It's interesting how American families' expectations about vehicles seem to have inflated in the same way our thinking about housing has changed.
Throughout most of my childhood, my family (2 parents and 2 children) lived in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom house. At most, it was ~1000 sqft., which, at the time, seemed completely normal to us. We actually had a little more room than some of our friends who had more children and the same or smaller sized houses. Fast forward to 2016, and 4 people living in 1000 sqft., with only 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, seems woefully inadequate, by most Americans' standards.
My family always had one big, old clunker car that was plenty large enough to fit the four of us. We could even fit most of the kids in the neighborhood, as well, when my parents used to drive us all to the pool in the summer time. This was before the days of car/booster seats for kids. If there were more kids than seat belts in the car, those of us with no seat belts just held on to one of the door handles or we were just wedged so tightly between the other kids who were buckled in that we didn't move around too much when we drove around bends or made abrupt stops.
As a child, it never occurred to me as being something strange, but my best friend's family, with 8 children, had only one car that I can remember, throughout our entire childhood, and it was a subcompact Chevy Chevette. This was in the 70's when small cars like that first started to appear in the U.S. I remember our neighbors bought one new ~1978. Looking back, now, I can see how that would be a pretty impractical vehicle for a family of 8 children and 2 adults. I guess the way they made it work was that they never went anywhere all at one time. If one of the kids had a doctor's appointment, one of the parents would drive him to his appointment and bring him back home. When they needed to go shopping, one or both of the adults would drive to the supermarket (leaving all 8 kids at home alone, gasp! Call CPS!), buy groceries and come back home. Of course, my friend's parents never drove him or any of his siblings to/from school. All of us walked both ways uphill to school everyday. :) Now that I think of it, the only time my friend ever left our neighborhood was when he went with me and my family when we took road trips to neighboring cities/states.
Not saying that the way we lived when I was a kid is preferable to the way we live now. Just making an observation about how our expectations about the size of our vehicles have inflated along with our perceptions of the appropriate size of our homes. Today, it would never occur to me to purchase a vehicle that wasn't big enough to transport my entire family all at one time, but I guess in the past people did what they had to do to survive. Today, probably people who can't afford to purchase minivans expect the government or a rich relative to provide them with one... :)