Jonathan Gitlin
America needs to end its national love affair with massive cars. It’s unlikely to have escaped anyone’s attention that our cars, trucks, and SUVs keep getting bigger in each successive generation, a problem exacerbated as most automakers abandon smaller cars entirely in this market.
It’s easy to see why carmakers and car dealers like this problem—it’s not that much more expensive to build a large car compared to a smaller car, but you can charge a lot more for the bigger one, meaning more profits for them. It’s just the rest of us who suffer.
Bigger vehicles cost more, are less efficient, and while they better protect their occupants in a crash, they’re much more deadly on the receiving end. Heavier vehicles also wear out roads faster, though the difference between a small sedan and a large electric SUV amounts to very little when compared to the effect of a garbage truck rolling by each morning.
The last few years have seen the disappearance of most small cars from new car showrooms. Just this week, Automotive News reported that the Mitsubishi Mirage is on the way out, joining the choir invisible alongside cars like the Chevrolet Sonic, Honda Fit, and Toyota Yaris, all of which were once sold in the US. And with that, the subcompact class is effectively extinct now, bar the Mini.
At least there’s an electric version of the Mini, which is also one of the cheapest new EVs on sale, starting at just under $31,000.
Small cars are good for us, bad for business
Stepping up to the next-smallest class barely improves the situation. I’ve been a big fan of the Chevrolet Bolt ever since driving a prototype at CES in 2016, and Chevrolet says it will build (and sell) 70,000 Bolts this year. But it’s also on borrowed time—the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan that builds Bolts is being refitted so it can make Silverado EV trucks instead.
The Bolt’s biggest problem, from a bean counter’s point of view at least, was a battery that cost a lot more per kWh than one made with General Motors’ new Ultium cells. News of the Bolt’s cancellation was met with much dismay, and GM recently decided to bring the nameplate back at some unspecified time on a new Ultium-based platform. But GM CEO Mary Barra has also warned that even with the lower cost of Ultium cells, the company won’t make any profit on sub-$40,000 EVs until late in the decade.
That other small affordable EV pioneer, the Nissan Leaf, is also doomed. Currently in its second generation, the compact electric hatchback is set to be replaced with—yes, you guessed it—a smaller SUV instead.
In addition to the ever-escalating safety arms race that entices American car buyers, a misplaced obsession with having as much range as possible also factors in here. For example, a cynic might point out that the first version of the Silverado EV that will be built uses more kWh of lithium ion than three Bolt EVs.
Our obsession with range is misguided
The fact is, range sells EVs. The big thing that made the Tesla Model S viable as a luxury electric car in the early 2010s was its range, then in excess of 250 miles. Similar range distinguished the Bolt from its competition, which was then an array of compliance cars, none of which could do more than 200 miles on a single charge. Range is so important to EV buyers that Tesla has felt compelled to exaggerate its claims, creating a special team to “thwart” complaining customers.
Buying an EV based on its road trip range is, in my view, deeply misguided. 300 miles of range became the new 200 miles of range. Now it’s on its way to 400 miles, if the Silverado and the recently unveiled Cadillac Escalade IQ are anything to go by. But as Ed Niedermeyer noted last year in the New York Times:
Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic EV market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that EVs can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.
We haven’t so much overcome this psychological hurdle as thrown big batteries at it, which is having a paradoxical (if predictable) effect of actually entrenching it. Despite dramatic growth in median EV range, to 234 miles in 2021 from 90 miles in 2015, consumer demand for range is always one step ahead. Three hundred miles might have been a desirable figure for potential EV buyers in 2019, but come 2021 it was 341 miles, according to findings from Cox Automotive. We could cater endlessly to this desire for more range without ever satiating it: More is always more, but more is also never enough.
The small EV is not entirely doomed yet. The CEO of Citroen—now part of Stellantis, which also owns Dodge and Jeep—has repeatedly gone on the record calling for smaller EVs with smaller battery packs and has predicted policy levers like limits on weight or battery capacity as potential solutions. And I’m intrigued by what Renault will do when it brings back the Renault 5 as an EV next year, built on a new platform that it says is 30 percent cheaper to build than the current Renault Zoe EV.
But before our European readers get too smug, this biggification is happening there, too. Honda’s diminutive e was a failure across the pond, justifying Honda North America’s decision not to import the adorable little thing. And the Economist noted in June that sales of SUVs in Europe have increased by 300 percent since 2011, during which time sales of small cars have declined by half.
Buy smaller
While I’m confident I’ve laid out the problem, I’m not sure I have any wonderfully compelling solutions. I’d like more people to buy smaller vehicles, but I’d also like more people to take public transport instead of driving, and you know what they say about wishes and fishes…
We can only buy the cars on sale, and if automakers refuse to build or import smaller vehicles, all that leaves are big ones for us to choose from. Contacting car makers to ask them to build smaller cars might help, so, too, could asking politicians to pull some policy levers that could encourage those OEMs—tying an EV’s tax credit to a lower curb weight for example, rather than the current scheme, which creates a perverse incentive to make more SUVs and fewer cars.
