Unless you live in the snow, desert, or on a farm, you don't need a two ton tank. Urban SUVS accelerate climate change, are a danger to cyclists & pedestrians and increase traffic congestion, as well as being conspicuous consumption.
The majority of British motorists want an outright ban on highly polluting vehicles, such as 4x4s and SUVs, to stop them from entering well-populated areas like town and city centres.
According to a survey of 1,000 UK drivers, 59 percent said they would support a ban on larger vehicles like 4x4s, SUVs and other large vehicles. A further 39 percent would support the mandatory introduction of Clean Air Zones in every town and city in the UK, as has been seen in the likes of Bath and Birmingham.
As the leader of the over 120-year-old automaker, Ford CEO Jim Farley has an essential job of steering it into the future. Farley said smaller EVs, which Ford is shifting toward, are “super important for our society.” Meanwhile, Farley addressed the love for larger, “monster vehicles” in the US.
“We are just in love with these monster vehicles,” Ford’s CEO said at the Aspen Ideas Festival Friday. And although Farley agreed, “I love them too,” he acknowledged they are a major issue due to their weight.
The University of Oxford haven spoken out about how increasingly large cars like electric SUVs are missing the point of electrification, and cars need to stop getting larger to actually help the environment.
The transition towards electrified road transport is a cornerstone of global efforts to mitigate climate change. Whilst 14% of cars being sold are electric, there is an alarming shift towards the production and use of larger, heavier vehicles – ‘mobesity’ – which pose unique challenges to reducing emissions.
Whilst electric SUVs (e-SUVs) are three times more energy efficient than their counterparts, they still require significantly more resources to build and have greater energy consumption, increasing their environmental footprint and undermining the potential gains from electrification.
Adverts for sports utility vehicles (SUVs like Range Rovers etc) & cruise holidays are to be banned by Edinburgh council as part of a crackdown on promotion of the fossil fuel industry across the Scottish capital.
The prohibition of ads from council-owned spaces such as billboards and bus stops also covers airlines, airports, fossil-fuel powered vehicles and arms manufacturers – but stopped short of outlawing meat adverts.
Edinburgh council said “the promotion of high-carbon products is incompatible with net zero objectives”.
Changes designed to encourage people to take other forms of transportation than cars have contributed to a 40% decline in air pollution.
That’s because a campaign to make Paris greener, primarily by reducing its dependence on cars, has transformed it into a shining example of what many environmental activists, city planners and transit advocates say ought to be the future of cities worldwide.
Paris has closed more than 100 streets to motor vehicles, tripled parking fees for SUVs, removed roughly 50,000 parking spots, and constructed more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of bike lanes since Mayor Anne Hidalgo took office in 2014.
The large, heavy passenger vehicles were responsible for over 20% of the growth in global energy-related CO2 emissions last year
SUVs accounted for 48% of global car sales in 2023, reaching a new record and further strengthening the defining automobile trend of the early 21st century – the shift towards ever larger and heavier cars. There are various driving forces behind this trend, from the appeal of SUVs as a status symbol and their potential enhancements in comfort, to the marketing strategies of leading automakers.
Calling drivers across the UK, are you ready for a challenge? Summer’s here and the time is right for the Going Car Free Challenge – a month of climate-friendly travel.
Could you swap your daily commute or school run from the car to the bus? Or cycle? Could you go car-free for a day? A week? A month? How about talking to your friends and family about the importance of clean air, active travel, and people-friendly streets?
Join us Going Car Free from 1st – 30th June 2024. Those ready and willing to take on the challenge will be in for the chance of winning some fantastic prizes.
https://www.wearepossible.org/actions-blog/going-car-free-challenge
Tight regulation of exhaust emissions by the EU has meant that new cars emit very little particle pollution. But tyre wear pollution is unregulated and can be 1,000 times worse, finds independent real-world testing experts Emissions Analytics.
Increased popularity of SUVs, larger and heavier than standard vehicles, exacerbates this problem – as does growing sales of heavy EVs and widespread use of budget tyres.
Fitting only high-quality tyres and lowering vehicle weight are routes to reducing these ‘non-exhaust emissions’
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-worse-exhaust-emissions
Could the tide be turning against selfish SUV drivers?
