one of the biggest fuckeries is CAFE standards. in the 70s during the fuel crisis, the NHTSA was put in charge of implementing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which are standards meant to increase the average MPG of cars sold in the US
CAFE standards dictate that if car manufacturers do not meet minimum MPG goals set by CAFE then they will be charged a certain $ per 0.1 MPG they are under the goals per vehicle they manufacture that year. that penalty is not just for the vehicles that fail to meet CAFE standards, but for their entire production line. that's every single car they manufacture, even ones that meet CAFE standards
CAFE standards are determined by the vehicle footprint. so basically, the bigger the car is, the higher MPG it's allowed to have. the graph below shows what the targets have been for the last decade. thanks, in part, to the EV scam, progressives embedded in NHTSA have set these limits to unrealistic standards. the requirements they're asking for impossible for traditional Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) vehicles to meet, especially with the amount of safety equipment that's required to be in every car growing every year (which also happens to be managed by NHTSA)
this is further complicated by the fact that passenger cars and trucks have different standards set, so if a car manufacturer is able to get their vehicle classified as a truck they have a lot more leeway in the MPG limit. this directly led to the development of the SUV, which is a truck wearing a car skin suit. this also directly led to all pickup trucks being huge as fuck because no matter what you do, it is physically impossible for a small box on wheels to meet the MPG requirements. trucks are not meant to be MPG friendly, they are meant to be utilitarian
so, long story short, the reason there are no reasonably sized vehicles left to buy in the modern age is that they either need to be tiny hypermiler cars that can meet the almost impossible MPG targets for smaller cars, or they need to be giant behemoths that are allowed to take physics into account and be allowed to have a low MPG
