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.
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.