Drivers of SUVs will have to pay €18 an hour to park in the city centre – three times the current €6
Parisians have voted in favour of tripling the parking fees for out-of-town SUV drivers in a narrow referendum vote that was nearly split down the middle…
It’s a nightmare situation on a highway: Your car hits a patch of ice and starts to skid. Unable to regain control, you panic as you veer toward the roadway’s edge.
In emergencies like this, guardrails provide a failsafe. As explained in a federal memo, a guardrail will “deflect a vehicle back to the roadway [or] slow the vehicle down to a complete stop.” Your car will probably be damaged, but guardrails can prevent something much worse.
But some modern vehicles can instead smash through these guardrails, new research demonstrates, sending their passengers hurtling toward a ditch, cliff, or whatever is on the other side. The problem is that thousands of miles of guardrails installed alongside American highways were designed decades ago, when vehicles were much lighter than the behemoths that increasingly dominate the U.S. car market. And cars are only getting heavier: Bulkier electrified versions of big cars are poised to arrive in the years ahead. The risk of huge vehicles tearing through guardrails is yet another reason to expect American car bloat to augur an expensive, and dangerous, roadway future.
https://slate.com/business/2024/02/car-safety-guardrails-bloat-electric-vehicles.html
Spurred on by rising sales of large SUVs, newly-sold passenger vehicles (i.e. cars) are getting one centimetre wider every 2 years (see figure 1 below). All the indications are that this trend will continue without regulatory action by European law-makers. The current EU maximum width applied to all vehicles, 255 cm, was enacted to limit the expansion of buses and trucks in the mid 1990s – and was never truly intended for cars. The limit fails to contain the trend to ever-wider SUVs (including pick-up trucks), and there is a compelling case to review it.
The average width of new cars in the EU now exceeds 180 cm, and around half of sales now exceed this figure. 180 cm is a key threshold because it is a frequently-used minimum specification for the width of on-street parking in Europe. When parked in spaces 180 cm wide, vehicles exceeding this width simply don’t fit. Vehicles which exceed their parking bay take space from those using the footpath, from vehicles moving along the road, or from both the footpath and the road.
(The usual complete missing of the point by the BBC – letting tyres down doesn’t destroy them)
“A man living in Clifton, Bristol, said he saw his Tesla’s tyres were deflated when he went out to walk his dog. On the windscreen he found a leaflet saying “your gas guzzler kills” and other cars were also targeted in the street.”
The growing market share and huge size of Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) are undermining opportunities to mitigate the impact of vehicle improvements even with the growing shift to electric vehicles (EVs), says a new report by the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI), supported by the FIA Foundation.
A new analysis in ‘Trends in the global vehicle fleet – managing the SUV shift and the EV transition’ examines global car market trends set against fuel economy developments. Key findings include:
They have higher emissions, hog roadspace and are more dangerous for other road users. Yet SUVs are selling better than ever. As calls for curbs increase, some people are taking matters into their own hands
By the early part of this year more than half of all new car sales in Europe were SUVs or SUV-styled cars. Between 2001 and 2022, in an outbreak of ongoing auto-obesity, the average kerb weight of cars sold in Europe increased by 21%. The International Energy Agency has said that annual CO2 emissions from the world’s 330m SUVs reached almost 1bn tonnes last year. According to the government, the transport sector is the biggest source of CO2 emissions in the UK (accounting for 34% of the total), with the “large majority” coming from road transport.
Ireland’s Green party has called for measures to reduce the sale of sport utility vehicles after figures showed that two out of three cars sold in the country in 2022 were SUVs, 13 percentage points higher than the EU average.
Data provided to the Financial Times by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association showed that SUV sales as a percentage of all new cars sold were much higher in Ireland than in Spain, France, Italy and Germany.
There is increasing concern about the environmental, health and safety impact of the increasing popularity of SUVs, often large four-wheel drive vehicles that routinely weigh more than two tonnes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/20/ireland-green-party-calls-measures-reduce-sale-suvs
New large-scale analysis of more than 300,000 road collisions between 2017 and 2021 has detailed the extent to which heavier, larger vehicles are putting cyclists and pedestrians at an increased risk of suffering serious or fatal injuries in the case of a collision.
