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…
