Conventional pickups have a host of aerodynamic ills, even if the bed has a cover over it. Several of the CT design features stem from an attempt to avoid these.
If there are any crash safety benefits to pickups and SUVs, they only benefit the occupants at the cost of whatever car/motorcycle/bicycle/pedestrian impacted by the taller and heavier pickup/SUV.
Your horrible comparison of a Chrysler minivan (or Chrysler anything) to a hybrid Rav4 (which apparently is actually rated at 34 city/ 30 hwy) aside, this is trivially easy to prove true.
A Subaru Legacy and a Subaru outback are almost exactly the same car with a different body on them. The Legacy gets 27 / 35 / 30 (city/hywy/avg) and the Outback gets 26 / 32 / 28. Smaller, lower to the ground cars are always going to have better efficiency if there’s no other difference between the two.
99% agreed; it’s just another American-standard arms race of trying to transfer the risk to anyone other than meeee. Because meeee is the only person most Americans care about.
The larger vehicles could also be made more crashworthy against solid objects like bridge abutments. I believe they are not actually made that way. Much.
Hence my comment the benefits are illusory.
I don’t understand this part at all. The Model 3 comes in 3 different versions, and that’s before you get to all sorts of options (or extras). Calling it “Performance All-Wheel Drive” instead of “LX” doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. I can spend $44,130 on a Model 3 (as long as I want black on black and nothing else added) or I can spend $64,630 on a Model 3 and a whole lot of numbers in between.
The small SUVs today are basically the form factor that’s between a minivan and a hatchback.
Naw, i bought a small SUV because it was enough smaller than a van to be significantly easier to park, but still large enough to carry a lot of gear to a square dance. I literally carried around my speaker stands when i shopped for cars, to make sure they’d fit.
(And the incredibly well designed Honda Fit almost passed that test.)
Probably, but having that fifth door in the back, and more headroom in the storage area, is very valuable. That’s why i like hatchbacks more than smaller sedans.
Yeah, I took my figure from a .gov site that is apparently quoting 2018 numbers. Either way, still a dumb comparison. If you want to compare a SUV on the small end of things to something, it’d be a hatchback. In fact, a non-hybrid Corolla gets 32/41/35.
And if they offered the same chassis in a wagon, it’d be more efficient and probably carry the same amount of stuff. They don’t, because they generally prefer to sell more SUVs for various reasons (they generally sell for higher prices than sedans, hatchbacks or wagons). My wife would have preferred a Legacy wagon, but they stopped selling them in the US. So, she bought an Outback.
The sales people aren’t on commission and the price is the price once you’ve chosen your configuration. No haggling.
The no haggling seems to be the only thing related to what I was responding to. So, just like SaturnRIP, Carvana, AutoNation, and a whole lot of individual dealerships around the country. To be fair, no dealer is going to stop me from walking into their dealership, picking a car I want and paying the price on the window sticker, while shouting out loud “The price is the price”. I’m pretty sure if I agree to that upfront, they’ll happily agree to avoid all upselling. (with exceptions for those cars/times when shortages force weird behavior)
I’m not sure where you think the “no extras”, “no EX/LX whatever versions of models” comes into play.
I bought a Subaru. They sold a similar wagon, but it was longer (so harder to park, also a bigger turning radius) and cost more.
Hmm, what model was the wagon and what model was the SUV? Subaru has a habit of basically building their cars like Legos, and the SUV is usually based off a car. For instance, a Crosstrek is basically a lifted Impreza hatchback. The hatchback has a teensy bit more cargo volume than the SUV, though. If one was longer than the other, it’s a fairly good bet it was based off a different chassis.
I bought the Forester. The comparable car that was lower was the station wagon, and cost more. I forget model. But neither are Teslas.
Tesla doesn’t sell anything marketed as a hatchback or a wagon. The cybertruck is called a truck, but looks more like an SUV or station wagon to me.
