• exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      Have you been to Europe? Have you walked the streets of Paris? The US was built with enough space being everywhere. American roads are wider, cities are mostly built like square-grids of roads built in a time when cats existed whereas European cities emerged in the middle ages. They’re tightly packed with little extra space. Sometimes (very rarely) here there are old Cadillacs that can be rented for weddings. Seeing one of these cars on the street is an unreal experience. They’re just so huge. They don’t fit on the streets here - and those are cars from the 60s or 70s. Everything seems tiny compared to them. From a European perspective it’s really stupid to build such large vehicles as driving and parking it is much more complicated when everything is build for small cars. Now that SUVs are becoming popular here too it’s just a really annoying. Less parking space per vehicle etc. On cities like Paris - one of the tightest city on Europe this is just annoying. And i haven’t even written about fuel consumption. Paris has had huge problems with smog in recent years.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The US is built more for SUVs than places outside it, so they make a little bit more sense than in places like Paris.

      But only a little bit more sense. They’re still obnoxious and far too big in the US.

      • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        True, lots of places (but I suppose maybe not everywhere) have really wide roads with tons of lanes so it’s easy to drive around with SUV’s, but this is generally not true in Europe where, even in large cities, often roads/lanes are narrower, making SUV’s unwieldy for those driving around them.

        Then there’s the pollution aspect which I can’t address, but I imagine SUV’s pollute more on average than other cars (and probably Europe is currently being a bit more stingy on allowing this)

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      the onyl reason they exist in the US is because a regulations loophole.

      The EU doesn’t have that loophole, so SUVs don’t even have that reason to exist. Which you can see, as SUVs are super rare in the EU, while they top all car sales ranks in the US in the last couple years