Our “Auto Paedia” article about Detroit’s tendency to make its cars “lower, longer and wider” during the post-war period continues to generate an interesting discussion in the comment thread. One comment I would like to highlight is by DECG50.
While this analysis contains much that is true, there are also some other factors that I suggest bear consideration.
Firstly, the fact is that the growth of standard-size vehicles in the 1950s and 1960s happened in tandem with the growth of freeways and suburban living. Until advances in suspension engineering from the 1970s, lower and wider vehicles were indeed materially better suited to this new form of driving. So too were heavier vehicles with better sound deadening and more highway friendly accessories, such as air conditioning.
My early childhood was mostly spent in Valiants, which although pragmatically efficient, as I recall were not very pleasant on the freeway. They were noisy, rode harshly, and lacked onramp “pickup” and passing power.
Secondly, the wave of downsizing coincided not just with energy issues in the 1970s but also deregulation of the airline industry in 1978, and thereafter the decline in middle-class families going on long-distance road trips for vacation. Our family Valiant was replaced by a GM colonnade wagon for just that purpose, and it served that purpose much better than the Valiant, although it was a gas hog, hard to park, and had much less room than you might say it ought to have had for the size and weight.
Also see ‘Bigger didn’t prove to be better for General Motors in late-70s and 80s’
Better still was my grandfather’s 1976 Electra 225. I took a long road trip with my family for the first time in decades last year during COVID in an otherwise sensibly sized Lincoln MKZ, and frankly it was just too small for three adults and a child and their luggage to travel in comfort.
Thirdly, the use of the family car changed as the number of families having second and third cars increased dramatically from 1960 to 1980 (transportgeography.org, 2022), and family sizes shrunk. With more vehicles in the family and fewer kids, there was less need to seat six on more than an occasional basis and therefore less need for vehicles to be wide, and luggage capacity could also shrink.
The other thing that bears thinking about is how consumer fashion continues to drive inefficiency in vehicle design. Today it is higher rather than lower. Crossovers, which have effectively taken over the family market, are materially heavier and less aerodynamically efficient than the mid sized sedans they replaced, don’t handle as well, offer no more useable passenger room and less cargo room below the beltline, and are inherently noisier. But the RAV4 outsells the Camry, and you can no longer get a mid-size sedan from most manufacturers.
Is that Grosse Pointe myopia on a global scale? Or is it a case of giving consumers what they want when they want it, even though you know it isn’t what they should want or necessarily will want in the future?
— DECG50
RE:SOURCES
- Transportgeography.org; 2022. “Percentage of Households by Number of Vehicles, 1960-2017.” Accessed Oct. 25.
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- autohistorypreservationsociety.org: Pontiac (1959, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977)
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So, it all boils down to three basic arguments:
1) Longer, lower & wider cars actually did handle better;
2) Large cars were useful for carrying a lot of people on long-distance road trips;
3) Modern crossovers are less efficient than similarly sized sedans, which tells us that efficiency doesn’t matter for the buying public all that much.
Let’s start with the latter argument, because I find it downright misleading. From my perspective, a properly designed crossover/SUV usually has a lot more interior room than a sedan/wagon with similar external dimensions, and is roughly similar in this regard to a sedan that is one size larger – while being closer to the former in price, maintenance cost an fuel consumption.
Of course, it all boils down to *how* we measure interior room – are we taking seat height and driving position into account, or just the distance between pedals and seats measured along the floor ? However, that is more about personal preferences (lower vs. taller seating position); I usually prefer the taller seating position of a modern SUV/crossover over “la-z-boy”-type position offered by the old American full-size cars like GM B-bodies, which takes up a lot more room lengthwise because the driver’s legs are more stretched. But not having you legs completely stretched, while maintaining an overall comfortable seating position, doesn’t make crossovers less roomy – it just makes large American sedans of yore (and even the more recently designed ones) inefficiently packaged.
DECG50 compares RAV4 to Camry, but RAV4 is a compact crossover, and, if we oversimplify things more than a little bit, is based off of the compact Toyota Corolla platform. The very fact that the compact RAV4 is able to functionally replace the mid-size Camry, which is much larger on the outside, tells us that it is more space-efficient than a mid-size sedan, not less. It may consume marginally more fuel, but makes up for that with higher ground clearance, all-wheel drive and other “crossover” features.
