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

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

square metres

US-americans will get a stroke

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Is there a metric version?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Relevant watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg

Chart has clearly labeled x and y axis in addition to writing the numbers directly on the line.

Trogs: this is misleading as fuck!

some people must have really tiny weiners, so much over-compensation...

Citation link needed

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.