I'm guessing you either don't remember or didn't see what SUVs and light pickup trucks looked like in the 80's and 90's, but there is absolutely a lower bound on size that is way below where we are today.
The big problem -- pun intended -- is that vehicles are de facto required by law to be huge.
Imagine if we had cars that were built like cars from the 80s -- smaller, lightweight, tons of visibility, minimal equipment -- but with modern engine technology and a few of the electronics that don't add much weight, but add a ton of functionality (like 360-degree cameras).
I'll take the road noise, less interior comfort, and all the rest, just for a basic... car.
I'd love to have a modern reboot 80s compact pickup that wasn't a bloated mess like the new Ford Ranger.
I'm not talking going to a different class car I'm talking when the given model inflates in size with a new generation. Some people still drive trucks from the 70s and 80s in california. They are remarkably tiny compared to trucks today, like a 1970s F150 seems smaller than a modern light truck like a tacoma, definitely lifted a lot less too based on a couple examples I've seen I assume to be relatively stock specs given the similarity.
Small pickup trucks used to be popular, when I was a kid most pickup trucks weren't much larger than a station wagon, but the government fucked it up by setting MPG requirements lower for larger trucks, incentivizing manufacturers to go big. At this point consumer tastes have adapted to the market and small trucks probably wouldn't sell well even if the regulations were fixed to make them feasible.
For my part, my tastes never changed. Modern pickup trucks are hideous giant blob abominations. But that's not the way most people feel anymore.
I don't think that's accurate, vehicles are being made larger to get around emission limitations. I'd love a new small truck like what Toyota used to make and ford f150/ranger's used to be ~10-20 years ago, but such vehicles just don't really exist anymore.
It doesn't help that the size of SUVs and Pickup trucks have grown over the past 20 years. They take up more width and the length of truck beds are shrinking in place of more cabin space. I would love to find a truck that has a similar profile to a Chevy S10/GMC Sonoma but manufacturers are pushing bigger and bigger trucks to the market.
Modern trucks (an all vehicles, tbh, even electric) need a massive size & complexity reset. There should be 1980's sized pickups available with good visibility via reduced pillar sizes.
Yeah, and the "midsize" trucks from 15 or 20 years ago are the same size as the full size trucks were 15 or 20 years ago. Everything is getting way bigger and harder to drive. I'd much rather have a Toyota Tacoma or Ford Ranger from 20 years ago on a forest service road than an F-150 built now.
We didn't have large vehicles in the way we do now. Going back and looking at the sizes of trucks – real, functional, agricultural/construction use pickup trucks – over the decades shows dramatic size increases.
You can still get something like a 90s F-150, but it's now called a midsize truck. The main difference is that the bed will be smaller and the interior will be larger. There are even some smaller unibody trucks like the Maverick coming on the market.
What you can't seem to get is something like a first generation Tacoma or 90s S-10 without 4WD that's low to the ground. All of the newer trucks have very high bed sides that make loading them from the side a huge pain even if you're tall.
>Interestingly too - the size of pickups was increased; what really seemed to have happened, is they "pushed up the models" - ie, what used to be the F-150 (say 1995 vintage) no longer exists. What we see as the F-150, today, is actually the size (and price) of the F-250 of 1995. The F-250 is now the F-350, and so on (it kinda levels off after the 400 class, simply because those and larger were mainly niche sales to individuals, or commercial sales). I don't know if that is truthly real, but if you compare the sizes of the vehicles and options, it feels like something they did.
You can't justifiably make this comparison across such a wide year rage because trucks went from utility vehicles to flagship models in this time and there's been some massive improvements in drive-train tech since the 90s. A lot of that "moving up" is simply technological improvement allowing new trucks to do what old ones couldn't. Trucks have certainly grown to occupy more physical space but their footprints have remained close to the same and their weights haven't increased all that much.
>I'd love to see smaller vehicles make a come back, because it might also mean smaller pickups and a return to smaller Jeeps and other 4wd vehicles, too! But until those CAFE rules change, I don't know if we'll ever see that here.
Agreed. Unless you have some other market you expect to sell them in and consider the US a sideshow you aren't gonna invest the $$ to develop those vehicles.
But if you look at the biggest pickups from the 80s they're not really that big. The whole compact and subcompact truck market has vanished. People only want 'em big.
Quite the opposite. Getting rid of small truck classifications ballooned the size of suvs and pickup trucks which is partially why we are in the mess we are in. There just aren’t small trucks anymore because of the changes.
Few people need the monster suvs and pickup trucks that are on the roads these days.
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