IMO/IME the Tesla Model Y is most assuredly a hatchback. A tall one. Sorta bordering on an SUV/crossover in terms of carrying capacity behind the back seat.
Admittedly terms like SUV, crossover, hatchback, and wagon have all become very blurry here in 2025 versus the fairly clear and distinct meanings each had when those terms was first coined.
I bet that if we tried we could find a single vehicle that somebody here would label as each of those 4 terms. Just different somebodies would choose different terms.
Huh? Road trips are the one area where EVs are not as good as ICEs. Longer refueling times/less range (while you may start at 100% you don’t recharge to 100%), & less infrastructure for charging out there; especially in rural areas means your trip will take longer.
I did 600+ miles this weekend (in 28ish hrs); I was done by the time I got home; wouldn’t have wanted to spend any longer sitting in the car at that point. I knew there was a 7-11 across from my destination so I stopped on the way in to get a cold drink & pee (while not high on the list a 7-11 bathroom does rate higher than a PortaJohn). They had gas so I filled up my car in 4 mins (& 0’ out of my way) & could then make it all the way home w/o another stop. There was no charging option at the event & I got to the hotel about midnight; even if the hotel had EV charging (I didn’t look) I wouldn’t trust them to not be occupied by other guests at that time of night & if they were occupied I’d expect them to remain that way until people left the next morning so the next morning when I’m ready to get on the road to go back home the first thing I’d need to do is…go sit in a parking lot somewhere. I’d then need to make a second stop somewhere enroute because filling to 80% would not have gotten me home.
Interestingly, I did pull off the interstate on the way home to get a quick snack at a convenience store. On the ramp, it showed a blue sign for EV charging to the left, but all of the convenience stores & fast food chains were to the right. Now that store did have Tesla charging but if one had any other vehicle you’d have to make two separate stops, one to charge & one to go in the store to buy food; they couldn’t occur simultaneously due to separate locations.
Years ago, when one was the rare bird in a higher pickup they probably did have some crash safety benefit, as-in if the driver could see over the cars immediately in front of him that something (even just brake lights) was going on up ahead & could apply the brakes, or at least get off the gas sooner & avoid rear ending the car in front of him. (Non-crashes don’t make the statistics!). Now that so many people have the higher/wider vehicles that advantage has been negated.
Of course the car manufacturers making more profit from SUVs, & therefore pushing them, & in a bunch of cases, stopping sedans hasn’t helped the matter.
Those high sides on the CT make it as useless for a work truck as the Chevy Avalanche was - no ability to put a locking box in the front of the bed to carry your tools since it’s not accessible like in a typical pickup bed.
I can take my Tesla from Santa Barbara to Hollywood and back (a frequent trip for me) and the Leaf barely wouldn’t cut it but that’s and edge case. I am about to take a 350 mile road trip and it will be a bit of a pain. I’ll have to make one stop to get there if I start at 100%. Ideally there will be a charger where I can stop for lunch so it won’t hurt the timing too much but no guarantees of that. I probably should have studied the locations a bit better. Range anxiety is real but it ended up not being as bad as I feared.
For a long time, Teslas were the only electric cars suitable for road trips, both because they had better range and because they had a better charging network. But that’s really not true any more.
And also, ICE cars remain more convenient for road trips. Most people who buy electric cars anticipate mostly shorter trips. Shopping, commuting, visiting friends, going to ball games, movies, museums. They figure the networks are now good enough for the one or two road trips they plan to make in a typical year.
My text was comparing the Leaf with the 3.
I drove ICE cars for 40 years, and for about 3 months, we had an ICE and an EV in the garage and could select either, for any trip. We always chose the EV, so we sold the ICE and bought a 2nd EV. We’ll never go back. It may add ~10% to our travel time, but the trip is more pleasant.
Depending on the generation, it’d be an Impreza. Still might be in terms of underlying frame, but the body styling has become more it’s own thing after 2008, where before it looked more like a tall station wagon.