It is also not true that compact crossovers are “materially heavier” than mid-size cars. In fact, modern car-based wagons are often as heavy, or heavier. E.g. 2.4 liter Volvo XC70’s curb weight is 3607 lbs / 1636 Kg – close to a late 1970s full-size car; 2.5 liter RAV4 weights 3362 lbs / 1525 Kg – a benefit of using a less robustly made compact platform, no doubt.
In my mind, it makes sense that most people now consider a not-quite-luxury mid-size sedan an outdated concept; crossovers based off of compact platforms do the same thing, but cheaper and more efficiently.
If we look for a crossover/SUV-style vehicle with exterior dimension comparable to the Camry, that would be Toyota Highlander, or even 4Runner / Land Cruiser. While the former is arguably a bit too “sporty-looking” (“swoopy”, “car-like”) to be efficiently packaged, the latter two have roughly similar (or greater) interior length & width compared to the Camry, but offer a much taller seating position, and, consequently, much more actual interior space. I’d say that in terms of interior room they are roughly similar to the full-size sedans like GM B-bodies from 1980s & 1990s – however, it is difficult to compare the two, because this kind of roominess is achieved by very different means (full-size cars have very long and wide, albeit low, interiors, and offer a very stretched seating position for both rows of seats; crossovers/SUVs offer much taller interior & upright seating position, which allows them to have more compact external dimensions).
Probably, DECG50 is only familiar with the “sporty” versions of crossover vehicles, with chopped roof & fastback-style roofline, such as BMW X6 and similar. These cars I find to be inexcusably inefficient in their packaging – but not every modern crossover follows, or should follow, this pattern.
In my opinion, crossovers in general are a definite step towards more efficient packaging – albeit not going as far in this regard as minivans (which, in turn, are less space-efficient than true cab-over vans).
1) is correct up to a certain point. However, there is a limit to this effect; e.g. making BoF, RWD cars larger than 1977-1990 GM B-body doesn’t seem to improve their road-ability in any significant manner.
It can be argued that late 1940s low-price “standard size” cars, such as the shoe box Ford, were too small & light for high-speed, long-distance travel; however, it would be difficult to justify going from there all the way up to the gargantuan full-size cars from early-to-mid 1970s. GM’s downsized B-bodies & early 1970s intermediates were, arguably, the “golden mean” between these two extremes for a sedan-style car – albeit some people would point at the Tri-Five Chevy as an example.
2) is also correct – but also up to a certain point. Making a station wagon geometrically larger does work – but that is inherently a very inefficient way to do that.
I own a 1970 Ford Country Sedan (which, somewhat counter-intuitively, is actually a 7-seat wagon based off of the Galaxie 500 trim level of the full-size Ford car), and, while doing the job, it is much, much larger than a modern 7-seat SUV/crossover with three rows of seats, like Toyota Land Cruiser or VW Atlas / Terramont – and doesn’t offer any significant functional advantages over it to justify being that huge.
Of course, it can be argued that in 1950s & 1960s suspension technology was too primitive to replicate the same level of handling & overall roadability in a taller, more space-efficient vehicle – hence long & low road-hugging wagons were required. But it wouldn’t explain why the non-luxury 5/6-seat sedans got unnecessary big as well.
In “it just makes large American sedans of yore (and even the more recently designed ones) efficiently packaged” I really meant “INefficiently”, of course. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to edit my post.
I made the edit. Indie Auto is a pretty low-buck operation so the website doesn’t have all of the features of the big-time media outlets. We are now generating enough readership to sell ads, but I’d prefer to keep this a reader-supported website (go here for further discussion).
“If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” – Jim Barksdale
So before we get into a contest of opinions, let’s look at some data for the moment.
According to Car and Driver’s real world highway fuel economy test, a non-hybrid 4 cyl Camry gets 45 mpg, while a non-hybrid 4 cyl fwd RAV4 got 35 mpg, and a 4 cyl awd RAV4 got 32 mpg. This means that a Camry gets 29% better fuel economy than a fwd RAV4 and 41% better fuel economy than a RAV4 awd.
Comparing base LE fwd trims, a Camry weighs in at 3,310 lbs and a RAV4 weighs in at 3,380 lbs, so the weight difference is 2% in favour of the Camry (going up to 6% if you compare fwd Camry to awd RAV4). I pause here to observe in response to s. Bauer’s comments that the ostensibly “compact” based crossover manages to weigh more than the longer and wider “midsize” sedam, though in fairness all of the Corolla, RAV4, Camry and Highlander are based on the same modular architecture.
