People should do what is generally done here in Northern Europe. Get a Stationwagon/Estate with a tow hitch and a trailer. With that you get a smaller, more practical, car in terms of day-to-day driving. And when you really need to move something bigger/something you don't want inside your car you still have options.

Renting a trailer locally is incredibly cheap too, costing just $26 at a nationwide gas station. IKEA, and similar local stores, will lend you a trailer for free.

Here's how two friends and I transport our gokarts. One in the trailer, another secured on top. The car on the day of the picture is a Mercedes CLA Coupé. Other times it's the other friend's Ford Fiesta. And yet other times it's one of our dads driving an Audi Q5 or a Peugeot 3008.

https://imgur.com/jOoEzuS

A hitch gives you the price and size advantages of e.g. a Ford Fiesta while still having the option of hauling several hundred kilos worth of stuff. The Q5 can haul a ton and a half. I'd wager that very few people regularly (weekly) need to haul several tons worth of stuff, and the few that do have a legitimate reason for owning a pickup.

In the past few decades, we've seen many cars here go from having some decent tow rating to a very low tow rating or saying in the manual not to tow.

Just for example, the Mazda 3 in Australia has a tow rating of 1200kg. In the UK it's 1500kg. In the U.S., towing is not allowed at all per the owner's manual.

I'm not sure what all the reasons for this discrepancy is. I know when I lived in Germany where towing fairly big things with fairly small cars was more common, I noticed some differences in towing practices:

1. They use a different style of hitch that flips down under the bumper instead of the receiver style hitch in the U.S. The German style hitch kept the ball closer to the bumper, which improves stability.

2. The trailer is loaded with a fairly balanced weight distribution so that there is not much weight on the tongue of the trailer. This keeps the rear suspension of the car from being compressed and keeps weight on the front wheels of the car. It has the downside of making the trailer less stable at higher speeds.

3. Presumably because of this lower stability, many trailer/car/driver combinations are limited to 80kph. Car/trailer combinations tend to have a critical speed where they become unstable if the weight from the trailer is not loaded in the front, and 80kph is a typical speed where this can start to happen.

4. Germany requires extra licensing to tow a trailer. Someone who actually gets some training and has to pass a test is going to be a lot safer towing than someone who got 5 minutes of instruction at U-Haul.

I have seen a lot of trailers reversed into expensive cars, flooded cars, trailers falling off and hitting things at speed, cars driving into the sea because the driver got out to check the trailer, etc.

A lot could be fixed with better software and sensors. For example a car should be able to measure the angle of the trailer and apply the brakes when someone tries to reverse-jackknife. It should measure oscillation frequencies and damping factors at highway speeds and set a safe max speed. It should refuse to start the engine at all if a trailer isn't correctly hooked up including electricals and brake lines, etc. Finally, trailer brakes need an overheat/wearout sensor so the driver is aware if their trailer brakes have failed before they find out when going down a hill at 70 mph.

As a kid we would sit down at our neighborhood landing in the summer and watch boat launches for entertainment. I saw at least 2 cars get submerged, people run into each other, many many fist fights. Prior to allowing me to pull our trailer, my dad made me back up (with trailer attached) in circles and figure 8s in a parking lot and then in and out of the driveway many times. Showing up to busy landing on summer holiday is NOT the time to learn how to back down a trailer.

It effectively means trailers are now only for professionals.

F.ex. where I live a Hilux or a Landcruiser is a must.

What I wanted to say is that a 'station wagon' is useless for half a year in some climates. And it doesn't make any sense to keep two cars, one for 'summer' and one for the 'rest of the seasons'.

The best vehicle I’ve ever driven in the snow was a tiny 2001 Mercury Cougar. Snow tires make a world of difference.

The automakers have determined that this is not practically achievable, and so you can't buy a truck like the old S-10 or a pre-Tacoma Toyota pickup anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

If the goal was to reduce fossil fuel consumption, then fossil fuels should have been slapped with a huge tax.

Immediately the automakers would have been incentivized to produce more efficient vehicles.

Of course, it’s politically impossible to do the right thing due to the general public wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

I think a lot of "environmentally conscious" people don't realize that more and more of these types of environmental regulations will come at some direct cost in terms human-safety.

And also that a surprising number of politicians/activists/people are so committed to the dogma that they don't have any problem with that.

So net result of indirect regulations to decrease fuel consumption is increased fuel consumption, and more dangerous vehicles for everyone to contend with who is not inside as large of a vehicle.

Simply making people pay more for fuel would have incentivized them to prioritize what kind of vehicle to buy, and make it possible for smaller pickups to still exist and/or a rental market for pickups to flourish.

EPA regulation and govt overreach/ unintended consequences are what led to these design changes, not market demand.

The blue-book price for my 12 year old steel-framed truck has gone up every year since I bought it used.

>before they turned into a political/biological/emotional statement piece

The anti-truck crowd, which supported all the regulations that led to the current state of vehicle design, are the ones that made this a political/emotional issue, whether they realize it or not.

>In other words, the regulations put in place to get better mileage out of vehicles also led to an increase in truck size. “There was kind of an incentive to maybe stretch the wheelbase a couple of inches and set the tires maybe an inch [farther] apart, because you get a bigger platform and slightly smaller target,” said Edmunds. “Now, the bigger vehicle would be heavier and might use more fuel, so it’s not as easy as just doing that. But certainly there was a feeling that if they did need to make it bigger to accommodate more passengers, the fuel economy target wouldn’t be onerous. They could do it.”

That statement is not very convincing that the regulations lead to bigger trucks.

It's also super easy in these situations at a nursery, etc.. that the car or SUV owner has to make multiple trips and waste tons of gas because the vehicle can't hold much.

People who don't own homes too easily forget it's really really common to have jobs around your house/yard where you're dealing with thousands of pounds of supplies.

You can overload an SUV/Wagon/whatever incredibly quickly with sand, mulch, rock, etc.. and it will be nowhere near full.

To elaborate, since I've even had to explain this to some "eco-conscious" engineers:

This is also partially why trucks have gone from steel to aluminum, which is lighter (to gain a marginal increase in mpg), but also requires larger shapes (moment-arms) to achieve the same amount of strength and resilience (crumple zone rigidity & required crumple zone size, etc).

Of course the other side effect is that using aluminum frames/engines won't last as long, since they deform easier, so all that saved energy from increased mpg doesn't make up for the wasted embedded energy from decreased useful lifespan.