A tool is only as useful as its user.

If you’re going to talk about how big cars are getting, you need to look at the generations side-by-side. Compare Tahoes to Tahoes: Tahoes are illustrative of little length gain from the '90s GMT400 to the early '10s GMT900 but show a not-insignificant increase in bumper/hood height, and the GMT900-GMT1YC shows a significantly higher hood and a more significant increase in size.

If the hood height was related to cooling system efficiency, the GMT900’s 8,500lb max towing capacity should be increased- but instead it decreased to 8,400lbs (and yes, I know the GMT900 wasn’t initially engineered to SAE J2807).

Whatever you do, don’t use the Lotus Elan to compare to anything modern.

Stupidly oversized American utes are everywhere in Australia now. So fuck you, US car industry, for sending them here.

Putting a Hummer H2 next to an Escalade really sums up how desensitized we are to pointlessly oversized vehicles. When the Hummer H2 came out in the early 2000’s it dwarfed everything, it looked so ridiculous on the road and barely fit in between the lanes. The Escalade/Suburban/Yukon is nearly 2 feet longer and is just as wide as the Hummer and we see them all over the road and don’t really think twice about it.

I think it’s getting ridiculous. Call it authoritarian, but I think it’s past time governments start putting hard limits on civilian vehicle sizes, except for rare situations that would also need rare additional licensing.

I recently went from an 07 Cobalt to a new Integra A-Spec because this relative size of vehicle just makes sense for me, and it’s just frustrating how hidden I am in a lot of traffic scenarios. I’m a pretty big guy, like 300 pounds, and I still fit in this car perfectly, I don’t get the obsession with land tanks aside from pure safety reasons.