What's happening
Anyone who has spent time driving on America’s roads in recent years has surely noticed that cars in the U.S. are getting bigger. But that transformation has been so gradual, it can be hard to appreciate just how dramatic the change has been.
The average vehicle in the U.S. weighed 4,300 pounds in 2022, a full 1,000 pounds heavier than it was four decades ago, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. There are two major reasons for this trend.
The first is that Americans have made a dramatic shift in the types of cars they prefer to drive, ditching once-ubiquitous smaller sedans in favor of SUVs and trucks. In 1975, those larger vehicles made up less than a quarter of new car sales in the U.S. Today, it’s almost 75%. Demand for smaller vehicles has become so weak that many manufacturers have significantly cut back on the number of sedans and subcompacts they offer in the U.S., or even stopped selling them altogether.
On top of that change, individual car models have also gotten larger. For example, the 2023 version of Ford’s top-selling F-150 pickup weighs nearly 600 pounds more than it did in 1991. It’s not just trucks that have gotten bulkier. SUVs, crossovers and even classic sedans like the Toyota Camry are hundreds of pounds heavier than they were a few decades ago. This trend is likely to get even more pronounced, thanks to the growing market for electric vehicles, which — for all of their clean energy benefits — tend to weigh substantially more than their gas-powered counterparts.
The simplest explanation for this transformation is that Americans prefer bigger cars — often because they feel safer driving them, like the extra interior space or believe it fits their personal image. But companies have also had strong incentives to market their SUVs and trucks to consumers for years, including government rules that set lower fuel efficiency standards for heavier cars.
Outsized cars create problems beyond tight squeezes in the parking lot. Heavier vehicles are significantly more deadly for the people they collide with, and many have large front blind spots that are believed to have contributed to a troubling increase in pedestrian deaths. Bigger cars are also less energy efficient, making it even harder for the country to meet its climate targets.
Why there’s debate
In light of all of these problems, many experts argue that reducing the number of massive cars on the road would do the country and the planet enormous good. But reversing a decades-long change — one driven by a complex combination of consumer preferences, corporate incentives and government policies — would be no easy task.
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One idea that has gained some traction recently is to use a variety of methods to make owning an oversized car more expensive. Late last year, Washington, D.C., imposed rules that more than tripled registration fees on vehicles weighing more than 6,000 pounds. Bills that could lead to similar fee increases have also been proposed in California and New York state. Others have called for regulators to roll back long-standing rules that make larger cars more profitable for manufacturers to sell or to update the national safety rating system, which currently considers the risks to only people inside a vehicle.
But some industry analysts say Americans’ obsession with big cars runs too deep for a few extra fees to curb it. They argue that, while plenty of people need a large vehicle to haul cargo or navigate dangerous roads, the main motivation for most owners is cultural. Changing that will require that people become more aware of the safety and climate harms caused by massive vehicles, to the point where they inflict a stigma of selfishness and recklessness on those who choose to own them.
