In The View From Planet Yaris, Joseph White notes that cars can be designed to meet practical needs, like the subcompact Toyota Yaris, or they can be designed for “speed, size and status”:
Since the early days of the auto industry, two competing visions of the automobile’s place in American society have battled for supremacy. One, championed by Henry Ford with the Model T, was the idea that a car was a mobility appliance. The Model T wasn’t stylish — Mr. Ford famously offered it in just one color, black. While he and his engineers improved the car over time, he didn’t fundamentally change its architecture. Instead, Ford concentrated mainly on cutting the car’s costs, in the process essentially inventing modern mass production using the moving assembly line.The rival vision was advanced and honed by General Motors, which during much of the first two decades of the 20th century was an upstart chasing Henry Ford’s tail. GM’s leaders realized that cars could be more than appliances. They could be expressions of the owner’s personality. They could be status symbols. They could come in colors. Designers could render new body styles as often as every year, the better to entice consumers to buy cars more often, for fear of appearing out of fashion.
Cars have changed over the last 20 years, but the emphasis has not been on smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles:
The average 2005 model light vehicle — the average — runs from stop to 60 miles per hour in 9.9 seconds. In 1975, the average car loped to 60 miles per hour in 14.1 seconds. The average 1975 car had a mere 137 horsepower under the hood. The average 2005 vehicle packs 212 horsepower — reflecting, among other trends, a horsepower race in “family” segments such as mid-size sedans and minivans.It’s true, as industry representatives often stress, that average fuel economy improved by 60% to 21 miles per gallon in 2005 from 13.1 miles per gallon in 1975. But since 1987, average light-vehicle fuel economy has declined from 22.1 miles per gallon, reflecting in large part the shift to SUVs. About half the 2005 vehicles sold were classed as light trucks, compared to 28% in 1987.
The auto industry looks a lot better when one considers how much fuel it takes to move a ton of vehicle weight. That measure has improved nearly 58% since 1975.