If there's a war on cars in the USA then the cars have won - Max Mautner<br>Every American understands the phrase “war on cars”, including the ones hearing it for the first time. Cities fight over every reallocation of street space: a protected bike lane, a bus lane, parking converted into parklets.<br>At stake in these fights is an inherited premise: that a car is how an American arrives at adulthood, independence, and economic mobility. Yet fewer people are claiming it: in 1983 nearly half of 16-year-olds held a license, but by 2022 it was about a quarter. 18-year-olds holding licenses fell from 80% to 60% over the same span.<br>The vehicles have kept growing anyway. The federal government has weighed and measured every new car, SUV, and pickup sold in America, model year by model year, since 1975.1 The first 6 years are the only stretch in the last 50 when American vehicles got smaller.
The average new vehicle sold in the United States now weighs 4,441 pounds — the heaviest figure in the 50-year record.<br>Horsepower traces the same shape:2
An average new vehicle sold in the USA today makes 264 horsepower, nearly double the 1975 figure and 159% above the 1981 trough. The average new vehicle reaches 60 mph in 7.3 seconds, down from 15.6 in 1980.3 On this chart, falling is the bad direction if you care about pedestrian or bicyclist safety:
A faster car is a car whose driver has less time to humanize others they may or may not see beyond their windshield.<br>“Footprint” is the rectangle you’d get by drawing lines between the four spots where a car’s tires touch the pavement: front tire to back tire, left tire to right tire. The EPA sets fuel economy standards against that rectangle, and a bigger one means more permissible gas guzzling. Growing the car size is a strategy for American car companies to remain compliant with a backwards policy:
The average American vehicle footprint is up 6% since the EPA started tracking it in 2008.4 Between 2003 and 2023 the average new vehicle grew about 5% longer and 6% wider, and the space displacement has spread across every parking stall, turning radius, and sightline in the country.<br>The footprint increase has directly escalated parking congestion in my city of residence (San Mateo, CA).
Drivers struck and killed 7,080 people walking in the United States in 2024, 72% more than in 2009, when pedestrian deaths were at their lowest.<br>Fifty years of federal data show a fleet that has gained mass, power, and land use. While drivers have gained acceleration they have also lost critical seconds they need to react to pedestrians and bicyclists in the roadway, i.e. their neighbors.<br>I have critically left out vehicle miles traveled: how far is all this metal actually moving and how much per capita? I will revisit that in a subsequent blogpost.<br>In the meantime, people trying to walk, bicycle, or ride the bus in America have never been more outgunned in the “war on cars” since the consumer automobile revolution in the 1920s.<br>The contested territory in the war is a bike lane here, a bus lane there, and a few parking spaces.<br>Where things are headed is up in the air: is there any reform on the horizon that will curb these metrics? Is their a ceiling to vehicle size?<br>These questions are playing out at local, state and federal levels of government–and your voice is needed: as a voter and a consumer.<br>US EPA, The 2025 EPA Automotive Trends Report (EPA-420-R-26-001, February 2026). Weight, horsepower, 0-to-60, and footprint series are from Table 3.1 and the accompanying vehicle-attribute tables. Report landing page and downloadable data: epa.gov/automotive-trends. ↩
Model years 1994–2009 are reconstructed rather than taken directly from a published annual figure, by combining EPA’s separate car-class and light-truck-class weight averages — published as US DOE, Fact #807: Light Vehicle Weights Leveling Off (December 9, 2013) — with production-share splits interpolated between EPA’s official 1993, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 values. The reconstruction matches every official checkpoint it touches to within one pound. ↩
EPA does not measure 0-to-60 times; it estimates them from engine power, weight, body style, and powertrain using the regression models in Don MacKenzie and John Heywood, “Acceleration Performance Trends and the Evolving Relationship Between Power, Weight, and Acceleration in US Light-Duty Vehicles”, Transportation Research Record 2287 (2012): 122–131. Pre-2010 points are sampled every five years. ↩
JATO Dynamics data as reported by Motor1, “In The USA And Europe, SUV Popularity Has Set Records For Average Vehicle Size” (February 2024). Three observation years, US figures only. ↩
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