This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in De Groene Amsterdammer.
What drives someone to buy an SUV? A bloated car that sticks out above everything else, that rarely fits comfortably in a parking space, that you have to pay far too much for at the dealer and even more at the pump, that scares the living daylights out of other road users, that garners scorn and aggression and that above all stands out like a raised middle finger to the climate?
The SUV is deadly dangerous in the city and redundant on the highway. It prevents some fatalities but causes many more. People are conned into buying it by appealing to their independence. It reminds the owner of what he or she is missing. It is tolerated for the sake of the climate, but it also brings the disasters closer that the owner hopes to escape. It is loved and reviled. The SUV is a major contradiction. A conflict on wheels.
Let’s start with road safety. A sturdy car is safe – for its occupants. Cyclists, on the other hand, feel increasingly less at ease in city centres, according to research by the Cyclists’ Union. In four out of five municipalities, they have experienced more stress in recent years and consider the roads less safe for the elderly and children. Nowhere in the world are there so many free cycle paths, roads where ‘the car is a guest’ and thirty-kilometre zones, but these have not increased the feeling of safety. Cyclists find it increasingly scary to share the street with cars.
Their fear is justified, according to recent studies. In 2023, there were 9.2 million passenger cars on the road in the Netherlands, of which 1.6 million were in the SUV category . These heavy vehicles do not cause more accidents, but they do cause more
serious ones, with more deaths and seriously injured. These victims are usually not in the SUV, but in the other car, or they are motorcycles, cyclists and pedestrians, according to analyses by the Foundation for Scientific Research on Road Safety. It is a simple law of physics: the heavier the one collider, the more serious the injuries in the other. The height of the car and the design of the front appear to be important factors. Cyclists and pedestrians are more seriously injured when they are hit by an SUV because they are often thrown onto the street after the collision and then run over.
The Economist recently ran the headline “Killer Cars” above an article about heavy SUVS . The magazine itself analysed data from 7.5 million car accidents in the U.S. over the past decade and found a dramatic correlation between weight and fatality. Sure, the driver of an SUV is safer, but for every life saved in an SUV, twelve people died in the other, lighter vehicles involved in the crash.
Of course, American SUVs are often heavier and larger than European ones, and the Economist study concerned the heaviest category (around 3,000 kilos), but here too in Europe, some SUVs are huge, like the BMW XM, a monster of 2710 kilos that can reach a speed of one hundred kilometres per hour in 4.3 seconds. And even with less extreme cars the results of the study were frightening. For example, cars of 2200 kilos – not unusual in the Netherlands – were involved in ten thousand accidents with 26 deaths. With 10% less weight this already drops to 10.3 deaths per ten thousand collisions. If this were the maximum permitted weight in the US, that would save 2300 traffic deaths.
Marco Te Brömmelstroet is professor of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam. He is annoyed that the responsibility for traffic safety is mainly placed on the victims. ‘Every time new figures on traffic fatalities appear, there is discussion about bicycle helmets, better lighting or fluorescent vests. We discipline four-year-old children about how to deal with the danger on the way to school. The danger itself is not up for discussion – the growing number of cars, which are also getting bigger, heavier and faster. It is the world upside down: apparently we take for granted that on average seventeen children are involved in a traffic accident every day.’
SUVs come in a ranges of sizes: from the smallest monster, the Volkswagen T-Cross (four meters) to the biggest monstrosity, the Cadillac Escalade ESV (5.7 meters). But on average, the SUV is 20 centimetres longer, 30 centimetres higher and forty percent heavier than its ‘normal’ counterpart. And it is still growing: every year it adds 20 kilos in weight and 5mm in length. With an average length of well over 4 metres, the SUV has now literally almost reached the limit of a standard parking space. As the CEO of Renault said recently in a TV interview ‘You don’t need two thousand kilos of plastic and steel to transport eighty kilos of people. The SUV is an ecological monster.’
