The increasing popularity of ultra-heavy SUVs in England means a conventional-engined car bought in 2013 will, on average, have lower carbon emissions than one bought new today, new research has found.
The study by the climate campaign group Possible said there was a strong correlation between income and owning a large SUV, which meant there was a sound argument for “polluter pays” taxes for vehicle emissions based on size.
Emissions aside, those big SUVs are so ugly and unnecessary for your average driver.
It’s also such a race to outsize other vehicles.
I know SUV drivers who bought an SUV because “everyone owns an SUV, and if you’re driving around in a smaller car, you can’t see anything around you any more.” They’re not even wrong, in some communities it’s getting really hard to participate in traffic of you’re constantly surrounded by much larger, taller cars on all sides.
But of course, they’re now just perpetuating the problem.
One thing I noticed the other day while going through a new drive through is that the increase in vehicle size is noticable there. I drive a sedan, and most of the drive through windows near me are level with my car’s window, but the one that I went through the other day was built in the last year or so, and the window was significantly higher up than my car’s.
Not to mention that they require no additional driver training.
You can pass your test in a Ford Ka, then hop in a 2 tonne range rover the next day.I’ve never even considered that, but it is wild. Like those grandmothers who have spent 60 years driving tiny little cars and then one day their family gets them a fucking tank to drive around in and they suddenly start putting everyone’s lives at risk because they have zero experience behind the wheel of a vehicle that’s at least double the size of what they drove their entire life beforehand.
Good point. Let’s make every new passer drive an old banger for a year - I’m absolutely fed up of monkey-lipped young girls forcing me to my side of the road because they can’t fucking negotiate the width of their fucking tractors!
Sorry for the rant, but I drive a classic - and it fucking riles me - every day ! I used to enjoy driving - now it’s a daily nightmare.
What does monkey-lipped mean, I’ve literally never heard that phrase?
I’m just having a pick at the fashion of overly botoxed lips.
What you’re describing is actually collagen filler, not botox. If you botoxed your lips you’d end up with a serious speech impediment for a few months. Back in the day we used to call it the “Leslie Ash special”, after a celeb who had a particularly disasterous one done.
Never heard of that special. Thanks for the correction though.
@GreatAlbatross @DeathWearsANecktie to be fair you cannot drive on a motorway until you pass and then once you pass you can go straight onto it unattended.
You can use the motorway with a an accredited driving instructor before you pass.
The motorway can be an odd one too: The speeds are higher, but they can be one of the safest ways to drive.
Afaik, the reason motorways don’t feature on the test, is that some test centres are 50 miles or more away from one
@GreatAlbatross Apparently you can in England, whoops
And because they’re heavier, there’ll be more wear and tear on the roads too.
Oh man this one is so big for maintenance costs, the damage is exponential! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Which mostly means it doesn’t matter. Car vs electric truck is basically a rounding error compared to either a lorry or the regular freeze-thaw cycle.
What do u think a electric car eith its huge batteries would do ?
Telsa model 3 is 3000 pounds
Chevy equinox is 3300
Chevy traverse is 4300
Tesla model Y 4400
Tesla model x 5200
Chevy suburban is 5700
And the Rivian R1T is 6949 pounds.
But there is the dacia spring with 2304 pound.
EV does not automatically have to result in huge heavy cars.
Top speed of 125kph, 0-100kph in 19 seconds… Sure, city cars don’t need to be as heavy but then why need a car at all?
“Everyone in the city needs their own car” was not the argument I made, just as your comment did not mean to say that everyone who does not live in the city needs a 3.5 ton truck.
They don’t, but an EV that’s usable in the highway weights as much as a truck. If you want to compare the Spring to other types of vehicles you need to compare its weight to cars in the same category and then you realise that it’s heavier than the equivalent gas car…
I have seen Spring and Renault Zoe on highways, in Germany none the less. If your argument is you need big fast cars for highways I don’t see it that way.
It’s a good point about the weight of EVs. I suppose it’s a question of whether the benefit of EVs are worth the extra wear on the roads.
