In the 12 July issue of Autocar, Renault design chief Gilles Vidal said: “It’s no secret cars have grown, for safety, because buyers want more content, more equipment and so on.”
This is the same philosophy that manufacturers say when they produce yet more SUVs. They say we want them.
The point is that it’s not really the public driving what the manufacturers make and what equipment they put on the vehicles. It’s the manufacturers telling us what we want by seduction. When Nissan invented the small crossover class with the Qashqai, I very much doubt the public wrote to Nissan and said they wanted a higher-riding hatchback that can’t really go off road, has extra weight, is slower and handles worse than the hatchback equivalent does. I also don’t…
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Autocar (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 26, 2023