Not at all. It’s just that in the USA, things are on a different scale, and it makes sense to have larger vehicles.

For example, a couple of years ago on eBay I bought a second-hand carrier battle group. Now, if you’re not from the USA, I can already hear you objecting that “it’s impractical” to drive a small fleet of ocean-going vessels on suburban streets, or that “it’s wasteful” to retain a staff of thousands just to make the daily commute, or that it’s “not all that great, environment-wise,” to knock over city blocks every time I make a Starbucks run. And, in your country, I’d guess you’d have a point. But here in the USA, once you factor the need to carry back all the stuff we buy at Costco, you can see how the extra capacity of a carrier battle group would actually save you trips and, in the long run, be more efficient than a smaller vehicle. So, once you think it through, it actually makes sense.

It’s all a matter of scale.

For my commute, I chose rail instead – Budd Pioneer III-series rolling stock go for surprisingly little on eBay these days, and at least where I live, it's not terribly expensive to file the paperwork for a zoning easement to add a 700v third rail to a local stretch of freight rail (you can usually find qualified installers on Craigslist).

These rolling stock are single-operator capable, so the staffing costs can be quite low, and generally buying electric for a home rapid transit system is far cheaper than buying fuel for a home naval vessel or home fighter jet, especially if you can power down the transformers while you're at work.

I disagree. I understand the limitations of land-based military vehicles, but tmoertel has it right. Oceangoing vessels make for quite practical daily drivers. If you can afford it I would highly recommend a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. I take it as a point of pride and efficiency that I only need to refuel it once every two decades, though I admit that sourcing a sufficient quantity of reactor grade fissile material for two separate reactors may be a bit of a hassle for the average commuter.

However, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. The 260,000 horsepower provided by the reactors supply plenty of energy to operate an on-site synthetic biofuel manufacturing facility to provide liquid fuel for the fleet of light aircraft in case I want to go to Costco or anywhere else not equipped with large enough pier to dock the carrier, and you can get a pretty good deal on decommissioned F-14 Tomcats these days. Plus, flying over all the traffic at Mach 2 is really satisfying.

And as time passes and technology improves the operating costs continue to fall. I've joined up with a pilot project in a joint venture between Google and Cyberdyne Systems to develop a self-driving carrier, and so far they've been able to reduce the required crew complement by more than 30% in just two years. I estimate that before the end of the decade we'll have it fully automated and then every American family will be able to operate their own carrier and fleet of fighter aircraft.

Or is the fire truck particularly bad for some reason?

Okay I get it, you want a big car for that roadtrip or vacation. Understandable, I do too. But for everyday stuff? My hatchback does perfectly fine around town ... hell, it does perfectly well on most vacations and long drives too.

Something occurred to me today regarding Americans and big huge stupid cars... I was watching the NASCAR earlier and there was a throwaway comment about some driver's sponsors being "local". By local they mean 60 miles away. Now to a Brit, maybe other Europeans, 60 miles feels like anything but "local". So, I get the impression that we don't understand the sort of scale of travel there is in the US. Which kinda begins to explain this fascination with big large cars with big lazy engines. These cars fit American geography and scale. I think it also explain what oil seems that bit more important to the Americans.

See, Im pretty sure that if an American came to live in the UK (maybe else where in Europe) and tried to run a big old American car here, it would take about a week before this American when off and bought a little European type car. Equally, Im pretty sure we'd ditch a small Euro type car for a big old American thing is we went to the US.

I too think American cars are a bit silly, but I think they make sense in context. I think American cars will get smaller and more efficient, but I think they will always be designed with those long distances and scales in mind.

I would daresay it's more cultural than geographical, or at least it's an isolated case. Distances here in Australia are even larger, yet SUVs/4WDs don't outpace the small-medium car sector in year-over-year growth.

Our 2005 Honda CRV is approaching 120,000 miles, and both myself and my fiancée telecommute.

A colleague just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.

The idea that most people think that 100 miles is a long way is silly.

A colleage just drove/ferry back home from Germany - which nobody regards as anything unusual.

In the US, everyone's driveway is more like something approaching a major civil engineering undertaking, being the size of a tennis court, consuming several cubic metres of concrete, steel reinforcing, etc.

I can't believe how big U.S. houses are. A quick Googling shows they're much larger than the average house in my country:

Average House Size By Country Australia - 214.6 sq m (2310 sq ft), 2.56 people per household (pph) USA - 201.5 (2170), 2.6 pph New Zealand - 196.2 (2112), 2.6 pph Canada - 181 (1950), 2.5 pph Japan - 132 (1420), this year the pph in Tokyo dropped below 2 for the first time (1.99) UK - 76 (818), 2.1 pph

and those are averages, I'm sure median shows a different picture (small flats for Europe and urban Latin America, large houses for suburban U.S. and Australia).

