England Trip #4

I'd read that the cars British people buy are significantly smaller than the cars we buy in the States, but I was still surprised to see just how much smaller the majority of their cars really are.

See, in America, we consider cars like the Chevrolet Cruze and Ford Focus to be small cars. We're right. They consider cars like that to be mid-size. They're wrong.

Because they consider Focus-sized cars to be mid-size, and they prefer to drive around in the absolute smallest cars they can squeeze into, the European market is flooded with "city cars." That's stuff like the Smart Fortwo, the Ford Ka, the Vauxhall Tigra, and about 800,000,000,000 others. 

Look at this picture:

That's an old Focus (left), a Focus that is much smaller than the one on sale today, parked next to an old Fork Ka. That Ka is microscopic.

To be fair, the reason the English stick to buying tiny cars is because almost all of the roads in England are freakishly narrow. The picture below is of an MG TF. It's slightly smaller than the Mazda MX-5. Despite it's tinyness...

...it almost takes up that entire lane. Same thing in this next picture of a Fiat Punto, an Aveo-sized car.

Sheesh.

Now look at this picture:

That's a Maserati Quattroporte parked in a normal sized parking space, in England. To put that picture into perspective, here's an interesting stat.The Quattroporte is just 0.3 of an inch longer than a Chevrolet Impala. Hope that explains how darn small the parking spaces in England are.

The moral of this blog post is: Be thankful for Suburbans, and roads that can fit them.