Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf
If the US population really wants nothing but big, bigger and even bigger cars, how do you account for the fact that over the last 50 years or so, US automakers have lost about 50% of the domestic market to the likes of VW, Honda, Toyota, &c, all of which started out by selling cars that were a lot smaller than anything Detroit would build?
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Because the Japanese are all building big, bigger, and even bigger cars? When it first came here, the Honda Accord was 171.9" long, 63.8" wide, 53.3" high. Today, the Accord is 194.9" long, 72.7" wide, and 58.1" high. Then, it weighed 2240 lbs; now, it rings in at 3216 lbs for a barebones LX and more than 3600 for a loaded EX-L. Then, the only engine available made 75hp, today the base 4-cylinder dwarfs that output with 177hp. Heck, even the current Civic dwarfs what the Accord used to be, a full 6" longer, 4" higher, 5" wider, 10hp shy of being exactly twice as powerful, and 400-500 lbs heavier. While Honda doesn't make any "full-size" cars, Toyota/Lexus and Nissan/Infiniti do, and what we call "small" today is still much, much larger than what was small 50 years ago. Compared to their domestic competitors, imports long ago achieved parity in terms of size, weight, performance, and number of large vehicles/SUVs/trucks offered (just take a look at
this chart from a recent Car & Driver comparison).