As far as cargo capacity, if you look at the Alex on Autos YouTube channel, you will find he was able to get five 24 inch roller bags in a Camry and the same five 24 inch roller bags in a RAV4 with the rear seats up. A difference of 0% in favour of either. And no, I am not just familiar with “sporty” versions of crossovers with sloped rear ends. The issue with crossover cargo capacity is that the load floor is much shorter lengthwise to the vehicle as opposed to that of a sedan. On paper you get a larger cargo area because it’s measured to the roof, but in practice you can’t fit more luggage in a compact crossover vs. a midsize sedan.
As for ground clearance, the Camry comes in at 5.7 inches and the RAV4 at 8.4 inches. This makes the RAV4 47% higher off the ground. I’m not aware of any data on how many crossover owners actually take their vehicles offroad, but there is data for more capable true SUVs that puts the number at somewhere between 15 and 20%. Presumably that number is much lower for crossovers than for true SUVs. If you don’t take the vehicle offroad, query the utility of the increased ground clearance vs a lower center of gravity.
I wish there were data about the height of seats from the vehicle floor, but as far as I can tell, no one publishes this. One can extrapolate that data inexactly by taking the overall vehicle height and subtracting the ground clearance though to the degree overall height will include roof rack hardware on a crossover this will skew the result a bit. For the Camry this figure is 56.9 in minus 5.7 in = 51.2 in. For the RAV4 this figure is 67.0 in minus 8.4 in = 58.6 in. Leaving aside the roof rack hardware issue, this would imply that a RAV4 could have a seating height at most 14% higher than a Camry.
The data doesn’t seem to support the opinion that crossovers in general are a step towards more efficient packaging.
Speaking purely for myself, I’m all in favor of chair height seating, just not the useless added ground clearance and aerodynamically inefficient shape that comes with a crossover, and in fact the failure to truly exploit the ability to raize the seating height that I’ve generally observed. I really liked the Ford Five Hundred for its elevated H point in a sedan package. But clearly that is not a fashionable consumer preference.
I would also concede that too many manufacturers who still make sedans have compromised on rear headroom either for styling or aerodynamics (or sometimes both perhaps), which makes their products impractical for those with adult rear passengers.
Just don’t try to convince me that crossovers are more efficient. They aren’t. Their consumer appeal is in the image of outdoorsiness they convey over a sedan.
“Is that Grosse Pointe myopia on a global scale? Or is it a case of giving consumers what they want when they want it, even though you know it isn’t what they should want or necessarily will want in the future?”
If the automotive history field had a meaningful presence in academia, it would likely offer conference panels that explored such topics as the reasons for Detroit’s fixation with “lower, longer, wider” designs. I could see panelists coming up with long lists of reasons for that fixation and debating the relative importance of each one. What reasons a given scholar might emphasize would likely be heavily influenced by the “school of thought” that he or she gravitated to.
In other words, I could see some embracing a Grosse Pointe myopia perspective whereas others might be more aligned with a demand-side school of thought. Whatever the explanatory value of the latter, it does have a political upside: To a significant degree it lets automotive executives off the hook. They can largely blame their product planning failures on factors outside their control such as the fickle consumer and the long lead times needed to develop a vehicle. You can see that to some degree in books written by academics such as Hyde and Ward.
I’m not an either/or kind of guy, so I don’t reject demand-side arguments. However, it makes sense to me that oligopolies tend to be less adaptable than more internally competitive industries. I don’t think it an accident that “lower, longer, wider” designs were dominant during roughly the same period when the US automobile industry was at the peak of being an oligopoly.
Arguing in favor of a global form of Grosse Pointe myopia requires a more complex logic chain because, even before the rise of electric vehicle upstarts, there was considerably more international competition than in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. That said, industry consolidation — which has washed away most of the smaller automakers as well as national differences in design approaches — has led to a fair amount of conformity. For example, you can’t buy a subcompact truck in the US anymore. And styling has become increasingly generic.
The fundamental problem is that too many automakers spend too much time copying each other rather than trying to do something completely different. Aside from the EV startups, there aren’t any truly iconoclastic mass-market automakers akin to Volkswagen in the Beetle era. Recall how radical VW was in rejecting planned obsolescence.