Big cars might make a comeback - as electric vehicles.
The big, "full-sized" American car never died, it just morphed into a pickup truck or SUV. CAFE regulations, bumper regulations and emissions regulations for cars were much stricter than for light trucks. Back in the day, the thinking was, light trucks were such as small part of the market and were used for hauling things and thus didn't need 5 MPH bumpers (or later, 2.5MPH bumpers) or 25 MPG fuel mileage and so on and so forth. They were held to far lesser standards than cars.
It took the automakers nearly a decade to figure out this loophole in the law - and even then only when people started showing up at car dealers and while looking at some econo-box, saw in the background a big honkin' Chevy Suburban and said, "Hey, what's that?" And the era of the luxury SUV was born. Pickup trucks followed suit, growing in size and adding extra doors. Many have a "bed" that is really just a big trunk or an afterthought. The heaviest thing most haul is groceries.
Cars, meanwhile, started disappearing from the road. American car companies hardly produce any of them anymore and what few they produce are unmemorable. The SUV has become the defacto American car. Only the Japanese and Germans seem to make much money selling four-door sedans or coupes anymore. Once upon a time, these body styles ruled the road!
But that might all change. Electric cars are here and more are being offered every day. And while at first many of them were tiny cars which punished their owners in an effort to expand driving range (while not increasing battery weight) Tesla demonstrated you could build a "full-sized" four-door luxury sedan that was faster than a scalded (hell)cat and had a usable range of 300 miles or more. Today, we see people driving on the Interstate, from Maine to Florida, in electric cars. Obviously, they are stopping somewhere for the night to charge up, but it can be done. Some can now charge 100 miles range in as little as ten minutes! And who wants to drive more than 300 miles a day anyway? A big day for us is 200 miles, tops!
But it gets weirder. GM is introducing an electric Hummer and an electric Silver-a-do - two vehicles which, as internal combustion vehicles, had the worst gas mileage on the planet. (Ford already has also come out with their electric F150). They are EPA rated for nearly 50 MPG which is paltry compared to most EVs, but a staggering rating for an internal-combustion powered pickup truck or large SUV.
So this brings up the question: Do we need to pretend that SUVs and pickup trucks aren't being sold as cars anymore? In other words, if you want to meet a corporate CAFE rating of 30 MPG or more, an electric car - even a "land yacht" should have no trouble meeting that number. Cars no longer have to look like a bar of soap. Big Lincolns and Cadillacs and Chrysler Imperials could make a comeback - with brick-shaped styling, huge chrome bumpers, fake spare tires, opera windows, landau bars, and peeling vinyl roofs - the works!
A lot of Americans are suspicious of electric cars - claiming that they will spell the end of an American way of life. No longer will they be able to "blow coal" on some bicyclist or Prius driver. And with the price of gas going up and up, they will have to trade their big truck for some punishment econo-bucket and it's all Joe Biden's fault!
I say, au contraire. Electric vehicles may save the American way of life. Not only will they allow us to drive our house-sized cars around, we may be able to literally drive our houses around. Electric RVs with banks of batteries could self-drive across the country and run the A/C and microwave oven "off the grid" for days at a time. So much is possible if we keep an open mind.
On the other hand, if we keep relying on a diminishing oil resource for our power, we will keep polluting the planet and have to rely on some pretty odious countries for our supply of energy. And no, it doesn't matter if we are "energy independent" - the world price of oil is based on the world market. So if there is a shortage in Europe, the price here goes up as well.
The only good thing to come out of the Russo-Ukraine war is perhaps a realization that we can't keep depending on sketchy and odious governments for our energy supplies. We look the other way while they kill their own people and commit human rights violations, because we have to beg them for gas and oil. If we want to make any progress, that has to stop.
And who doesn't want a big-ass electric Lincoln Continental that seats six and goes zero-to-sixty in three seconds?
