Go to Mexico and see where they all went to. I often see caravans of trucks towing other trucks heading south on I-35, mostly old used small trucks, often with old motorcycles that Americans no longer want in the bed.
We get huge trucks for much the same reasons restaurants serve huge portions. If they served sensible portions, they wouldn’t be able to charge as much and that means smaller tips for the waitresses. It’s not the raw food that costs money in a restaurant, it’s the employees and building lease.
Similarly, it doesn’t take that many more man-hours to put together a large engine and vehicle as a small engine or vehicle, but the market is willing to pay a high price for a large vehicle, even if the largeness subtracts from the vehicle’s utility.
@Mustangman, I think tat Daimler won’t sell the A-series because it is a less expensive vehicle. If the sell it at a Mercedes Benz dealer, they fear it will degrade a brand that is known for its luxury. That’s probably why the Smart car isn’t sold as Benz.
@B.L.E., another reason restaurant portions are so large is that the ingredients are the least costly part of the meal. When I see small portion meals on the menu that’s are identical to the full size meals, they are maybe 80% of the large meal cost. We like the large portions. It provides an extra meal for me, and two extra meals for Mrs JT. It’s the same thing with automobiles. A similarly equipped midsize car is more than half the price of a full size car. If a small truck with half the capabilities of a full size truck costs more than half the price of the full size, a lot of buyers will see the value in the full size and buy it instead.
When General Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia University which was after WW II but before he was President of the United States, a meeting was scheduled which Eisenhower was to attend. The meeting was about where to build sidewalks on the campus. Eisenhower said, “Go observe where the students are walking and you will know where to build sidewalks”.
Maybe the automakers should observe what vehicles people are driving and make their products accordingly. My dad had a 1954 Buick which he bought in 1955. By 1959, the Buick had gone 100,000 miles which was a lot in those days. We went down and looked at the new 1959 Buicks and went out in a demonstrator. The 1959 Buick was lower, longer and wider, yet had less room in the passenger compartment. The trunk wouldn’t hold as much as our 1954 Buick. The seats were hard in the middle because the car was lower and cars back then had driveshaft tunnels. We were happy to get back in our old 1954 Buick. Back then, families went on vacations together (maybe.they do now,.but the school year has been lengthened so much that it cuts into family vacations). At any rate, Studebaker and Rambler sales were.up in 1959 and GM and Chrysler sales.were down.
Oh, yes, You are right! I forgot the van was unibody. I remember the vans having similar-to-S10 suspension parts on the 2WD versions and some full size truck suspension parts on the 4WD versions.
If they just do that, they will be 5 years behind consumer preferences when they release the new design 5 years later. Progress marches forward, it doesn’t march in place.
But by March 1966 the last Studebaker rolled off the line and Rambler was gone by 1969.
@Mustangman. American Motors continued on past 1969. The Rambler American was replaced by the Hornet. It was quite a while later that AMC was gone. One thing that happened at AMC was that the president of the corporation, George Romney, left AMC to become governor of Michigan. AMC’s new management thought the company ought to build full size cars to compete with GM and Ford, so they pushed the Ambassador instead of concentrating on the niche it had established in the marketplace. I owned a 1971 Ford Maverick and found a good.used 1972 AMC Hornet at the AMC dealer. There was no comparison–the Hornet was far superior. Unfortunately, the AMC dealer and I couldn’t agree on a price.
Studebaker was strapped for cash. The 1959 Studebaker Lark did earn a profit. What hurt Studebaker was the flathead 6 engine that went into many of the Larks. This engine dated back before 1940. The optional V-8 gave excellent performance and got as good or better mileage than the outdated six. It would have been far better, IMHO, if Studebaker had only installed V-8s in the Lark and advertised the car as having 8 cylinder performance and 6 cylinder economy.
Back in the 1950s, GM, Ford and Chrysler practiced planned obsolescence. Mechanically, the cars.didn’t change much. The Plymouth used the same flathead engine from sometime in the 1930s through 1959. What did happen in the mid to late 1950s is that the cars grew fins to make the previous models look obsolete. When the public figured out how ridiculous these cars looked, the fins were shorn off.
When you think about a minivan, it’s a box on wheels. You can’t add.fins to it. If you have.seen one minivan, you’ve seen them all. You make them obsolete by labeling them as “soccer mom vehicles” and pushing SUVs instead.
I sold my 2011 to my son. I replaced it with a 2017 Sienna. The style is.the same. I couldn’t get the same.color, so. I tell people I had my Sienna repainted for $49.95 by Earl Scheib.
@Triedaq Mr. Triedaq, this goofy Discourse system that Car Talk now has will make a link when someone puts a period behind a word and then puts a word without a space. while harmless it could possibly send someone to a site they should not use by accident. You can tell by the words being blue.
Carolyn can explain it better.
@VOLVO_V70 Thanks for the information. I went back with the editor and removed the periods that were accidentally inserted. On my Smartphone, the period is too close to the spacebar, and I often hit it by accident.