Advantages

Mileage

The most obvious, but seemingly ignored, advantage of small cars are their high mileage. Without the need of expensive hybrid technologies, smaller cars simply need less fuel to run because not only are they are lighter, requiring less energy to get them moving, the fact that they aren’t as tall or wide means a smaller drag area, reducing the amount of efficiency-killing aerodynamic drag that the car experiences. Further more, smaller cars do not need the kind of huge engines that large cars need to get their massive masses moving, so they can use smaller engines with fewer cylinders that are more efficient, while still being as fast or faster than than high horsepower trucks.

Here are some stats that make this waste more concrete. An average car is driven 12,000 miles a year. For a large car like a Ford Expedition, that is 750 gallons of fuel a year. At current current gas prices ($3.879/gallon), that is $2,909 a year! However, a small car, for example a Ford Fiesta, would save you 386 gallons of gasoline and therefore $1,499 every year! If you owned the car for ten years, you’d save enough money to buy a whole ‘nother car!

Material Use

Another, and definitely less mentioned, aspect of larger cars is simply their increased use of materials. Obviously, it takes more raw materials, such as metal and even petroleum to make the plastics, to build bigger cars. For a general estimate of material use, we can compare weights. Small cars, such as a Mini Cooper or a Ford Fiesta, weigh around 2,600 lbs. On the other hand, full-size size trucks, such as the Ford F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado, weigh around 4,600 lbs. Large SUVs, such as the Ford Expedition or the Cheverolet Suburban, are even heavier, weighing around 5,800 lbs. Though bad, larger heavy-duty pickup trucks, which are actually used as daily cars for many people, tip the scales at up to 6,400 lbs, the weight of a Ford F-350.

So, these huge cars, which much of people in our country choose to buy, use anywhere from 1 to nearly 2 more tons of materials for every single car, as compared to a small (and entirely practical) car. To explain the colossal repercussions of this discrepancy, I’ve done some math. Including both passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs (the latter two of which are even distinguished as separate from passenger cars), there are 243,343,727 cars on US roads. 44.4% of those cars are trucks or SUVs. So, if the the average Truck or SUV weighs about 5,400 lbs, the trucks and SUVs on the road consist of about 291 million tons of materials. However, if these cars were small cars instead, 151 million less tons of materials would have been consumed.

To put these numbers in perspective, here are a few more. 151 million tons is the equivalent of…

768,057 Boeing 747s

3,259 ships the size of the Titanic

414 Empire State Buildings

Quite staggering numbers, it might be said. However, those number will rise significantly as our country grows further, if we do not use smaller cars. Especially when considering how smaller cars cost less because of their lower use of materials, making the switch makes even more sense.

Saved Space

Smaller cars, being smaller, require less space to park than their larger counterparts. While a Ford F-150 takes up 116 square feet of road space, a car like a Mini Cooper only takes up 67.5 square feet of area. So, if 80 million of the trucks and SUVs on the road averaged out to about the size of an F-150 each and each needed one parking spot to fit it, an area over four times the size of Manhattan would have been saved had they been the size of a Mini Cooper. That is quite a lot of saved asphalt. Considering how that the size of cars affects the size or a lot than a single parking space, the affect is actually quite larger. Also, if cars were smaller, there would be room for more cars on parking-starved streets city streets around the US.

Also, paving over land, including parking lots, has a major effect on the amount of groundwater below the surface. Aquifers, through wells and springs that rise from them, are a major freshwater source for millions of people. However, paving over the ground prevents rainwater from seeping through the soil and into the water basin, as water often drains into sewers or is evaporated. So, a reduction size parking lots because of reduced sizes of cars would help keep our nation’s aquifers, many of which have been drastically affected by decades of use.

An interesting affect smaller cars have is that they make the length of traffic jams shorter. Shorter cars would mean back-ups would not extend as far, meaning you would be able to get to your exit quicker.

Sources:

Mileage (using combined MPG): http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm

Gas Prices: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html

Weights (which depend on specifics like transmission): MiniUSA.com, http://www.altcarexpo.com/ridedrive/2011_fiesta_specs.pdf, http://autos.aol.com/cars-Ford-F_350-2011/specs/, http://www.newyorktransportation.com/info/empirefact2.html, http://www.titanic-facts.com/titanic-facts.html, (using 747-400 specs) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080422123355AAC8HEF

Number of cars, used in calculations (using 2006 statistics): http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html

Size of Manhattan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan