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Many drivers are familiar with the oppressive feeling: You drive a newly purchased car on Swiss roads – and compared to the previous old car there seems to be a constant lack of space. It doesn’t even need to be an SUV, we’re suddenly sweaty on highway construction sites or on mountain passes with oncoming traffic.
Who doesn’t scratch the rims of a modern car in narrow, old parking lots, resent the very narrow parking spaces, or curse the many obstacles that calm traffic in 30 km/h zones and sometimes make parking impossible? bigger cars to pass? This raises the question: Are our multi-storey car parks and streets too narrow, or are modern cars too big?
Cars got bigger, parking lots didn’t
The reality is that while infrastructure has barely changed in recent decades – streets and parking lots are not bigger and wider, but rather narrower, often due to construction measures – the number of cars has steadily increased. Looking at the datasheets, we see that on average they expand by about five centimeters every ten years! The automotive industry likes to explain this by saying that humans also grow as a result of evolution. That’s true, but over the past 120 years, human height has averaged just 14 centimeters.
As an example, let’s take the VW Golf, which is still one of the best-selling cars in our country. In almost fifty years since the first generation in 1974, the length of the original meter of the modern European compact car has increased by more than half a meter, from 3.71 meters today to 4.28 meters. Depending on the variant, today’s Golf is even longer. At the same time, its width increased from 1.61 to 1.79 meters.
Extreme example Fiat 500
The differences in the Fiat Cinquecento are even more impressive. Compared to its 1957 predecessor, the Fiat 500 was 60 centimeters taller and over 30 centimeters wider in less than 60 years. Little used to be less than three meters long and 1.32 meters wide, the current 500 is 3.57 or 1.63 meters. Even more obvious: 470 weighed 1127 pounds! The newest model of the 500, the electric 500e, is 3.61 meters long and weighs 1.3 tons. Its electric motor has a proud 118 hp – compared to its predecessor’s 13.5 hp engine, the 500e is a racing machine! The list of old and new comparisons could go on forever.
Of course, growth is also about our comfort needs. For example, in the original Cinquecento, heating was at an additional cost, side windows could not be opened except for small hinged windows. Today, even cheap microcars have heated steering wheels, power window lifters and air conditioning. A vehicle as plain as the original 500 would not be for sale.
Safer, but not wider
And of course, cars have gotten safer over the decades. Let’s take the Mercedes S-Class as an example: the first S-Class of the W 116 series, so-called by Mercedes itself, began in 1972 with a world first: a four-spoke safety steering wheel with a large “bumper”. Soon after, an electronic anti-lock braking system (ABS) was available for the first time in a car. Today, however, the current S-Class is the first robot car to drive autonomously on the highway without the driver ever needing to hold the steering wheel.
But we also realize that while modern cars are getting bigger, they don’t offer much more space. On the contrary: narrow windows, wide center consoles and bulky instrument clusters with thick screens trap passengers like a cocoon. There’s rarely room for taller people in the rear, and the luggage compartments haven’t been significantly enlarged either: despite being over half a metre, it only offers 30 liters more luggage space than the current Golf ancestor.
Source: Blick
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
