I completely buy in to the notion that auto makers are pushing the luxury items for profit, but I also believe mileage and safety requirements are at least in part responsible for the move to super-size vehicles in the past 10 years. Someone else on this forum posted a link to an article explaining how manufacturers have been changing vehicles to meet EPA targets. I couldn't find that other MTC forum member's post but I did find this:Absolutely wild that the under $30k cars went from 38% to 8% in just a few years. I want to say I don't agree with the features race thing, but I bought a lariat entirely because I wanted ACC so
I hate the trend of small cars going away for bigger, more luxurious, higher margin cars. But I wonder how much of that percentage has to do with manufactures choosing to build more of the higher trims to maximize profits through the parts shortage. If they can sell X amount of high trim and Y amount of low trim, but can't build enough to meet that, they're going to still make X and make the cuts to Y.
