There are a few different stories going on here.

One story is engineering success. The engineers squeeze out so much more performance per amount of gasoline burned, that the cost of extra weight from a fuel economy standard is significantly less than 25 or 50 years ago. If you chart the fuel efficiency over the same time period, the fleet average fuel economy went from 20 to 34 mpg, even as vehicles were getting more powerful and heavier. A 2026 Camry Hybrid has a 232 hp drivetrain (184 hp from the gasoline engine) that manages to push 3700 lbs 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Those are sports car stats from the 80's, and yet the modern Camry manages to get 44 miles per gallon in fuel economy. Charting emissions shows an even more pronounced improvement.

Similarly, the rise of electric vehicles has increased the average vehicle weight. Batteries are heavy, and the whole chassis needs to accommodate that.

Another story is unintended consequences from dumb regulations. The fuel economy standards were updated for the 2011 model year to allow a sliding scale where vehicles with larger footprints were allowed to be less fuel efficient. Naturally, smaller vehicles were disincentivized, and compact trucks and compact cars all but disappeared. These regs need to be updated, and we'll see the return of smaller vehicles for those of us who prefer them.

And another story is shifting consumer preferences. For a whole bunch of reasons, Americans have expressed a preference for taller and taller vehicles, where crossover SUVs are much more common than the old wagons, the relative balance of sedans versus SUVs has shifted entirely in favor of SUVs.

That’s vehicles classified as “light duty” — pickup trucks.

All other vehicle classes are down in curb weight over that same period.

Look, give us come kind of civilized measurement. Like how many pygmy marmosets is that?

The size of vehicles around me in the US is absurd. I live in a pretty white & republican area, with a mix of rednecks in their compensators and temporarily embarassed billionaires in their 2-3 ton $100K luxury grocery getters.

I'm a big guy and I drive an old Mazda3 sedan that we've had for almost almost a decade and a half. It's what some Europeans might call a family car. It has fun driving dynamics which I care about and enjoy, though that seems to put me in a tiny minority. It's even practical enough that I have hauled home 8-foot lumber dozens of times with the back seats folded down, because I actually build shit unlike most of the truck drivers.

It sucks knowing all the SUVs with their rushed & distracted drivers weigh 50% more than my vehicle, sure. But the pickup trucks have become caricatures of themselves. I'm sure most folks in this community have seen the charts showing how terrible the forward-looking visibility is in modern pickups versus everything from older trucks to heavy construction equipment. It's like the number one feature driving sales is how fucking high off the ground they can get the hood/bonnet.

It's like driving around mobile buildings. The front grilles of these vehicles are just a vertical wall. And even for how large and high the entire bodies of these vehicles are, the new look seems to be having the hood/bonnet in the front sitting even higher than the edges of the bed in the back. I might think that automakers were in competition to see who could get the most customer's children run over, but I am all too familiar with our garbage culture where everything is a competition and every other person must fall on a spectrum somewhere between rival and mortal enemy.

Just the empty cars and not with an average American inside, right?

My wife and I purchased a new Japanese car last year. Nobody makes small cars anymore, except maybe Suzuki with the Swift? Our small cheap car is bigger than we had anticipated. Good car though.

When I get in some of the newer SUVs it feels like driving a boat.

American cars cover more pavement than they ever have

Then goes ahead and shows a change from 48.9 to 51.8

Whoever made those charts wanted to make the change look bad, no matter what.

Where is the chart of the average heavy injuries per passenger? Or the average energy efficiency of engines?

square metres

US-americans will get a stroke

The 5 square meters are no accurate display of the pavement covered by those cars, because they're much longer than just their wheelbase.

12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride!

Right-sizing cars is the cheapest, most rational option for space and public money. There is no reason not to do it other than wasting precious public and private resources into building more parking spots and repairing road infrastructures more often.

Fat people want big cars. You can overlay these graphs.

America needs to make its own KEI car standard. at least they wouldnt be as dangerous for pedestrians, or as disastrous for the environment as the fucking rolling city blocks we have now.

Especially since we're never gonna get a functional public transit system.

Meanwhile, the average parking stall is smaller than a 1978 Honda Civic.

Did you change the first graph from weight to horsepower?

So does the average American.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to directly complain about fast 0-60 times. Slower acceleration removes options and makes merging more difficult; not all high speed roads have onramps of adequate length.

Definitely agreed on weight.

The Y scale on the third graph is a joke; that's like a 4% change over 20 years. Wheelbase is not the same as vehicle length.

Is there a metric version?

It's an arms race. I prefer a bicycle, but am I really insane enough to ride it in between these tanks? My wife is afraid in traffic, she would never want to get a small car, just because of her safety concerns.

The only thing stopping this madness is regulations.

One of the sad bits of this is that the move to EVs, while a positive in many ways, also makes our cars even heavier for the battery.