The research(link is external) comes thanks to the Vias institute, formerly known as the Belgian Road Safety Institute, and saw the characteristics of vehicles involved in collisions analysed. Factors such as mass, height and age were noted alongside the severity of injuries sustained by the vehicle’s occupants, and those suffered by occupants of any other vehicle involved, or pedestrians and cyclists.
https://road.cc/content/news/new-research-shows-danger-cyclists-posed-large-cars-303555
A Range Rover driving idiot was “shocked when our renewal quote for this year arrived from Aviva, which had shot up from £893 to £2,531. An increase of more than 180%.”
According to the DVLA, Range Rovers were the second most stolen cars in 2022, with more than 5,200 taken. Earlier this year, an Autocar investigation found that owners were being denied insurance because the risk of theft had become so great.
Aviva says: “According to the Association of British Insurers, premiums have risen in recent months due to inflation and rising claims costs.
“Unfortunately, there has also been an increase in thefts of high-end vehicles, particularly in urban areas, and this has impacted JM’s premium. Many are being stolen to resell the vehicle, or its parts, in the UK, or overseas.”
Fears over safety as analysis by Which? shows ‘autobesity’ epidemic means cars getting wider and longer
More than 150 car models are now too big to fit in average car parking spaces, according to analysis conducted by Which?.
While the size of the standard parking bay has remained static for decades, cars have been growing longer and wider in a phenomenon known as “autobesity”.
Natalie Hitchins, Which?’s home products and services editor, said:
“Cars are getting larger and larger, and while this might mean a more comfortable driving experience, it could be a problem when it comes to squeezing into a parking space.”
There is growing debate about car size and road safety, after two eight-year-old girls, Selena Lau and Nuria Sajjad, died when a Land Rover crashed through a school fence in south-west London in July.
Electric cars will need to be smaller with shorter ranges and people must make fewer private journeys by road to ease the inevitable surge in demand for critical metals when transitioning to battery vehicles, according to a new report.
These are among the recommendations outlined by a green transport thinktank as part of a study looking into how to moderate the consumption of key metals needed for electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
It says the usage of critical metals – namely lithium, nickel and cobalt – could be slashed by almost half by 2050, though this is dependent on manufacturers no longer producing hulking SUVs.
And it has called on governments to introduce ‘weight-based taxation’ on the heaviest and largest motors.
Our research shows that a full three quarters of all SUVs sold in the UK to private citizens in 2019-2020 were actually registered to urban addresses.
What strings have advertised pulled in people to bring about such a perverse shift in the face of the double air pollution and climate crises?
Decades of work and countless billions have gone into carefully and deliberately cultivating consumer demand for vehicles that are bigger and more powerful than their typical buyers could ever need in practice. Advertisers spent an estimated $9 billion alone between 1990 and 2001 – and that was before the market took off.
Earlier this year it was reported in the U.S. that the “nation’s SUV boom is becoming increasingly deadly” after it was revealed that pedestrian deaths hit a 28-year high in 2018. A new data crunch from British transport data experts shows there may be a similar lethality problem with SUVs in the U.K.
Britain’s Department for Transport (DfT) should be “really concerned that some [car] sizes are twice as likely to kill pedestrians compared to others,” says transport policy advisor Adam Reynolds.
He has worked with other spreadsheet specialists on police crash data made more statistically accessible by Robin Lovelace, a “Big Data” fellow at the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds University in northern England.
You may have also noticed that the cars on our streets – and in the adverts – are getting bigger. A new report by the New Weather Institute and climate charity Possible shows that SUV sales are rising and that: “In 2019 alone, over 150,000 new cars were sold in the UK which are too big to fit in a standard parking space.”
The tantalising wild landscapes so common in adverts for these giant cars seem all the more deceitful when you look at the reality: that globally rising sales of SUVs are the second biggest cause of increasing CO2 emissions. Climate change and extraction are already devastating many of our natural landscape. But that truth won’t sell many cars.
https://adfreecities.org.uk/2020/08/a-ban-on-suv-ads-could-help-create-the-happier-cities-we-want/
Calls have been made for SUVs to be banned from built-up areas after a girl was killed in a crash outside her primary school. Eight-year-old Selena Lau was killed during a tea party at The Study Preparatory School in Wimbledon.
With three quarters of new SUV sales going to owners who live in urban homes, there are calls for curbs on their use. The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) called Thursday’s crash a “terrible and avoidable tragedy” and wants a ban on SUVs in towns and cities in a bid to cut cyclist and pedestrian fatalities.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/call-ban-suvs-city-centres-27282940
Fatal pedestrian and pedal cyclist crashes have been on the rise in the United States since 2009. This rise in fatalities coincides with the rise of large vehicles on American roadways, continuing a trend that began years earlier.