In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett call the SUV a ‘sign of damaged social relations and a lack of trust between people’. They cite Josh Lauer, one of the first researchers to look at the rise of the SUV through a scientific lens, who concluded that the two most common justifications for an SUV – safety and interior space – should be understood as euphemisms. “Safety is not road safety but
personal safety. Space is not cargo space but social space, including the privileged ability to traverse inhospitable terrain to remove yourself from society.”
Most people buy a second-hand car. Only twenty percent of buyers opt for a new one. Of those, most choose an SUV . These are primarily companies and leasing companies: seven out of ten company cars costing between €25,000 and €50,000 that were sold in the past six months were SUVS , according to research by the Association of Business Drivers. Private individuals are only a small group in the car market. “The demand for SUVs is driven by big companies and wealthy individuals,” says Lucien Mathieu, director of Transport & Environment, an umbrella organisation of transport and the environment NGOs. “Lower incomes have no influence on this.” What the private jet is in the air, the SUV is on the ground: a symbol of an inequality.
It might seem that drivers about a decade ago developed a voracious appetite for SUVS, but that’s not the case. In the search for higher profit margins automakers moved to larger and larger cars and boosted sales with a marketing blitz. According to research by the World Wildlife Fund in France, automakers spent nearly €2 billion in 2019 marketing their largest models to men and women – far more than they spent on branding their small and medium cars. In other words, the popularity of SUVS is not driven by demand, but by supply.
The average selling price of an SUV in Europe is 59 percent higher than that of a hatchback. However, production costs do not increase proportionally with the size of the car. Manufacturers charge roughly two-thirds more for a car that is at most a third more spacious and only fractionally more expensive to produce. This explains why most European manufacturers, despite selling fewer cars overall, are still posting increasingly large profits
It goes without saying that a larger car has a larger carbon footprint, mainly because of its weight. 70% of CO2 emissions are caused by the energy needed to get the mass moving and keep it moving. SUVs consume up to twenty percent more fuel. They have become more economical, just like other fossil fuel cars, but that does not outweigh their weight gain. In fact, half to two-thirds of the effect of cars becoming more economical is being lost because the cars are getting heavier. If SUVs were a country, they would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter, at 900 million tonnes of CO2, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). To compensate, the researchers say, there would need to be twice as many electric cars on the road today.
An electric SUV then? The total carbon footprint of an e-SUV is 70% higher than that of a standard electric car. A hybrid perhaps? Because it is powered by both an electric and a combustion engine, it is among the heaviest cars on the road. More emissions from the pipe also means more unhealthy particulate matter. Larger cars take up more raw materials. Charging the large batteries in electric SUVs puts a strain on our already overloaded grid.
What is the solution? In Japan, if you want to buy a car, you have to be able to show that you are able to park it on your own property or in a private parking garage. In the Netherlands, parking on public roads has been permitted since the 1960s. ‘As a result,’
says Professor te Brömmelstroet, ‘civil servants in various cities are now struggling with the question of how to make existing parking spaces larger.’ In Paris, visitors with an SUV now have to pay triple the parking fee at parking meters. Amsterdam and Utrecht are studying similar measures. ‘But it is quite difficult to find a legal basis for that’, says an Amsterdam spokesperson.
‘Even if an SUV is only driving thirty kilometres per hour, there is still 2500 kilos coming at you at eight metres per second’, says te Brömmelstroet. ‘That speed needs to be reduced around primary schools and in busy city centres, and that can be done with a geofence, a system that automatically adjusts the speed of passing cars.’ That will undoubtedly raise questions, for example about privacy. ‘But you could start, like in New York, with municipal services, delivery vans and taxis.’
However, whether the SUV disappears from the city does not depend on CO2 targets (after all, there are also electric SUVs ), invisible fences (permeable) or the parking meter (affordable for the average SUV driver). The final blow for the SUV will be a mandatory standard for energy efficiency. The Greens in the European Parliament have proposed it, but have not (yet) received any support. ‘Isn’t it stupid’, asks Bas Eickhout of the Greens, ‘that your kettle has to meet all kinds of legal energy standards, but your car doesn’t?’
