Serious question: what’s a good option if you live in semi-rural suburbs that gets snow in winter? Safety would be my main concern–something with four wheel drive and larger tires makes a difference there.
Myself commuted with a 95 Saturn SL for years out of a farm in rural Canada. People used crappy small cars for decades and still got where they need to, and today even the most basic car with basic snow tyres is extremely capable.
Needing AWD for the suburbs is a marketing myth the car sales racket wants you to believe.
Most Canadians get along just fine in normal FWD cars. Depending on how much you drive get all-weather tires (different than all season) or if you really want get snow tires. My previous car was FWD, current one is AWD, and really the AWD isn’t necessary. Next car I’ll go back to FWD.
I don’t think telling people to buy 2009 and earlier Subarus is a good idea. I love the huge resale on my legacy but the current cars are kind of not up to the task and they haven’t made a wagon since 2009 in the US. The ATS all wheel drive system can’t even drive the rear wheels without front slip, not to mention the reliability issues with the CVT if you actually use the all-wheel drive or cruise on the highway.
I’m not in the US and haven’t needed a good winter vehicle in several years. I guess wagons have gone pretty far out of style in a lot of places - do you know if Subaru’s other models would be fit for the task?
The WRX could be up to the task, it is the only car in the lineup that can drive all the wheels without slip. The rest of the lineup is kind of just a front wheel drive car with a CVT so I would not recommend it, but if you put winter tires on it it’ll be fine.
If you put the multi layer WRX 2.5 l head gasket saying and you get the heads plained it’s so one time job. You should be good for a 300 to 400,000 miles from the rest of the car.
If you ask this on any car blog, people will emphatically say that you do not NEED AWD. What you really need are a set of dedicated winter tires. Winter tires make a huge difference in snow, if you live in an area with a lot of it.
Having said this, you should check out the Car and Driver’s buyers guide on their website to see what peaks your interest. Tons of great options. Subaru Crosstrek, Kia Seltos, Hyundai Tuscon, Mazda Cx-50… it goes on and on! Then check out Doug Demuro’s reviews of any cars that strike your fancy. His reviews are crazy thorough and give you the best idea of what a car is like, before even stepping into a dealer lot.
I, too, love cars, so hit me up with any questions.
This right here. I drive a tiny old rear wheel drive 4 cylinder pickup which is arguably the worst vehicle for winter driving. The only thing it has going for it is that it does have a bit more ground clearance than cars. I live in Minnesota and work nights so I often get off work before the plows have cleared the roads. As long as I have a good set of snow tires on that truck, a couple sand bags in the back, and drive carefully, then it can and has trecked through roads covered in nearly a foot of wet snow like a champ. I’ve had to give rides to multiple people who planted their big 4x4 SUVs in the ditch with that little truck.
Also because OP mentioned it but you didn’t say anything in your post, wide tires aren’t necissarly better in the snow. The best winter vehicle I’ve ever owned was a tiny 90s Mazda pickup that actually used unusually narrow tires compared to modern vehicles. Wide tires are great for mudding or off roading because they distribute weight over a larger area and help prevent you from just getting stuck in your own ruts. However when it comes to snow you actually want to sink farther down in the snow because there is road underneath so you don’t need to worry about digging ruts. So narrower tires will concentrate the weight of your vehicle better and give you a better chance of digging down to a solid surface rather than skating across the top of the snow. With wide tires they wind up distributing the same weight over a larger area so you just wind up with more less tightly compressed snow under the tires and that can make them more likely to slide in some situations.
If you have AWD, or if you don’t have AWD, in both cases, you still need winter tires. There is a reason they are obligatory for a couple months per year in Quebec. It’s illegal to drive without them in winter here because if there is one thing we know, it’s snow. Not only do you need them to stop safely on snow and ice, but you need them to adhere to the ground when turning, both at low and high speeds, even without snow or Ice.
The ground is so cold that even if we melt the snow using salt, your summer tires won’t adhere as well as they would, and you could find yourself losing control.
I live in Minnesota with a steep hill to go up to get off our street. My old Elantra had trouble with the steep angle after a plowing and I had to go back and get my wife’s Tucson which did it no problem. I was already considering a new car and that spring we bought a Kona. It’s small, sporty, and has proven to be just as capable as my wife’s Tucson, so for me AWD has been the difference.
Current Subaru (other than wrx) are no better than any other front wheel drive car. They can’t drive the rear wheels without the front having slip and they don’t live up to the old Subaru standards of symmetrical oval drive. They also have a CVT that’s only good for 60,000 miles if you like to do Subaru stuff, and they have nothing but SUVs or vans other than the WRX. It’s been almost 25 years since I had a wagon so I’m not sure what their brand images supposed to be anymore since I keep trying to push that they have wagons that can go off road but they don’t. The flagship outback wilderness gets destroyed off road by a mid-90s automatic and Impreza.
