Manipulating public taste has its limits as far as automakers are concerned. Years ago muffler salesmen captivated ago people; having your muffler checked meant more than being aware of controlling the car's noise level. Today that notion is totally absurd. Car companies and spin-off industries later knew how they could create captive sales by inducing the public to buy peripheral equipment which at one time was never considered to be something a car had to have, like the ability to hook up to a laptop. No one dreamt of ever owning a compact computer in the days that cars had humongous bumpers. Computers only existed for the military. Then shinning the chrome of your bumper, or the emblem on the hood was a way of showing status. Today that attitude has gone the way of the dinosaur for the most part. There is a small percentage of the public that still thrives on knowing the hood of their car carries a jaguar and not some other emblem.
Slogans today promote the idea of keeping better in touch with the world around you but it appears that they have always been the way that a merchandiser would push his business. The car industry has always, since the time of creating special models, been keen on finding new ways to keep the public wanting more. Not everyone in the public can be fooled though.
When the auto industry went compact in the beginning it was a challenge to get sales. Anybody wanting a small car was derided as going cheap and then people realized that driving in a smaller vehicle did not mean having less class. Obviously the industry wanted to keep its image as a large and spacious car producers, which meant producing innumerable vehicles that would destined for one passenger and wasteful as far as fuel and space was concerned. By today's standards, not much has changed since suburban urban vehicles have entered the market and owners are being coerced in savvier way of using space, but then these modern vehicles are just as long as the Chrysler was 50 years back, if not longer.
So many more people have money to spend on vehicles than after the war. In my opinion that many people could not care less on economizing fuel and how to save on costs. Those are ones who were born in a world of high consumption, they are prodded to consume more and all they know is how to compete or how to spend more. Manipulating the market for a greater number of large space vehicles then fits well on arrogant and self-serving personalities who have little regard for the quality of air tomorrow or the disappearance of global caps because of the increased use of fossil fuels over recent years. There are more energy conscious auto consumers though who value the use of the energy efficient car and are aware they would be contributing to global warming by using a less fuel-efficient car. I hope that electrical cars will win over one day altogether.