When comparing ICE cars though, it’s a pretty clear cut argument that SUVs are worse for everyone except the occupants.
Suv’s are not always worse.
Equinox 26/31 Corvette is 16/25.
Equinox can fit five adults plus room for luggage or other items in jt.
He’ll the Chevy malibu is 27/35 amd is a Sedan. I rather the equinox
Shocker. Did anyone really think quadrupling the size of vehicles wouldn’t increase how harmful they are to the environment?
Seems to increase the size of people’s egos too.
My 202 Chevy equinox gets similar mpg as my 2016 Chevy trax and both do better than my previous 2007 Pontiac torrent
Trax. 26 city 34 highway Equinox. 26/ 31 Torrent. 17/24
The torrent and equinox are similar sizes while the trax is half the size.
Suvs keep getting more effcient
Yet another example of the incredibly stupid decisions George Osborne took when equalising VED/Road tax in year 2 onwards.
It used to be that the higher emissions you made the more you paid every year, and while it was never enough, having a single rate of 180 quid for all petrol / diesel cars regardless of size/efficiency was clearly the wrong policy at the time, and this just shows it.
Monumentally stupid, but we’ve come to expect that from the Tories over 13 years. Glad to see Labour will reverse this decision on day 1 and bring back the policy of higher emitting vehicles pay more taxes.
Stand by for the Tories to start claiming that labour is regressively taxing the poor who can’t afford to upgrade their SUVs to electric.
Bit late on that, they are already doing it. Claiming that Labour are “anti-motorist” with ULEZ expansion, LTNs the 20mph limit in wales and also delaying the ban on petrol/diesel cars.
The US did something similarly stupid. We based our fuel economy standards on the size of the car, and enforced high percentage reductions on smaller cars than larger. A small truck might need a 30% improvement in economy over previous models, while a larger truck can get away with a 20% improvement.
So manufacturers stopped making smaller cars.
Average economy is worse now than 30 years ago, because CAFE standards incentivized much larger vehicles.
Image: fiat 500 from 1960’s Article: cars from 2013
But 500 from the 60s is super cool!!
Definetely way cooler than dumb SUVs
For that, you don’t need a “study”. You just have to look at the technical data that is available on those cars.
Also in the news. Putting your hands into fire does do the ouchie ouchie.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The study by the climate campaign group Possible said there was a strong correlation between income and owning a large SUV, which meant there was a sound argument for “polluter pays” taxes for vehicle emissions based on size.
While they are billed as vehicles that cover rough ground or tow heavy loads, previous research has shown that three-quarters of SUVs bought new in the UK are registered to people living in urban areas.
Recent debate over London’s expanded ultra-low emission zone has focused on concerns that cars that emit more NOx are almost always older, and disproportionately used by less wealthy people.
In contrast, the report argued, high greenhouse emissions have often been a product of richer people buying huge SUVs – at a price that showed they could afford an electric car.
Lambeth, in south London, charges owners of the heaviest, most high-emission vehicles, more than four times as much for an annual parking permit than for the smallest cars.
This year, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said that, globally, SUVs produced emissions equivalent to the combined national totals of the UK and Germany.
The original article contains 615 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot.
If looking at carbon emissions only… Well, no shit? No need for a study to know that, it’s purely based on fuel economy. Look at other types of emissions though and a 2023 SUV with a brand new catalytic converter will be much better than a 10 years old car.
How so? Cars have to pass emissions tests, and ten year old cars have to pass them, too.
Also: what significant improvements in filtering out “other types of emissions” have there been made in consumer vehicles in the last 10 years, and what “other types of emissions” are those?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
A 10 years old car would fall under Euro 5b standards instead of Euro 6d, there’s also a level of tolerance when a car gets tested so it might have beat the standard by a good margin when it was new, it still passes the test 10 years later because it’s still under what’s allowed but not as good as it was when new.