The median for a flat here in Montevideo is about 60 square meters (the one I rent is 55 square meters, and most new ones are even smaller), and the median house is about 100 square meters (and forget about the humungous driveways and stuff the U.S. suburban house has).

http://notbuyinganything.blogspot.com/2012/03/average-house-...

But this is exactly why gas guzzling cars are idiotic.

What I do like is that even with a small circle of friends it is almost guaranteed that you know someone with a large truck that can help you move large things, such as couches =).

I have a Renault Twingo (3.4 meters long), and before that I had a Maruti 800 (3.2 meters long).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twingo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maruti_800

That's what I consider a small car :) . My father had a Fiat 600 (the original one), and now has a Suzuki Maruti Alto/A-Star

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_600

The current best-selling car in Uruguay is the chinese-made Chery QQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery_QQ

Yes, the Impreza is a small car, I've seen people drive that in The Netherlands (although Subaru seems to be pretty rare there). Compare it to an Audi A6 wagon for example, plenty of those available.

I guess small is in the eye of the beholder, my car isn't much bigger than my grandpa's Opel Astra for example, and that is considered a small car in The Netherlands.

In the States, a Subaru Impreza is a compact car in size

Part of my family lives in Austria, and what they consider a "small car" is more along the lines of a Volkswagen Golf, which is a little under 4 meters.

According to Wikipedia itself, the Impreza wold be a "Compact" (what North Americans consider a small car)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_car

while the Golf would be a "subcompact" (what I thought Europeans considered a small car)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcompact

and the Maruti would be a "city car" (what we Uruguayans consider a small car)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_car

My 8.5 year old car has 31,000 miles on it. I haven't had a job since 2007 where I have to drive to work. My daily commute now is a 1.5 mile round trip walk. I hate traffic and don't understand other Americans who are fine with driving long distances on a daily basis.

Given how little I currently commute (2x/week), I am actually considering trading in my diesel VW for an old vanagon -- to facilitate some camping trips and the like. It will mean less milage efficiency, but 2x/week commuting won't take a huge hit.

Your hatchback is perfectly fine around town, but it can't tow a boat, and most people don't like to have multiple cars.

So, what winds up happening is people buy the most car they think they will need. It's totally overkill driving to work, and plenty of people never actually tow that boat, but this is why it happens.

Europeans would do the exact same thing, I figure, if they lived in an economic climate with similar gas prices and car taxes and such. With the possible exception of people living in old cities whose roads are just too small.

It's more the rule than the exception. European car makers have a specific car category named "City cars", big enough to host 4 to 5 people but as small as possible to be easy to park etc.

Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful. This is why he don't understand.

American cities are modern and built for cars, most big european cities have been built for walkers and horses, so now we got a tons of oneway streets and a general lack of space to park cars.

Parking on main street, for example, is nigh impossible. Parts of it aren't wide enough for many cars to go past one another while the streetside parking is in use (and it always is, the town has no parking since... who needed parking in 1800?). And then there is a big state university in town, so you end up getting delivery trucks to the campus all the time and some drivers don't have the experience to know not to try taking an 18 wheeler down main street.

This is a very important distinction! What a European considers a huge SUV is a small town car in the US. At least judging from what I've seen on my visits.

Some of those cars are just uncomfortably big.

It probably could and where the hell would I even put a boat. Silly americans :D

This "aspirational" angle to buying big cars actually explains a lot, like a fat kid drinking Gatorade or out of shape guys wearing tracksuits to the mall, "just in case". After all, if you're driving a big car, no-one will be able to definitively say you don't own a boat..

Granted if, you want to pull a 22' boat that's another story. But, for lake fishing it's fine.

While the engine can handle it, that's generally not the issue with towing anymore. Like you said, todays engines are powerful. It's the rest of the car that needs to be beefed up for towing. Particularly the transmission and breaks.

My 4-runner had plenty of power to tow my boat, but over time the wear and tear on the rest of the vehicle would destroy a perfectly good car. I now have a Tundra that is build to pull the load. FYI, my boat ready to fish plus trailer is ~7k pounds.

