Tires,wheels and brakes are bigger, mostly because the car is heavier. I compared the two top spec models to keep it fair and yes, the trend is that wheels are bigger and heavier. In fact, apart from this top model, the cars both have 254 disc brakes in front and drums in the back. The difference is that the newer model has ventilated brakes. As I said, it's much stiffer, mostly because of the safety regulations. There are exactly 2 more electric motors in the new one, for the wing mirrors. The rest is also present in the old one.
The car I picked to compare is maybe not totally representative of the european market, since Alfa already was putting quite a bit of features in their cars and kept it to "essential luxury" so the car would remain sporty. Power to weight ratio and suspension/brake features is rather good for a small midsized car and always has been with them. I picked it because it's the brand I've been driving for the last 11 years and I've been working on a lot of these cars, so I know the technology and features best.
If you look at for instance the VW golf, now in their sixth generation, the creeping featurism is much more defined. The first golf in the seventies curb weight started at 790 kilo's, the GTI at 836 kg being slightly heavier because of the bigger engine and brakes. The second generation already was at 120 kg more. The 3rd golf GTI was much slower than the first generation golf GTI and weighed 1088 kg.
These figures are quite a good representation of the trends in European cars. They got heavier, more features got added, engines gained power and efficiency, but in the end, the cars weren't going faster and fuel economy wasn't much better either. Only emissions of CO, NOx and HC are down because of the cleaner way the cars now burn fuel. CO2 is still roughly the same in real world use. The "euro test cycle" has been instated and altered a few times, but it's in no way representative for most of the driving done in the real world.
I live in the Netherlands and our government is traditionally taxing both ownership and usage of automobiles quite heavily. Purchasing a new car means that over 50% of what you pay is taxes, unless it's one of the "A label" cars that is environmentally friendly, then it's exempt from some of the taxes. The more a car pollutes (euro cycle used) the more tax you pay at purchase. You also have to pay road tax, based on the curb weight and the type of fuel used. Then there is fuel tax. Current prices for 95 ron, the most common fuel here (93 MON I believe) would be about 8.30 US dollar/gallon (1.54 euro/liter) The taxation on purchasing new vehicles based on pollution is new, it used to be a static percentage of the purchase price.
There's another phenomena here, but that's rather unique for the Netherlands, because of taxation, company lease cars. Quite a few people get a company provided lease car. They get to drive it as a personal car too, add a percentage of the catalog value of the car to their income (for tax) and usually don't have to pay for the first 10.000 km each year or so. For most, this is cheaper than buying a new car themselves so many companies offer this to their employees. They changed the tax rules for these cars as well, the A label cars get taxed 14%, the B labels 20% , and C and higher get 25% of the catalog value after taxes added to your income for tax reasons.
This means that a lot of the new cars sold here are in fact hybrids and "micro cars" as I call them, since they are the modern equivalent of the BMW Isetta in my eyes. We do see a few 3 cylinder turbo diesel cars that are slightly larger appear now, since they are very fuel efficient and the taxation criteria are only based on CO2 emissions per distance traveled.
A lot of governments are now trying to regulate what cars are being bought with tax and emissions regulations. Safety regulations seem to make meeting these emissions regulations hard, because you can't just put people inside a paper bag with wheels attached anymore.