CO2 emissions don’t get filtered by the anti emissions equipment, they’re the by-product of combining the CO emissions with unburnt hydrocarbons, it’s 100% based on how much fuel is burned by the vehicle and that’s it. Anti pollution systems do reduce NOx emissions by splitting it and Euro 6 tolerates less than half the NOx emissions that Euro 5 does while also reducing the tolerance for HC+NOx (talking about diesel here, since the standards were the same Euro 5 to Euro 6 for petrol vehicles).
Euro 6 also introduced particle emissions for petrol cars, which only existed for diesel vehicles under Euro 5. Euro 7 is coming in 2025 and will add NH3 and brake pads particles into the mix.
Right.
So no changes between 2013 and 2023 standards for petrol cars. No new technology to reduce harmful emissions either.
So there’s no actual argument in favor of a new SUV over a 10 year old car, outside of marginal degradation of the catalytic converter or degradation of the combustion process - most of which should still be caught in emissions tests.
And even then, properly maintaining the car, replacing the catalytic converter or even replacing the 10 year old car with a new car of the same size instead of upsizing to an SUV would all be better for the environment than buying a new SUV.
I never said there’s no new technology because there is and improvements to existing technology too, the proof being that the standards become more strict as time goes by and manufacturers need to plan ahead for it.
I said that just looking at carbon emissions is ridiculous as it’s a simple matter of how much fuel is burnt, it either comes out at CO or CO2 and both are bad, that study could be resumed by saying “Carbon emissions are worse in vehicles with worse fuel economy.” For this reason emission equipment improvements are concentrated on other emissions as we’re already handling CO emissions the best way possible with what’s feasible in a vehicle. Fuel economy improvement is the way we reduce carbon emissions and that’s also improving, an example is that my ICE car develops more power from a smaller, more efficient engine than the previous year model so its fuel economy is comparable to smaller cars from 10 years ago, its emissions are lower, but the driving experience is still better.
This is a European study so diesel vehicles are much more common and the SUV also beats the standards by a wide enough margin that the emission equipment won’t need to be replaced in 10 years. I’m just pointing out that if they only studied carbon emissions then the study is flawed as there are other emissions to look at.
No one replaces a catalytic converter as part of regular maintenance, that’s a thousands of £ job that you do when you fail the emissions test or it becomes clogged. Same thing for all the emissions equipment (O2 sensor, knock sensor, EGR system…) or carbon buildup that prevents the valves from sealing properly/blocks the intake, they’re things that get taken care of only when they fail.
I never said there’s no new technology because there is
Well, alright then: what is the new emissions reducing technology that 2023 SUVs have, but smaller 2013 cars don’t have?
Better fuel management in general? More forced induction engines than before? Improvement on existing tech? New emission control equipment like DPF, SCR (that thing that made the difference between cars that only required a retune vs cars that required a buyback/mechanical modifications for VW diesels)?
Do you think manufacturers have been using the same engines and fuel injection methods since the introduction of OBDII or something?
Smaller cars can also get by without things like direct injection because they don’t require as much power to get going, but under constant load (on highways) it means worse control over fuel injection vs more modern tech.
https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/ULEV/Emission+control+technologies
Heck, just go take a look at the source of the study and you’ll realize it’s totally biased.
My celica will beat your SUV MPG any day
I just learned about the Tyre Extinguishers. They use lentils to depress the pin on the valve cap of an SUV’s tyre, so that the tyre deflates without getting damaged. It’s super effective and it’s probably not a crime. They are called the Tyre Extinguishers.
I own a jeep Unlimited… And, I don’t get why people give a crap about whether they are using petrol. I’d happily switch to a battery 4wd if one was released which was affordable and had sufficient battery. Maybe something like an electric Jimny would be awesome
The only real reason I have a 4wd is because I do a lot of hiking in my free time (and I got this cheap as it was 10 years old). If I wasn’t hiking though, I’d move back to my Toyota Echo Hatchback. That thing was SO easy to park, cheap to drive, and so reliable and safe.
Why we walking that you requiring a Jeep to get around? Pretty much everywhere has car parks. Even in the Scottish Highlands.
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FTA:
Ultra-heavy SUVs
Not quite what the headline implies. Clickbait.
Aren’t all SUVs ultra heavy? I thought this was just describing them.
