#The expense drivers#
#The expense series#

Ford was so thrilled with its recent relaunch of the Bronco, a model infamous for being driven by OJ Simpson as he was chased by a phalanx of police cars in 1994, that it rolled out an eight-part podcast series in celebration. Marketing for SUVs is now so broad it no longer seems jarring to see ads of a beefy car-truck zooming around urban streets to take its occupant to a yoga class or to grab a coffee. Americans like to take all of their stuff with them and automakers figured this out.” Millennials like them, baby boomers like them. “The family car is now a utility vehicle and not a sedan. “Pretty much everyone wants one now,” said Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst at IHS Markit. For many Americans, SUVs invoke alluring qualities of fortitude and independence.

#The expense drivers#

The industry found that American drivers enjoy the lofty seating position of SUVs, as well as the capacity and the comforting feel of security their bulk provides, even if half of all journeys taken in the US are mundane trips of under three miles to run errands rather than high-octane adventures in the Rocky Mountains. The look and cost of SUVs stretched to suit all tastes – the 1984 Jeep Cherokee, a boxy, spartan offering considered the first SUV, has spawned successors ranging from the compact Kia Sportage to the sporty Mercedes ML. Once a workhorse that lugged tools around or was used for bumpy off-road driving, the SUV morphed into the default option for families puttering around suburbia and even for people in the cores of densely populated cities. After successfully lobbying lawmakers to class these vehicles as light trucks rather than cars, binding SUVs to less stringent fuel efficiency standards, the industry set about slotting them into almost every arena of American life. This global phenomenon has its roots and impetus in the US, where in the 1980s the car industry carved out a new category called the “sport-utility vehicle”, a sort of mash-up between a truck, a minivan and the traditional American family car.

“With the explosion in SUV sales, we are moving even farther away from our goal of decarbonizing the sector.” “To avert the worst of the climate catastrophe, the transport sector needs to be completely decarbonized,” said Sebastian Castellanos, a researcher at the New Urban Mobility Alliance who calculated the emissions.

Suv emissions compared to small passenger vehicle emissions Combined, these emissions will be three times higher than what the UK emits from all sources in a single year. In China, the emissions will amount to 482m tonnes of CO2, while in the EU the vehicles will expel 129m tonnes of CO2. Over a 15-year lifespan, the SUVs sold in the US in 2018 will emit 429.5m tonnes of CO2. Over a 15-year lifetime of the vehicles, the extra pollution is on a par with the entire annual emissions of Norway. These differences add up to a hefty toll in emissions – all of the SUVs sold in the US just in 2018 will in a single year emit 3.5m tonnes more in CO2 than if they were smaller cars. In the US, SUVs emit 14% more carbon dioxide than small passenger cars on average, a wider disparity than in the European Union but smaller than China. ‘They created a market that pushes our buttons’Įmissions analysis commissioned by the Guardian illustrate, for the first time in detail, how much worse for the climate SUVs are than smaller vehicles, and how they have helped transform our cities. SUVs’ share of car sales in the UK has tripled over the past 10 years, in Germany last year one in three cars sold was an SUV.Ĭombining the weight of an adult rhinoceros and the aerodynamics of a refrigerator, SUVs require more energy to move around than smaller cars and therefore emit more CO2, overshadowing the car industry’s climate gains from fuel efficiency improvements and the nascent electric vehicle market. The world’s roads, parking lots and garages now contain more than 200m SUVs, eight times the number from a decade ago. SUVs raced to a new milestone in 2019, surpassing 40% of all car sales worldwide for the first time. “The global rise of SUVs is challenging efforts to reduce emissions,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, admitted. If all SUV drivers banded together to form their own country, it would rank as the seventh largest emitter in the world.Ĭlimate activists may hurl themselves in the path of new oil pipelines and ladle enough guilt on to flying that flygskam, or “flight shame”, has spread from Sweden around the world but a mammoth, and growing, cause of the climate crisis has crept up almost unnoticed around us. Increase in carbon emissions by industry from 2010 - 2018Įach year, SUVs belch out 700 megatonnes of CO2, about the entire output of the UK and Netherlands combined.