what the neighbours may think about it, we’re unlikely to make the kind of buying decisions that are in the long-term best interests of the car.

 

New marques will be best placed to take some of the cost and complication back out of cars that premium and luxury brands have added over the past 30 years, which will in turn enable size and weight to shrink and energy efficiency to improve. But there’s an opportunity here, too, for the old-guard volume players to be bold and to grab back some of the market share they have haemorrhaged.

 

The reason that the global climate has warmed over the past century, as environmentalists quite rightly tell us, is that people the world over have been able to pay a price for fossil fuels that don’t reflect the true costs of consuming them.

If the cost of a litre of petrol reflected not only the cost of pulling it out of the ground, refining it and delivering it to your car but also of recapturing the CO2 that burning it emits and removing it from the atmosphere, it would be many times more expensive than it currently is, for sure. But only then could drivers, home owners, manufacturing magnates and logistics and airline executives compare the cost of different sources of energy on real like-for-like terms.

 

So many global economies are still built on the profits and tax revenues that would be hit if this kind of reasonable thinking were put into law, of course. But if by some unlikely route it were, most of the world’s remaining combustion-engined cars would be made smaller, lighter and more efficient very quickly indeed.

Edited June 23, 2020 by flaffy213
Closed Topic / Complete 24 hours.