This is true; “light truck” is the classification.
Basically, it would have been annoying and more expensive for car manufacturers to meet the standards, so they just started producing and promoting a bunch of vehicles like SUVs that technically classify as light trucks and thus are exempt from them. American consumers are American and thus love dumb big things for the sake of being big, so that was a pretty good gamble.
This is true; “light truck” is the classification.
Basically, it would have been annoying and more expensive for car manufacturers to meet the standards, so they just started producing and promoting a bunch of vehicles like SUVs that technically classify as light trucks and thus are exempt from them. American consumers are American and thus love dumb big things for the sake of being big, so that was a pretty good gamble.