I kinda want to take a picture of the parking lot at a local (Salt Lake County, UT) Costco. It's almost exclusively "light truck"-classified pickups and similarly sized SUVs. I'm sure a similar image has already been captured for posterity but damn if it wouldn't be useful for pointing to a problem.
You can buy Kei vans too. I've seen them, in the USA. Same import rules as the Kei trucks. When I lived in Chicago, a neighbor had one. It was 4x4 too, so great in the winter.
While I largely agree with you, AWD/4WD minivans seem to be harder to find than AWD/4WD SUVs - so if you live in a place with both snow and hills, you're probably going to be gravitating toward an SUV.
AWS/4WD drive can't be pulled off with a minivan while maintaining the flat floor that people expect. There's not enough clearance for a rear drive shaft.
I mean, it clearly can be, since AWD (and RWD, for that matter) minivans do exist. It's just less common for minivans than it is for SUVs, likely for the reason you mention.
However, practically, it's not. Within the modern minivan sector, it'd be a non-starter to have a transmission tunnel when all of your competitors don't have that.
Cars much bigger, heavier, and with worse visibility than necessary, make the roads more dangerous for everyone else—motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, everyone.
The whole thing's turning into an expensive, dangerous game of prisoner's dilemma. It's best if everyone buys exactly as much car as they need, but anyone who "defects" and buys a bigger, heavier car is safer than everyone else, while making everyone else a little less-safe. Iterate for a few decades and you get the current situation.
However, begging individuals to behave differently isn't going to fix the problem. Certainly not in the US.
Oh, for sure. The old-school conservative solution, from back before "conservative" meant "simply don't try to do good things, at all" (at least, in the US) would have been to try to price in the added risk to others (and other externalities, like extra road-wear) to discourage having too-large vehicles. I think that could work.
Never gonna happen, because too many people think discouraging choices that make public roads more dangerous, or simply paying for costs they impose on others through their choices, is outright tyranny, but hey, it's a nice idea.
Please don't go back to posting ideological flamewar comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and you've mostly been doing a pretty good job of avoiding it (thank you!)
> The estimated number of police-reported crashes in 2020 decreased by 22% as compared to 2019, and the estimated number of people injured declined by 17%.
> While the number of crashes and traffic injuries declined overall, fatal crashes increased by 6.8%.
It's at least a somewhat common belief that the 6.8% increase of fatal crashes despite a decrease in total crashes is caused by a perceived increase of the average size of vehicles on the road. A minivan is not an American-sized pickup truck which are commonly seen as unsafe for other drivers.
The American car market is flooded with shitty crossovers because people don't have the balls to just rock the minivan when they hit that point in their life. The entire SUV segment up until you reach 9-seaters doesn't have a great reason to exist at the market share it does, and the situation will continue until people grow out of the delusion that they're not uncool yet because they bought a specific class of bad vehicle.
