When it comes to driving, going small is a good call
I played hockey as a kid in Windsor and we carpooled with the dad and son down the street. They would come by in their Dodge Shadow and my dad and I would pile in. Two dads, two kids and giant bags of hockey equipment all fit just fine.
I never thought the car was small, even when the other dad would hotbox it with cigarette smoke on the way to and from the arena. Today, though, a Shadow would be considered a tiny car as vehicles have upsized over the decades, despite ever more crowded urban areas.
North American auto manufactures have been abandoning their sedan models to focus on SUVs and trucks as our modern lifestyles seem to need ever bigger, and often more aggressive-looking, vehicles to accommodate our lives. Small is still good, though.
This pandemic summer was another one filled with Ontario road trips. While driving around in our VW Golf, it felt like it was one of the smallest things on the road. At every provincial park and motel we pulled into, I looked up at towering SUVs and oversized pickups around us. Yet the Golf did everything we needed it to do — and did it perhaps better than an SUV would, as we could fit into small parking spots and stop for gas less.
With the seats folded down, the wee Golf has transported home a chunky 1.7-metre-long credenza purchased on Kijiji, as well as an outdoor sink contraption, a wonky office chair, rain barrels and even a 2.5-metre ladder, the latter being the only thing the rear hatch had to be left open for. It’s a small car, but secretly big. If it had a roof rack, the kayak would have gone on road trips, too.
If more space is ever needed for family reasons, such a rack (with a cargo box) might be considered, or we could upgrade to a station wagon. Sadly, the once-ubiquitous wagon is now available in only a few models, and most are quite high-end.
Speaking of hauling stuff, the growth in pickup-truck size has been exponential, and what would almost have been considered monster trucks in the 1980s are now consumer products (remember, the original “Big Foot” was actually a modified 1974 Ford F-250, a small pickup by today’s standards). Yet today’s pickups don’t carry much more — the beds are the same size, sometimes even smaller, than a few decades ago.
A few years after I was being shuttled to and from hockey in that Dodge Shadow, our do-ityourself, all around handyman neighbour was driving a Chevy S10 pickup. It was dainty compared with today’s models, more akin to a minivan; it was low to the ground and didn’t tower over people or other vehicles. Yet our neighbour was able to haul all manner of materials without any trouble. It even had two jump seats in the back of the cab for kids.
Of late, there’s been a real culture war driven by identity politics brewing around oversized pickup trucks. They, along with SUVs, are rightly criticized for taking up unnecessary
space, using more fuel, and simply being more dangerous to those around them, especially in crowded cities where their poor sightlines put others at greater risk.
Yet the crux of this “war” isn’t anti-pickup at all, simply a critique of the race to get bigger. Considering how utterly useful the small and reasonable pickups were just a few decades ago, it’s about image rather than utility.
There are surely individual reasons and locations where the largest of the large vehicles are needed, but the mass transformation of the market to big-is-better is simply fashion driven along by marketing, two of the most powerful lifestyle forces around. Big is in fashion right now, even if in increasingly congested urban areas bigger doesn’t make sense. In other places, like Europe and some Asian countries, small is still in vogue. Tradespeople work just fine using very small trucks and vans and our “small” cars would be considered big there; their subcompacts are absolutely tiny.
My father, who now lives in Malta, recently got a Mazda Demio, called a Mazda 2 in some places, and it’s so small an average person could touch the back of the car from the driver’s seat. Yet friends with families there drive similarly sized cars.
He traded in his Honda Accord that he, to my endless amusement, called “huge.” It’s all relative. This coming from a guy who owned his share of land yachts when he lived in Canada. Let me tell you sometime about the 1980 Chrysler Cordoba we owned.
Small is good, and the smaller the conveyance the easier it is to get around. When on foot or bike, much of the traffic congestion that plagues drivers isn’t an issue. Similarly, negotiating a small vehicle through a city is easier. And safer. And cheaper. And less polluting.
Maybe all of that will make small fashionable again soon.