Quote:
Originally Posted by MossJenks
Sorry, I was talking about the '80s and '90s in the US and 40's onward for the rest of the world. Yes, I understand that in the '50s and '60s the "Big 3" were making cars as gigantic as possible, and in the '20s and '30s super high-end cars were gigantic. But over the last 40 years the average automobile has gotten bigger and way heavier. Also, that '72 Chevy wasn't 7 feet tall. Anyone who says that cars today aren't WAY taller than in the past has no idea what they're talking about.
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I think this is an odd way of looking at it, with the 80s as a baseline. Starting from the Model T genesis American cars got bigger and then stayed big. 40s cars big, 50s big, 60s big, 70s big, oil crisis and pollution leads to 80s small, 90s bigger, and now back to big again. The 80s were an aberration. The Chevy sales leading DeLuxe in 1941 was 196 inches. The first Ford Explorer, a smash hit introduced in 1991, was 184 inches. Our 5th gen is 190 inches--we're just back to the American normal.