Against SUVs

A couple of weeks ago the campaign group Transport & Environment published a report explaining how the height of SUVs increases the risk of injury and death to pedestrians, especially children.  It seems that the bonnet height of these vehicles is increasing by half a centimetre a year.  High bonnets decrease the field of the driver’s vision – small children can be entirely invisible – and increase the severity of injury when collisions with pedestrians occur.  T&E calls for governments throughout Europe to impose a legal cap on bonnet height.

There’s plenty of evidence that SUVs are more dangerous than smaller cars for those on foot unfortunate enough to come too close to them.  But the case for placing kerbs on SUVs is much wider than the question of bonnet heights.

SUV stands for Sports Utility Vehicle.  That might seem an oxymoron.  If an SUV is a workaday, ‘utility’ vehicle, how can it be a ‘sporty’, ostentatious car at the same time?  But it is an accurate description, because an SUV does in reality combine the two functions: people use it simply as a means of getting from A to B on suburban roads, but they also want to be seen driving one.  An SUV is a potent status symbol, a ‘positional good’ in today’s parlance, a prized possession to be flaunted.

Anyone who’s been to continental Europe recently will know that most cars there are still small(ish).  In the UK, by contrast, SUVs now account for over half of all new car sales.  In part that may be because Jaguar Landrover is the UK manufacturer of 70% of them.  But I suspect that ‘autobesity’ or car bloat is a specific Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. As in so many other areas, many Britons aspire to the inflated sizes and aggressive stylings prevalent in the US (where 80% of new cars sold are SUVs or equivalent).

It’s not just that SUVs are dangerous.  They’re also far more polluting.  In 2024 the International Energy Agency calculated that global SUV sales generated 1bn tonnes of CO₂ emissions – equivalent to the output of the fifth most polluting country in the world.  Particulates from tyre and brakes, a major source of dangerous microplastics entering the environment, are more of a problem with SUVs than with smaller vehicles.

Since SUVs are much heavier than other cars – heavier still if they’re e-SUVs – they cause more damage to road surfaces.  They also take up more road space, and more parking space, both in car parks and at home, where owners have to remove gateposts to allow them access to drives.  They consume more petrol for a given distance (larger models can average no more than 15 miles per gallon), or need even bigger batteries.  Their higher centre of gravity makes them more prone to rollover accidents.  Their headlights, brighter and placed higher than on normal cars, dazzle other road users.

In most cases, people simply don’t need to drive an SUV. A smaller car would do the job just as well (and cheaper).  They choose an SUV because advertising persuades them to think it makes them superior.  Superior in all senses: they can sit at a greater height than others, they can bully other car-users to get their way, and they can feel at a social advantage to them.  All three might give the impression of increased personal safety – the risks to safety being exported to others less fortunate.  Purchasers are unlikely to make the choice because they intend to make off-road use of their machines, despite what the adverts suggest.  On the supply side, it’s easy to see why manufacturers are so keen to flog SUVs: the profit margins on them are much higher than on smaller cars.

When we know for certain that the planet can’t survive ever greater pressure placed upon it by humans, including in the area of personal transportation, it makes no sense to allow SUVs to multiply in an uncontrolled way.  Since SUV owners, studies have shown, are immune to rational argument or environmental shaming, it’s up to governments to start discouraging SUV use, except when such use is justified.  All kinds of disincentives are possible: heavier, weight- or footprint-based taxation for SUVs; differential car parking fees (tripled in Paris after a referendum); a ban on advertising.  Any government that treated human safety and environmental health seriously would be investigating the options as a matter of urgency, alongside measures to get people out of their cars altogether and use public transport or other less damaging ways of getting around – including use of our oldest transport mechanism, our feet.