This is something that has bugged me for some time, but has finally come to a head, with the introduction of the so-called “B-segment” cars.

Why does a vehicle, if it’s successful and produced over a succession of generations, keep getting bigger? Like Stephen Harper’s waistline?

Take Honda for example. When it was first introduced in 1973, the Civic was 139.8 inches long. The current Civic is 177 inches — over three feet longer! It’s even more than a foot longer than the 1976 Accord, which Honda introduced back then as its next-size-up car.

Now I know it’s the natural order of things to get bigger, or at least want to get bigger. Because, amongst other things, the tall gene is dominant, there is too-much sugar in our diets, and there is too much money to be made in the NBA. But why cars? Is Shell putting growth hormones in the high-test? We end up having a spate of small cars that aren’t small. It’s like serving an entrée that’s bigger than a 20-ounce porterhouse.

The Civic is so large now that Honda had to go looking for a car to slot under it — the Fit. That car by the way, one of those so-called B-segment entries, is still bigger than the ’73 Civic, by close to a foot. Chrysler currently doesn’t have a B-segment entry, so its smallest/cheapest car is the Dodge Caliber. Excuse me, but the Caliber is not a small car. Take the difference in interior volume room, between a Caliber and an original Civic, add it to a New York apartment, and you could charge another $375 a month in rent.

Why can’t a manufacturer simply settle on an optimum size for a car, and then simply refine that car within that framework? If you need a larger vehicle in the catalogue, create one and call it something else.

And bigger is not always better. I could rest my case with the miniskirt— but I won’t. Sometimes the whole point of something is that it is not too big, too refined, or too grown-up. Like Rock’n Roll. And where would we be without Rock’n Roll? Maybe all lying in a gutter mumbling Big Crosby tunes, that’s where… Before I lose you let’s get back to cars … or how about trucks? Because this phenomenon of continual up-sizing is equally ramped in truck segments. Remember those neat import pickups that everybody drove in the late 1970s, because of the gas crisis? Well, they were so damn popular that the U.S. government slapped a 25 percent duty on them. There were small, light, and low, and a breeze to handle.

Have you noticed what constitutes a compact pickup these days, even from the imports? The Toyota Tacoma has a Double Cab model that sports a wheelbase over 140 inches — that’s longer than the total length of our much-mentioned first-generation Civic.

And how about the Dodge Dakota? Chrysler calls this an “intermediate” truck. Intermediate my asymmetrical tires. Spec out a Dakota with 5.9-litre V8, Quad Cab, 16-inch wheels, the 4x4 off-road package, and black paint, and tell me if it’s exuding intermediate vibes. (It’s as big as my ‘80s full-size truck! P.C.)

I suppose this might be a North American dilemma. This is the home of super-sizing of course. Europe and Asia seem to have more success in keeping things in proportion. In addition to lots of European nameplates that continue to stay in their 1.0-litre or 1.5-ltire or 2.0-litre formats, I’m thinking about products like Gucci handbags, Nokia cell phones, Vespa scooters, and the fore-mentioned miniskirt, which seem to be precisely about being the “right” size.

Europe has also given us the smart car. The smart ForTwo is a foot (size 4) in the right direction, and a chic way to make for all us to re-think the rush to be bigger and better. The smart is a bit about being fashionable and different, and the car couldn’t stand out more on our North American roads, if it were 60-feet long. In my experience, the only vehicle that gets more attention is the OscarMyer Weiner Mobile. The obvious culprits of the upsizing movement are increased demand for power, safety and creature comforts, and the desire of manufactures to cash in on a well-known nameplate. Corolla’s fame was established when it was Toyota’s entry-level model. Toyota moved it up market, and why not? You sell a lot more compacts in Canada than subcompacts, so might as well make the famous Corolla the Toyota emissary there, and introduce something else when and where you need it.

There doesn’t seem to be much one can do stop this rising trend. The only thing I could think of is insisting (somehow) that vehicle names reflect their categories. A good name for a subcompact, for example, might be the Chihuahua, especially if it was assembled in Mexico. This would effectively prevent it from evolving into the Chihuahua Estate Brougham, or the Chihuahua XXL Expediter.

There have been some examples in automotive history, where a nameplate has decreased in the size, but unfortunately, they’re not pretty. Think 1974 Mustang II. Think 1982 Chrysler LeBaron. Think 1986 Buick Riviera. In each instance, questionable aesthetic results, and plummeting sales.

But that shouldn’t daunt us. For one thing, there was a lot of bad Coke floating around the auto industry in the late seventies and early eighties. We can do downsizing much better now. We also have lots of pertinent reasons for getting behind fuel efficiency at this time, and no matter which fuel we use now, or will use in the future, we’ll use less of it in a smaller vehicle. So maybe stop upsizing nameplates, at least when it’s done automatically, and let’s see some vehicles improve, without weight or girth gain. Just a thought.