To the original poster wondering why people want such big cars. Personally I would love a smaller car, but I enjoy my boat more :)

Second, there are more issues than power. Towing 1500lbs behind a Corolla puts a lot of strain on the car that it wasn't particularly meant to handle on anything other than an occasional basis, especially with things like automatic transmissions. Also very important, a Corolla is 2700lbs. 1500lbs of trailer starts to get sketchy, and the trailer can start yanking around the tow vehicle.

Edit: yes, you are right, lake fishing in a rowboat, you don't need a dedicated tow vehicle. Thing is, people dream they will get that 22' boat in a few years, so they buy the F-650 or whatever.

Anyway, sure there are limits, but a nice 14 foot boat at 1,000lb plus 500lb for the trailer is still a decent boat IMO.

For the "everyday" commute, I'm proudly on the bus and noticing as of late that this is getting more and more common with younger age groups who want to live in urban areas, where mass transit is most convenient. I would bet this trend continues for the next few decades in the United States.

[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/d...

- My wife wants to get a boat as well as we were gifted jet skis by her family.

- I anticipate moving at least three times over the next 10 years (the lifetime I give to the car barring any accidents) which the pickup will be great to be able to move things as well as being able to hookup a UHaul and go.

The biggest plus for me though is that I'm 6' 3" and 250lb and don't necessarily fit into some of the cars that are economical when it comes to fuel. My previous car (Toyota Corolla) actually would hurt my knees when driving more than 30 minutes because I had to angle my legs in a weird position in order to drive.

"According to Polk's data, the large mainstream sedan segment has plunged from a 5.8-percent share of the US car market in 2008 to just 3.5 percent in 2012. That sales drop is enough to put this most American of car bodystyles behind the minivan segment, a market whose own sales slide has been comparatively well documented."

http://www.autoblog.com/2013/03/24/large-car-market-witherin...

It's OK for other people to have a bit of fun. Really, it is.

Not flying doesn't really reduce emissions though... Those planes are going to fly whether or not you are on it.

The new Dreamliner jet is a good example of this (once they solve the battery problem and can fly the sucker...). It's massively more efficient than its predecessors (20% more efficient than the 767 according to Boeing). That's a huge jump.

On an individual level, sure, but not flying reduces demand, which in turn reduces the number of flights.

Try to get flights from London to Paris or from Paris to Lyon. Not flying stops planes from flying very quickly.

This is an extreme example of tragedy of the commons type thinking. Why bother doing anything because someone else will do it anyways?

A lot of cars are used by a single person. Almost never (generalised) to it's full potential.

I'm uncertain about this, but I think most planes are very well utilised (closer to the full potential rather than to the opposite) - since it's so uneconomical to go empty or close to empty utilisation.

I'm not however disputing that a plane emits a lot more emissions than road bound vehicles.

Average CO2 per person in the US is around 17 tonnes per year[1].

A single flight from LA to NYC (round trip) is equivalent to about 2 tonnes after taking into account some high-altitude effect[2].

Driving 12,000 miles per year at 25mpg releases about 4 tonnes[3].

So, if you cut your driving in half and then take one long domestic flight, you are just breaking even. If you take multiple long flights per year, you really have no hope of staying below the average carbon footprint for an american. Unless maybe you live in a tree or something.

I'm not saying this to be critical. I fly, and I am not ashamed of that. But we should be honest with ourselves, and not think that riding a bus once in a while and buying locally-sourced vegetables makes up for taking three international trips a year.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviatio... [3] http://www.stewartmarion.com/carbon-footprint/html/carbon-fo...

Well, yeah. Seriously though, I didn't get the impression that he drives it every day, and the town that he lives in is tiny. I doubt anyone would. I don't know if he mentions it but I'd estimate the bounds for his fuel mileage to be 4 mpg to 10 mpg.

>What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be hardly justifiable at all in our trade

If you lived in Missoula Montana, I doubt you'd consider a car / truck as optional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Because I'm thinking your computer would use less electricity and cause less CO2 pollution if it were half as fast as it is.

Bike photo! https://mobile.twitter.com/jchris/status/312728928919896064

I've actually driven this bike with complete windsurf and kitesurf set in the trunk.

You're joking right? Portland was nauseating. Filled to the brim with smug hipsters who apparently share your sentiment: that the rest of us are insane for having a car to travel to work/home/vacations etc.

http://www.needalimo.com/our-cars/novelty-limos/fire-engine-...

I have fkn loved Unimogs for years. To make matters worse, I live near a dealer. Lucky for me I can't afford a new one and even the used ones command a pretty penny.

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Mercedes-Benz-Unimog-U-400-8110

No, this is just one person, don't think it's representative of Americans.