I think you can trace a lot of these problems back to legislation and the classification of work vehicles which receive bigger tax/incentives and going bigger and bigger is continually more beneficial to car manufacturers as increasing the size and cost of the standard car is their way of profit growth. Unfortunately this comes at the cost of safety, road conditions, infrastructure space/costs, the environment and consumer costs.

Climate town has an excellent video where they explain how the American SUV became so dominant and pushed this kind of thinking from car manufactures practically all because Jeep was failing and lobbied to change the laws so they could sell cars (obviously a huge oversimplification)