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 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