Mostly marketing, but also the bigger vehicle safety dilemma: if you drive a bigger vehicle and crash with a smaller vehicle, you will be fine but the smaller vehicle will not. Hence, to remain safe in a world where some drivers get SUVs/trucks, you more or less are forced to get one yourself.

An easy solution would be to tax vehicles in relation to how much road damage they cause. If drivers had to pay the weight of their vehicle to the fourth power, then they would all think twice before adding any more unnecessary (and lethal) kilos to their vehicles.

One could buy a 30K minivan for that, not a 100K truck. And that marketing seems to be very powerful if it can easily make people pay 10s of thousand dollars more for the things they don't want, I'd like to employ this marketing for my business if it had been real.

Are you critiquing the luxury goods market or am I missing something?

Probably missing. I respond to the post that explains that people drive expensive cars they don't want because they are big and well marketed with an example of cheap big cars and a request for a referral to a marketer able to oversell tens of thousand dollars of useless goods.

SUVs and trucks are a lot better for dealing with furniture and kids.

As a compact car owner I wind up renting a pickup pretty frequently, and it's already pretty cramped for my son in his carseat. Just owning one is ... alluring.

They are, also they are much more comfortable to drive. And they are not the only expensive cars on the road, just the most obvious. If the theory that people don't like cars en masse had been true then I'd expect car market to look more like, say, insurance market, which people are actually forced to buy and as the result most of the insurance advertisement is about the lowest price.

To summarize my post, _urban_ residents would likely prefer not to have cars. Someone in an earlier thread also made a good point that I should have written “high density urban”.

Some people want cars. Some people like cars. But everyone is forced to have them in most places in the US due to the feedback loop caused by investing in car infrastructure and sprawl.

Beyond that, though, even if something is a necessity, it’s rarely a race to the bottom. Your insurance example is actually an excellent instance of how markets tend to divide up: there’s the economical market (eg save 15% or more!) and the premium market (eg you’re in good hands). Same with cars.

Well, I understood your post, but I have not seen any evidence for that. Is "high density urban" something that does not exist in the US? I've lived in several big metros and everywhere people seemed to love their cars. In case it's not clear, I am doubting your "most" qualifier, I am well aware some people don't like and don't want cars, I just think they are a tiny minority.

Also I don't understand how the car market is as same as the mandatory insurance market. There is a race to the bottom on the, say, auto-insurance market while the vast majority of car promotions do not mention price at all, at most advertising preferable financial terms.

There are several studies that show that a significant portion of Americans hold a more conflicted view of driving than you believe here. A quick search gives me [0] which is cited by a ton of follow-up research. While I think this is a sociological issue and therefore difficult to pin down, I have a hard time seeing this research and thinking that “a tiny minority” of people want to do away with cars.

Re: cars vs insurance, used cars are the economical choice, so new car commercials are targeting the premium demographics.

0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09658...

Cannot read the article but the abstract does not make any of your claims. From personal experience I've only seen people on the internet saying they don't want cars, if they had been any significant majority I am sure I've met one or two in real life over the years.

Why car manufacturers don't advertise to the "necessary" buyers at all? A new Kia Rio is still cheaper than a used MB GLS.