Degrowth

There was a very quick 180 on phone size when folks figured out they could be used for porn

That sounds like a double entendre

Like your mum.

Except the inside of today's monster cars is just as small as ever.

The closest equivalent to the 3 series would be a 3 series since it showcases how much bigger got.

Though a lot of that size increase is due to better safety tech, better crumple zones, so OP isnt very intelligent with this critique, the ford F150 comparisons are more apt.

That old e30(?) Is a badass car. Yes BMW are generally wankers, but don't hate the Chariot.

Hyundai Ioniq 5, Hyundai Vision 74 (just a concept for now)

These 2 look really nice.

The i20 looks nice 2 in my opinion and my Hyundai i40CW is probably the best looking car of it's generation in its category

Exactly the image I thought of.

Bless you, and all your generations to come, oh wide and sagacious one!

I've got big hands. Phones are great the size they're at now.

You mean like a Kei Truck?

I think they're so cute. Like they are out of a Lightning McQueen manga.

YES PLEASE. You can even make it electric. I just want a small truck with a full size bed. I don't need all the other shit these overpriced monstrosities come with.

Mac air was start of 2010s iirc

No, vehicles have gotten larger because of the same problem as most of the issues in the United States: politics!

You see automobile manufacturers have to meet an average fuel economy across their entire fleet under the CAFE (Corporate average fuel economy) act of 1975. CAFE was a good idea as it forced the auto industry into actually improving on fuel economy year after year throughout their entire fleet or be met with steep fines for ever 0.1mpg off the target.

In 2011 CAFE was changed which directly caused the auto market we have today. See in 2011 the formula on how you'd calculate your fleet's avarage MPG got changed to now factor in vehicle footprint as a variable which auto manufactures quickly caught on to mean the larger a vehicle is the smaller their entire fleet's MPG has to be.

On top of that in 2012 "medium-duty trucks" was added as their own category with a lower MPG requirement meaning if your truck or SUV fell into that category then you would have a smaller MPG target for your entire fleet.

Now put yourself into the shoes of an early 2010s auto manufacture, would you rather design small and light vehicles that require you to meet a pretty high fuel economy level across your entire product range or would you inflate the size of your vehicles and move all R&D into finding ways to get your entire fleet classified as a medium-duty truck/SUV with a smaller MPG requirement? Of course you are going to take the latter.

The changes to CAFE in the 2010s killed small vehicles as we knew it. Ensured light duty trucks stayed dead domestically built or chicken tax be dammed. Caused the explosion of crossover SUVs to flood the market. All while making vehicles more dangerous and worse for the environment.

Nah, we still make compact cars similar in size with the same safety features to econoboxes from 40 years ago. Like houses, people want more room in their vehicles than they had with the smaller cars plus some other misinformed choices like thinking bigger and taller means safer.

Plus along with the older small cars we also had the giant boats that got single digit mpg. It wasn't like they were all small in the past.

Many normal car models are now SUVs though, at least in Europe.

The 2 series is now ~180 inches long (about the same as the first generation bmw x3) and ~3900 pounds ~~(significantly heavier than the first generation x3)~~ (about the same as the first generation bmw x3).

I think this is more referring to the trend of larger vehicles becoming more popular and not any specific car model.

Imagine if we kept them the same size and still improved their efficiency

Well, we did! In Europe.

And I'm pretty sure the selection of compact BMWs has only grown in those years.

not only does it have a larger battery... it also uses up that battery 10 times faster while doing 100 times less work :')

I would really like to have modern laptops at like double/triple the size for more battery space though, why can't we have a normal laptop that lasts like a week on a charge?