If you pay attention to the auto industry for any length of time—or even spend some time simply car-spotting as you sit in traffic—you'll have noticed an obvious truth about modern cars: They're big, and they keep getting bigger. This isn't misplaced nostalgia or confirmation bias, either, because it's definitively true that vehicles have swelled in size in recent decades. Trucks and crossovers are more popular than ever, with light trucks outselling cars three to one. There are some obvious explanations for the steady growth in vehicle size, of course: taller people, stricter safety standards that demand stronger vehicles, more powerful engines that can make weight less of a concern. But these trends work on a scale of generations, not years; they're insufficient to explain just how quickly crossovers have dominated the landscape and why cars have gotten larger.However, there is one counterintuitive explanation for ever-larger cars with every passing model year: Fuel economy regulations.
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