A thousand times this.
You used to look through the car in front of you to see the traffic in front of that car
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Fuck Cars
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To be fair, those cars with huge windows and great visibility handled rollover accidents by crushing the heads and necks of everyone in them.
Everyone driving SUVs to get to the office is dumb, but we don't want to go back to the days where the passenger cabin is the primary crumple zone either.
I remember being annoyed by a noticeable increase in the diameter of the cabin pillars of new cars that happened in the mid-late 00’s until I found out it’s because before then rollover protection was akin to prayer and new standards were the culprit for the change. Never complained about the reduced visibility since.
A young lady I worked with for a while was in a wreck years ago, before I met her, that resulted in a rollover in an older vehicle. It absolutely flattened the top of the cabin and pinned her inside with a badly shattered femur. From memory she said it was 4 hours before someone found her. Frankly; fuck that. Give me a new car with a bunch of safety considerations, thanks.
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The factory window tint that's now standard is also incredible for making getting into a parked car on a hot day so much more bearable
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I hate the huge SUVs you see all over the roads, I have a 2021 Seat Leon FR PHEV hatchback, and around here the Kia EV9 is really popular.
While not as large as the stupid Ford F-150s, the EV9 is fucking huge.
The bonnet of an EV9 reaches almost up to my Leon's roof:
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/seat-leon-2020-5-door-hatchback-vs-kia-ev9-2023-suv/
It should be illegal to have a car with the headlight at the eye level of a driver of a standard WV Golf type car.
Bonnet height for private vehicles should be tightly regulated, they are a key contributer to lethality in car accidents yet increasing every year. I could imagine some steep increase in taxes (at least at purchase if nothing else) the further you deviate from a defined reasonable height. People do care about money, make lethal asocial choices more expensive.
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station wagon superiority
i need an electric station wagon goshdarnit!!
I really want a large electric station vagon, or even better an electric camper with decent range.
Hopefully its just a few years away.
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My contribution - 1990 Volkswagen Vanagon. It is pretty large, but hilariously it's still smaller than a Chevy Tahoe lol.
And it probably fits more stuff!
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The solution to cars being shit isn't old cars. It's bicycles and trains. Lots and lots and lots of trains and bicycles.
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Not the 90s, return to most people not owning a car
Make cars a choice again. Not a necessity!
And watch car ownership rates plummet. Turns out most people would gladly save their car money for something else if they could.
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Yes!
Finally a nuanced take in this community.
Cars wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so oversized
“Fuck cars”, like “ACAB”, is often a quick tagline to a problem people understand is more nuanced. I don’t think so many people here would literally like all cars in existence to be crushed in a heap.
Literally most though. And I agree.
Public transport is the way to go.
Exceptions for delivery and trucks for construction, emergency services etc.
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Cars wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so oversized
And if there weren't so many of them.
And if they didn't pollute so much
Edit: oh and the traffic accidents of course! But aside from their size, the required infrastructure, their number, the pollution, and the traffic accidents, cars are totally fine!
Edit 2: And the noise! But other than those things...
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Smaller cars will continue to kill a few billion animals yearly. They will also continue to kill around a million of humans every year, or about one human every 30 seconds.
The area covered by parking lots is mostly impervious and contributes to flooding as well as heat islands. Cars and parking lots make cities hotter and are worsening climate change. They also contribute to noise pollution. And no, electric cars are not better for noise because at highway speed they are as noisy as fossil fuel cars, and at low speed, their pedestrian warning system is also louder than fossil fuel cars.
I can be nuanced and understand that some people will always need a car, but most people in the world live in a town, a suburb, or a city, and the existence of the vast majority of those cars cannot be justified, whatever their size. Of course smaller cars are desirable. Electric cars are desirable A mix of electric and smaller would be better than status quo. But fewer cars is even more desirable.
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I suspect you and I are saying "fuck cars" for very different reasons
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My humble contribution
I mean this clearly shows how rectangular cars were back then, which is not great for collisions. They should at least stay round.
Also i read a discussion recently about how EVs are heavier due to their battery (and that's supposedly bad for pedestrians when they get into a crash with the car), and i immediately had to think of how enormously overweight SUV vehicles are today, and people don't complain enough about how enormously overweight SUVs are. In fact some people praise it and say that the heavy mass is good for the car-driver of the SUV because when they get into a crash, they'll take less damage (while everyone around them takes more, btw).
Really shows how arguments are twisted and turned around when it's the oil lobby that stands to profit from it.
In the case of SUVs, it's not primarily the oil lobby, it's car manufacturers. Put simply, they get to charge way more than the extra materials costs, for a "premium" vehicle. They're making bank out of this shit.
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In a surprising reversal, the meme got it right (SUVs, 90s) and the title did not (SUV's).
Even when dealing with acronyms and numbers, " 's " indicates possession.
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You'll never convince me that SUVs don't exist solely to sell what is effectively a minivan to deeply insecure men.
Deeply insecure men buy pickup trucks with hoods I can barely see over. SUVs and their perception of "safety", storage space, and ride height are why women are the primary purchasers.
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I do like my crumple zones, but would like modern cars to downsize like they did in the malaise era.
Ditch cars
I mean, it might be small but it got worse gas mileage, was heavier and would kill you in a fender Bender.
Turning a corner was like opening a submarine hatch. The brakes locked up causing more accidents and deaths. The suspension allowed the cars to roll easier. And if you were hit by one of them, you had a much higher chance of severe injury or death due to the lack of crumple zone.
People really need to stop looking for solutions to modern problems by looking to the past at the things that were the reason we ended up with the modern problems.
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It was always an american disease from my perspective. But it slowly infected Europe. Now every goddamn household drives a fucking huge ass minibus/truck/Fucking Hummer sized family wagon to work.
The worst part is when they take up so much parking space that the lots next to them are practically unusable because they fuck you, I needed this bigass milonstertruck for casual commotion.
Imagine if speed limits were variable based on a car's weight and lethality. Only small cars are allowed to go fast.
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This is a nice thought, but if that older car hit a wall at the same rapid speed as any of those modern cars, everyone in it dies while the people in the modern car walk.
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Oh, that Ford Escort model was truly Fix Or Repair Daily.
God, how bad it was. The shittiest and most unreliable car I ever had.
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I enjoy my small shitbox (2007 KIA Rio5 hatchback) and wish I had a smaller shitbox to commute in
One of the biggest perks is the fact that my little shitbox is FIXABLE by sane people with standard tools! No special tools, parts are literally everywhere, and all the parts are DIRT CHEAP. The engine is in Hyundais and KIAs from 1989 to 2011. If it's a 1.6L 4 cylinder made by those 2 companies it's the same engine between ALL OF THEM.
EDIT: The biggest difference is the exhaust routing. The midpipe on the Hyundais is straight, the KIAs it's got a bump.
I saw a 1980s Honda Civic on the road the other day and it made me so happy. I don't even love that model — the Prelude was the better small car, but I loved the Accord. Still, seeing something from the mid-to-late 1980s (I think they all got a little chonkier in 1988, so this would have been older than that) made me smile. Those cars were good on gas, too.
I mean they were built for the 70's gas crunch, it makes sense they were good on gas. The SUVslop and TruckSlop we see today is largely emissions control dodging, feature carcinization, alongside a healthy dose of Jevons Paradox. Reject modern car design, demand smaller cars.
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Meanwhile me back in University:
I hate them, I miss med-hatches and saloons. But they are hard to get hold of now, it feels like its the middle between tiny streetcars or ugly ute/wagons. I have even considered an estate car recently.
The days of flying around feeling like you were in a superpowered go cart so close to the ground
Yeah around here the little 90s car would look even more out of place since most people are driving lifted pickups that they are too out of shape to even lift anything into to haul. Guess what country I live in! :D
Not with those crash safety test results. I’ll take a modern sedan if I’m going to have a car
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