Method: Through rare access to both crash and hospital records, this report investigates the relationship between striking vehicle type and medical outcomes of pedestrian and pedal cyclist cases.
Results: Results suggest that children are eight times more likely to die when struck by a SUV compared to those struck by a passenger car.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437522000810?via=ihub
A letter was left on the vehicle referring to the tragedy in London where two children died after a 4×4 crashed into a school.
Paris city hall is to impose higher parking fees on owners of SUVs in its battle to reduce pollution in the capital.
Details of the charges have not been announced but the size, weight of the vehicle and its motor will be taken into consideration.
Electric vehicles and those with large families requiring a bigger car are expected to escape the increased fees that will come into effect on 1 January 2024.
Banning SUVs is a contentious topic that raises important considerations regarding environmental impact, safety concerns, urban congestion, inefficient resource use, and social equity. While it is a complex issue, proponents of banning SUVs argue that such measures will have positive effects on these issues.
One of the primary reasons to ban SUVs is their environmental impact. SUVs typically have larger engines and consume more fuel than smaller vehicles, leading to higher carbon dioxide emissions. By banning SUVs, there is a potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to mitigating climate change.
Safety concerns are another factor that advocates for banning SUVs highlight. Due to their larger size and weight, SUVs can pose a greater risk to other road users in the event of a collision. Pedestrians and cyclists are particularly vulnerable to the higher impact forces associated with SUVs. By removing SUVs from the roads, there is a potential to improve overall road safety and protect vulnerable road users.
Urban congestion is a pressing issue in many cities, and SUVs contribute to this problem. These vehicles take up more space on the road and in car parks, exacerbating congestion. Banning or reducing SUVs could potentially free up more space for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation, leading to improved traffic flow and reduced congestion in urban areas.
The inefficient use of resources is another concern associated with SUVs. These vehicles are often used for regular commuting and routine tasks, which is not the most efficient use of resources. Banning SUVs could encourage people to opt for smaller, more efficient vehicles or alternative modes of transportation, such as public transit or cycling, thereby reducing resource consumption.
Lastly, proponents of banning SUVs argue that it can promote social equity. SUVs are generally more expensive than smaller vehicles, and their ownership is often associated with higher income brackets. Banning SUVs could help discourage the display of wealth through conspicuous consumption and encourage a more equitable distribution of resources.
It is important to note that these arguments are not without counterpoints. Banning SUVs would have economic implications, as the automotive industry and consumers would need to adapt to the changes. Additionally, consumer preferences and the availability of alternative transportation options should be considered in any decision regarding a ban on SUVs.
In conclusion, while banning SUVs is a complex and controversial issue, proponents argue that it could have positive effects on environmental sustainability, road safety, urban congestion, resource efficiency, and social equity.
A government ban is unlikely as politicians are all investing in and/or paid off by car manufacturers, but that doesn’t stop concerned citizens shaming SUV drivers and making our voices heard.
Lentils on the valves of the wheels, painted on the moons… The attacks of ecological activists multiply around the world as ‘eco-anxiety’ proliferates in young people
A review found that older buildings should either be strengthened or a vehicle weight limit of up to two-and-a-half tonnes imposed
Electric vehicles (EVs) cause twice as much stress on roads compared to petrol vehicles, potentially worsening the pothole crisis in the UK, according to a study.
The research conducted by data journalists at The Telegraph revealed that the average EV exerts 2.24 times more stress on roads compared to a similar petrol vehicle and 1.95 times more stress than a diesel vehicle.
The impact is even bigger with larger EVs, which can lead to up to 2.32 times more damage to road infrastructure, according to the report.
More and more, we are seeing examples of public opinion mounting against the scourge of SUVs in cities clogging our streets and adding to dangerous levels of air pollution.
Ending advertising of the most polluting vehicles would bring us closer to achieving the immediate emissions reductions necessary to keep a liveable planet and align with other policy objectives on air pollution levels and low-carbon transport.
In February 2022, Badvertising wrote to Nadine Dorries MP, UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on behalf of 10,000 people who signed our petition calling for an end to advertising of the most polluting vehicles.