I wish I had an answer for you on what card to get. If you can keep the battery charged the Prius all-wheel drive and RAV4 all-wheel drive hybrid are really good. Other than that I would just get whatever you want that doesn’t have an engine driven CVT.
Grew up in mountainous high altitude Switzerland with pickets on the side of the road to show where the road stops, pickets were over 2m high because there was that much snow and ice and even now they are buried every winter and a machine has to come everyday to salt and remove snow from the road. My parents did just fine driving a class e break with winter tires and when weather got really shitty chains. Now that I live in the rural French country with an as shit and cold weather, I got a 4wd A6 avant with winter tires because I’m a bad driver and need to carry the kids to stuff. The husband is a really good driver and has a regular A3 with just winter tires and never crashed with it. But it was another story when he was younger and drived recklessly and totalled a couple cars. Also personally dislike suvs as center of gravity is much higher and it’s a lot more dangerous on slippery roads if you loose control at some point to regain stability.
In Fairfax County, 4% of residents own no vehicle and 30% own one vehicle. Among renters, 12% own no vehicle and 47% own one vehicle.
I’m surprised that 12% of renters don’t own vehicles given how suburban the county is. Tysons and Reston, while the densest areas, still don’t seem anywhere near as friendly to ditching a car compared to the Ballston-Clarendon-Rosslyn corridor in Arlington.
This is better late than never but the county has a long way to go to fix the sprawl, especially with how chaotic the Tysons transformation is coming along.
Fucking CAFE standards… Basically, the larger the truck, the less aggressive the mandatory improvements in fuel economy. So, manufacturers have eliminated the old, compact trucks from the 90’s and early 2000’s, like the Ranger or the S10. Their modern equivalents are now as large as full-size trucks from that era. Fuel economy has worsened considerably, because CAFE standards pushed manufacturers to abandon their most efficient vehicles and focus on their least efficient.
Don’t get me wrong, I love big trucks. I’m hauling 9 people and a 2-ton trailer every evening, in a 2000’s suburban. But aside from that, an old S10-sized truck would be the perfect daily driver for me, and I can’t get one.
I’m really hoping the alpha wolf truck that’s supposed to hit production soon is a decent vehicle. 300ish mile range EV truck around the size of the old S10. Supposedly going to start in the low 30k range before the tax rebate. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8675dac0-c721-4466-ad5d-960bdd5a9abc.jpeg
Their web site has twice as many photos of the fancy shovels they plan to include with the truck as they have of the truck itself. Not exactly inspiring confidence here.
They have a working prototype they released footage of driving around and it’s supposed to go into production this year. Sorry you don’t like their marketing teams approach I guess?
The only thing I see from them right now is that they have a “marketing team.”. At least, they have someone who knows how to buy a domain name and produce 3d renders from a CAD file.
Prototypes are irrelevant. Anyone can produce a one-off vehicle in a garage.
The real question is whether they have the logistical chain established to support full-rate production. I’m seeing no indication of that.
Am I reading this wrong? By all means plenty of people who don’t need trucks buy trucks.
But the majority of this list is sedans and compact crossovers? These are barely more than hatchbacks with a different name. Obviously the top few spots are dominated by pickups that have ballooned in size. Legitimate criticisms are easily made.
But after reading the title I was pretty surprised at the list because I expected lots of large SUVs. But most large SUVs are missing from this list.
Disclaimer: I am not a car person. I do not know the difference between a hatchback and an SUV, except that SUVs are bigger.
This is entirely anecdotal so take this how you will.
Having lived in another nation for a few years, the cars you are calling “compact crossovers” are huge compared to the sort of cars sold in other nations. I don’t want to give too many details about where I used to live, but in that nation, roads that we would consider to be one-way, one lane roads were used as two-way roads. If you meet oncoming traffic, the rule is the smaller vehicle pulls aside for the larger one. This is in urban areas. There is no shoulder to pull onto, there is a building there. If everyone with a car owned a huge American-style car or SUV there, it just wouldn’t work. Many parking places just don’t accommodate for them.
Another anecdote: Despite every house on my street having a two-car garage, there are huge vehicles parked on either side of the road, making our road wide enough for one lane of traffic. These two-car garages were built in the 70s and are too small to fit two vehicles now. Either one car is in the garage and one is on the street, or both cars are now on the street and the garage is full of misc stuff. Why would a road with with two car garages for every house have such congestion problems?
IMO, More people are buying SUVs than they used to. And their “cars” are simply much larger than they used to be.
I appreciate your perspective. I’ve spent enough time in other countries now to vouch for your anecdote generally speaking. Though to be honest sizes are increasing in places outside the US as well. It’s noticeable on repeat trips over years. Still not as big on average, but it feels like the trend is upward. The gap is not what it used to be. Something like a Corolla Cross or CR-V is taller than what you see in Europe but the footprint really isn’t much larger.
Some of it I think is people being actively unreasonable, some of it is larger safety and crumple zones on newer cars, some is the simple fact that the market has shown people like bigger vehicles.
