In condemnation of oversized vehicles

My deep dislike for agrestic oversized vehicles has not been a secret for many readers of this blog for years. I could go on and write a tirade how far too big vehicles reflect their users’ oversized ego, megalomania, inferiority complex, but… spewing out so many insults would mean hurting some of my good friends and workmates, hence in order not to spoil my relationships with people I contain myself and in casual conversations only express my (strong) preference not to use such cars. Instead of compiling a yet another rant about their uselessness (they are not more capacious than a smaller and lighter well-designed estate cars) and lack of off-road capacities, I will make reference to a series of articles published recently in the Guardian, quote (italicised) the crucial takeaways and add a few words of my own comments.

1. Monsters of the road: what should the UK do about SUVs?

After a period of falling, the CO₂ emissions of new cars sold in both the UK and the EU have been rising since 2016. Experts attribute the reversal to an increase in SUV sales.
–> you won’t circumvent the laws of physics. Heavier vehicles need more power to be propelled and even with more fuel-efficiency improvements in place, a two-tonne SUV emits more carbon dioxide than a small city car manufactured in the 1990s, whose weight is over 50% lower. Actually if only cars kept being reasonably small, overall emissions would go down considerably.

For a couple of years, more than a decade ago, I was the car reviewer for the Guardian. I test drove very few SUVs, but on the rare occasions that I did, I experienced two distinct feelings. The first was a debilitating concern about navigating such a large vehicle through the capital’s congested streets. And the second, as that anxiety began to ease, was a sensation of being above the fray, apart from the crowd, somehow superior to my surroundings.
–> sitting higher and looking down on the surrounding traffic from above is what I detest about SUVs. Oddly enough, it does not make me feel any safer. I feel more comfortable in a “normal” car, where a gravity load is located lower.

After a slightly banal tour of west London’s A roads, I ask the salesman what the car is like at negotiating speed humps.
“Try accelerating towards one,” he suggests.
On a deserted side street I do just that, driving at the kind of speed over a “traffic-calming” hump that would rip out the undercarriage of my hatchback. The big-wheeled SUV glides over it. Thus measures implemented to protect pedestrians work very effectively with the cars that do least damage, but are next to useless with the cars that cause most harm.
–> this is one of the essences why I believe driving an SUV is anti-social…

I had an ominous encounter with this marketed anxiety one afternoon a while ago. As I carefully lined up my small hatchback to reverse into a parking space that faced out into a north London street, a great bulbous shiny black thing, like some armour-plated sci-fi machine, drove straight into “my” space and also occupied a couple of feet of the one next to it.
A moment later, an elegantly dressed woman in her 30s climbed down from the vehicle with its bumper wheels and blacked-out windows, and started to walk off. I called out that she’d left me no room to park. Exasperated, she complained that I should have told her when she was in the car, and reluctantly returned to re-park. After five or six attempts, she gave up and got out. She was still impeding the adjacent space, but not by as much.
“Excuse me,” I said, as she stomped off, “can I ask why you have such a big car?”
She looked at me as though I were some mad Unabomber-type, and in a voice quaking with righteous indignation snapped: “Because I’ve got a baby!”
At the time, it seemed an absurd response (it still does), but that woman’s perspective has become a cliche. The problem with building cars for the protection of those within them, however, is that it tends to have a deleterious effect on the protection of those without.
As Murray puts is: “If you’re driving around in a small lightweight vehicle and you have a collision with, say, a Land Rover Defender, it’s going to smash you to bits.”
–> if I come across a badly parked car in Poland, it usually is an SUV. Besides, the delusory sense of protection at the expense of other road users is an example of selfishness I cannot stand.

Even the slow switch to electric cars is an unsatisfying solution. EV design favours SUVs because the elevated seats allow space for the battery pack, but they tend to make electric SUVs even heavier than the petrol versions.
“With bigger vehicles,” says Hannon, “you’ll get less kilowatt/hour efficiency, more material used to build them, bigger battery packs, and there are serious supply chain concerns around precious metals and minerals that go into these vehicles, and questionable ethics associated with how they are mined and processed.”
–> I pointed out more than once electrics cars are a dead-end street, but the claim electric SUVs can combine the human megalomania and the climate protection issues is an enormous lie.

2. Motor emissions could have fallen by over 30% without SUV trend, report says

Emissions from the motor sector could have fallen by more than 30% between 2010 and 2022 if vehicles had stayed the same size, a report has found.
Instead, the size of the average car ballooned as the trend for SUVs took off, meaning the global annual rate of energy intensity reductions – the fall in fuel used – of light-duty vehicles (LDV) averaged 4.2% between 2020 and 2022.
–> this is anything, but surprising…

The authors of the report called for governments to place restrictions on vehicle sizes to reverse the SUV trend.
–> I am sceptical towards pure restrictions and would rather call for heavy sin taxes for such vehicles, predominantly on purchases of new vehicles, less severe on ownership of existing ones, to price in (even excessively) their detriment to the environment.

3. SUVs emit more climate damaging gas than older cars do, study finds
–> this article is behind the paywall, but the message from the heading stands to reason. A 10-year-old small, sparingly used city car will do much less harm to the planet than an SUV used for one-per-car short-distance trips.

While keeping in mind an impending climate disaster, I do not tend to favour radical steps, as they bring out human defiance. When people are prohibited from doing something, they are even more tempted to do it. I believe financial penalties (heavy sin taxes) for selfish behaviours work much better. Being told you cannot afford to drive an SUV is a preferable solution to being forbidden to drive an SUV. You can say there still will be a handful of rich men driving embarrassingly chunky vehicles, but they will not constitute 50% of brand-new car sales, as they do now on many markets. SUVs are a product of marketing a useless good. Brushing aside all their drawbacks, they actually lack a major merit carmakers claim they have – space. A Skoda Octavia estate is more capacious in terms of space for passengers and luggage than an average SUV, while its kerb weight (standard petrol engines below 1.5 litre) is between 1.26 and 1.51 tonnes (depending on engine and equipment), some 25% lower than of a typical brand-new SUV. By dint of sheer mass difference, a petrol-fuelled Skoda Octavia estate 1.5 TSI emits (a bit) less CO2 per kilometre than a hybrid Toyota RAV4, with large 2.5-litre engine and kerb weight of 1.91 tonnes. The numbers speak for themselves, but they are sadly unlikely to convince consumers fond of “obese” cars…