Their policy recommendations consisted of an advertising ban on the dirtiest third of vehicles sold in the UK and on all cars too big to fit in a standard UK parking space. In more technical terms, this means a ban on adverts for cars with emissions exceeding 160gCO2/km or with an overall length greater than 4.8m.
https://www.badverts.org/latest/uk-government-refuses-to-rule-suv-adverts
Rapidly increasing the number of electric cars on the road in place of conventional cars is a key part of reaching net zero emissions by mid-century. At the same time, SUVs require larger batteries to power them, so a growing electric SUV market would impose additional pressure on battery supply chains and further increase demand for the critical minerals needed to make the batteries. Addressing those risks ahead of time is possible through a number of actions: downsizing of the average car size; increasing battery swapping; and investing in innovative battery technologies. Those strategies would keep in check the investment requirements for developing the cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel resources needed to satisfy the increasing uptake of EVs.
Guerrilla climate activists Tyre Extinguishers have claimed their “largest ever night of action against SUVs”, with 900 of the vehicles targeted around the world.
“Last night (the evening of Monday 28 November and early morning of Tuesday 29 November), citizens in eight countries deflated tyres on nearly 900 polluting SUVs,” the activist group said in a statement.
“This is the biggest coordinated global action against high-carbon vehicles in history, with many more to come.”
The latest communique from the Tyre Extinguishers suggests its campaign of clandestine climate action against the urban owners of 4x4s is still going strong, nearly nine months after the first reports of actions in the UK.
They have called for a ban on SUVs in urban areas. Until then, they have said: “We want to make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4×4 in the world’s urban areas.”
Climate activists have hacked billboards as part of an international protest against car adverts.
Billboards in Easton and St Werburghs in Bristol have been replaced with spoof adverts targeting car companies.
The Brandalism group claimed the hacking and local activists are calling for Bristol City Council to cut air pollution by restricting car adverts.
SUVs ARE AN environmental and social scourge. Whether we ban them in urban areas outright, as is being proposed in Germany, or we introduce new forms of taxation to regulate their weight, height and width, something must be done to stop the trend of excessively large passenger cars dominating our streets.
Recent figures show that 58% of all new car sales in 2022 were SUV type passenger vehicles. While those who buy them offer justifications such as the comfort of driving with greater visibility and a sense of safety, in practice it is the relentless advertising spend per vehicle that is driving up sales.
Estimates vary across the EU, but in France, in 2019 it was estimated that over €2300 was spent on advertising each individual SUV (a sum which would buy you a second-hand diesel car quite easily).
Nearly a dozen cars have been damaged by environmental protestors, who have spray-painted phrases like “climate criminal” on them. Avon and Somerset Police said it was investigating 11 reports of criminal damage to SUVs in Clifton, Bristol. It’s the second time climate protestors have damaged cars in Bristol – around 60 had their tyres let down last year.
SUVs are a giant punch in the face for anyone who doesn’t drive one. SUVs are oversized, ridiculous, unnecessary death machines that are literally killing people, even their own drivers.
“If huge cars disappeared, the biggest losers wouldn’t be drivers but carmakers. Some of them have probably been kept alive by the outsized profits from SUVs. If we let SUVs keep fouling the planet we might as well admit there’s no sacrifice we’re willing to make for the climate.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7612e3c0-0e10-4cfb-895d-40b2e5d083b9
Few trends have been worse for the environment than the dramatic growth of the SUV market in recent decades.
Between 2010 and 2020, 65 million new SUVs hit the roads in America. Collectively those cars will pump about 4.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the next few decades, more planet-warming pollution than most nations have emitted throughout their entire history.
But the dominance of SUVs on American roads is a relatively new phenomenon. In 1980, SUVs made up less than 2% of new car production in America; last year, that number was closer to 50%.
https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in-america
Increased sales of electric vehicles (EVs) have “not made a dent” in transport emissions, a leading expert has said, as he called for SUVs “to be phased out of the market”.
Trinity College Dublin professor in the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering, Brian Caulfield, said ever-increasing sales of SUVs, or sports utility vehicles, are cancelling out the emissions benefits of EVs, contributing to transport emissions rising just when they should be going down.
The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) interim energy balance report for 2022 showed that despite annual energy-related emissions in Ireland’s carbon budgets falling by 1.9% in 2022, the pace is too slow to meet 2030 targets.