In the last ten years, sales of big and heavily-polluting SUVs have doubled. The number of SUVs worldwide has gone up from 35 million to 200 million from 2010 to 2018. At the moment, 40% of annual car sales are SUVs. This drastic increase in gas-guzzling vehicles on the roads has outweighed the progress made from electric cars and efficiency improvements in smaller cars combined.
Florent Grelier, from Transport & Environment (T&E), said: “An SUV is bigger, it’s heavier, the aerodynamics are poor, so as a result, you get more CO2.”
The average mass of new cars increased by 10% between 2000 and 2016, according to figures by T&E. The added weight is due to the addition of new equipment, such as cameras and sensors, as well as heavier automatic and dual-clutch gearboxes.
These oversized vehicles have brought with them an outsized impact on the environment. SUVs alone were the second biggest contributor to the rise in CO2 emissions globally since 2010, with the most significant contributor being the power industry, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And, if SUV drivers were a nation, they’d rank as the seventh-highest emitter in the world.
Laura Cozzi, the chief energy modeler of the IEA, said: “We were quite surprised by this result ourselves.”
Grelier was also surprised, even though the global shift towards bigger cars had been observed for a while. He said the effect on emissions increases in comparison to other industries was shocking nonetheless. He said: “The problem is much bigger than we expected.”
Cozzi said that another surprising factor of the IEA figures was how SUVs had increased their share across all major markets worldwide, even in Europe, India, and China – not just America.
He said:
We thought this was a trend that was more concentrated in a few countries … but it’s becoming really universal.
Across the globe, 4 in 10 vehicles sold are SUVs. In America, it’s the worse with 1 in 2 passenger cars sold being an SUV.
The overall emissions from SUVs are actually even more because, in the IEA analysis, they only figured in the carbon produced from fuel combustion (driving the car), but not from the emissions created during the manufacturing of the vehicles. The fact that they are larger vehicles means that even the process of manufacturing them generates more emissions than lighter and smaller cars.
Not only are these massive cars more harmful to the planet, but they are more dangerous to humans. They are more inclined to kill pedestrians in an accident, and people driving them are 11% more likely to die in a crash too, according to traffic data from the US government. The fact that people feel safer in them because they are bigger only makes drivers more careless, and on top of that, they flip over in a crash more easily because of their shape.
The solution is simple. Car manufacturers need to halt the development of bigger and bigger models that run on petrol and diesel. New cars coming out should be smaller, safer, and electric. Furthermore, experts recommend an overall reduction in the total number of passenger vehicles on the road to achieve decarbonization of the transport sector quickly. Public transportation needs to be the primary mode of mobility.
Grelier said:
“We need to keep less and less space for cars so that it’s more convenient for people to use other means of transportation, whether it’s walking, cycling or public transport.”
As time is quickly running out, governments, individuals, and big car companies need to work together towards a sustainable transport future – one with more walking and cycling, more public transport, and much fewer cars, especially petrol and diesel ones.
