The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

It's never been illegal to produce small cars in the US. It's a tragedy of the commons that the more over-sized cars on the road the more intimidated the average driver and the more compensation in the sizes of other cars to "keep up". Over-sized SUVs and trucks aren't penalized enough for their domination and essentially destruction of the commons space.

That's also what fuels some of the demand for high-margin cars, because of the perverse incentive that over-sized delivers higher margins. People will be too easily convinced to pay extra (generally at linear relationship) for size and there's not a linear relationship in size versus margins.

> It's never been illegal to produce small cars in the US

I think they're referring to the practice of making cars larger to pass as trucks so they are faced with more lax fuel-efficiency standards.

The biggest reason that works is that most states dropped per-axle weight taxes for trucks (which would much more directly pay for road wear-and-tear than gas taxes, and which is why such taxes existed in the first place) and the ones that didn't carved out too many "personal vehicle" loopholes for trucks. It's a curious lack of disincentives (and enforcement of such) for larger vehicles more than "small cars are illegal". Things like CAFE standards could have been met in smarter ways if they were properly incentivized. (Plus CAFE standards were in part set with an expectation of not "double dipping" versus vehicle weight taxes. That the vehicle weight taxes disappeared is the smoking gun, in some ways.) Small cars aren't incentivized enough, larger vehicles aren't disincentivized enough. Especially with today's wear and tear on roads, the states complaining that EVs are dropping gas taxes too fast, it's a wild shame that we aren't seeing a faster return to per-axle vehicle taxes.

Even without the bogus classifications, the EPA emissions regulations are inversely proportional to the footprint of the car. That rewards manufacturers for not offering small cars.

The "light truck" designation is made on the basis of features like cargo capacity and ground clearance. The Subaru Outback was properly classified as a car until the smaller PT Cruiser got its truck designation and they justifiably complained.

... yet the Outback is still around and the PT Cruiser is not. Why? Well, the Outback has a thousand tiny details that add up to make it a very useful vehicle, while the PT Cruiser was all about exploiting nostalgia and finding regulatory loopholes to create/increase profit margin.

It's almost like there is a lesson to be learned. Make a "cheap" electric car worth buying, and people will buy it.