In the end though I guess my point was just that of all the vehicles on the market in the US, it looks to me like the top 25 list is dominated by those in the midrange and smaller categories relative to other vehicles on the market. Whether these are still too large objectively is a topic that can be fairly debated but the fact remains that people are buying things on the smaller end of what is available to them which runs a bit counter to the title of the post.
Only speaking to the garage thing, I think a lot of people like to think of their garages as a unfinished part of the house, rather than car storage. Same for the basement. So it’s sort of luck of the draw which one gets a TV, old refrigerator, and selection of tools and craft projects and which one is used for storage.
Your rav four either serves the purpose of a small SUV or minivan depending on the year. The current one is an MPV based on a small van so it’s literally a minivan from Japan with regular doors. It does not have the cargo space of a wagon and it definitely doesn’t have the performance or handling of a sport wagon. The closest thing Toyota had in the US would be the really old Camry V6 or the matrix XRS. Maybe a Prius v if it could have had the Prius all-wheel drive prime power train.
I’m always continually shocked at how small so many SUVs feel on the inside. The centre console and area around the gear selector is such a waste of space. For what, cup holders? Bring back the gear selector on wheel
“No cargo space” and “it’s a van” are incongruent.
As for performance, it has “sport mode” but even in eco mode it can vastly exceed the performance necessary to drive within legal limits. I’m not going to race with it, I am taking my kids camping in South Dakota or shopping at Costco.
Their seating or slope roof instead of rear cargo space. The current crossover version of the outback fits way less stuff in it when you go camping then my 4th gen legacy wagon. There’s a little more room for people but even with the seats folded down my legacy wagon fits more than the crossover.
There’s so much space taken up by interior trim and sloped body areas for no reason that could be used for cargo.
Edit- On the performance front the new XT can accelerate, but it feels bad to drive, wobbles in the corners while bouncing on the road, and does not stop well. It has similar ground clearance with the same sized tires as my legacy and less than a legacy outback stock for stock. So I just don’t get why you would pick the crossover if given the choice. It is also always fun to see the new Subaru dig a rut into a hill on a dirt road if they forgot to get a running start while I can climb it with my real AWD (VTD center diff.) Even old base models with 4ACT can shift into 4x4 mode (if you shift to 1 or 2 it locks the coupling if the steering wheel is straight so you essentially have a transfer case.)
The 2.5i withe the CVT is what I do not like. The 2010-2019 outback 2.5i take over 10s for 0-60, and the rest of the lineup was similar. They re-tuned the CVT to be more aggressive off the line so it is like 7.5-8s not for most of the NA line up, but the 5-60 is still over 10s. I had a 2017 impreza long term loaner and it felt unsafe to merge onto the freeway from a metering light in the bay area. It also got worse city MPG than my tuned LGT in the hills.
it has “sport mode” but even in eco mode it can vastly exceed the performance necessary to drive within legal limits
So my Kia crossover (needed ground clearance for rough unplowed rural roads at the time) has that, and I’ve found for most of the year it stays in Eco mode, I’ll pop it into Sport mode if I’m visiting a large city like Chicago or Milwaukee and moving through a busy highway interchange to better accelerate and decelerate as I work through crazy traffic to make my needed lane changes, then in the coldest winter days I’ll use Normal mode until it’s up to temperature because in Eco mode the engine never warms up if it’s below 0 out (I actually once watched the temperature dial go down as I went downhill into a valley once when it was around -10-15 out)
I don’t like to use the handles. They are so high up that it get’s uncomfortable and when I pull down to stabilize, my Fingers usually get squished. Most of the times when I use the handles, blood starts to leave my arm. Maybe the handles in my buses just really suck but I always use the bars or anything else to stabilize.
last time I filled my jeep, gas was around $2.00/gal and pickups were just starting the dino-grill trend. 2020. model 3 is the quickest car I ever owned. sticker shock is real but would have been making payments anyway. still have a gas mower but looking at a robot fix for that chore. sux to be u
Cities don’t tax only based on the potential for what land could be doing, but instead include taxes on improvements to the land as well. As a result, there’s incentive to sprawl rather than pressure to densify.
Yes that’s part of it. Another part is encouraging more permissive, inclusive, mixed use zoning to better reflect the potential optimal use of the land, and switching from property taxes to land value taxes to apply pressure to reach that ideal.
The way to achieve this is with a land value tax. Undeveloped land and developed land are taxed the same, so the owner is incentivised to maximize the development to make as much money as possible to offset the LVT.
The meme format is meant to be ironic, with an opinion full of holes and cadence similar to Lrrr from Futurama. Though that typo looks like an overzealous autoconnect.
I have often had this thought when driving around for parking at a mall in rural America. Wouldn’t a parking garage greatly reduce walking time into the store and save enough space to add more stores? But you see tons of small towns in America with laws against parking structes to “protect their small towns appeal”. Because as we all know the reason why people more to small towns is for the love of driving in a parking lot.
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