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Posted Jun 26, 2024, 2:06 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 10,047
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Timely article from CBC yesterday: https://www.cbc.ca/news/suv-small-ca...able-1.7239768
Quote:
How the automobile industry turned us into SUV drivers
Automakers focus on bigger vehicles amid lenient emissions regulations, higher profit margins
Andre Mayer and Emily Chung · CBC News · Posted: Jun 24, 2024 1:00 AM PDT | Last Updated: June 24
Last August, Paul Marriott emailed CBC's What on Earth? newsletter to share his frustration buying a vehicle. In looking to replace his 2006 Toyota Matrix, a compact hatchback, the Ontario resident had detected a pattern.
"It is impossible to buy a new small car," he wrote. "Gone are the Honda Fit, the Toyota Yaris, GM Spark, Nissan Versa, Ford Fiesta, etc. Apparently, people only want SUVs."
Marriott was largely right. Despite the higher price tag, SUV and truck sales have grown exponentially in North America in recent decades, eclipsing sedans in the process. According to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, 86 per cent of all vehicles sold in Canada in May were classified as SUVs or pickup trucks. And Europe and Asia have developed a greater taste for them, too.
But the ubiquity of SUVs and trucks isn't an accurate reflection of what people want to drive, say industry analysts.
The trend has been greatly influenced by a combination of savvy marketing, government regulations that incentivize bigger vehicles and limited supply of more modest ones.
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David Zipper, a Washington, D.C.-based senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative who has studied the automotive industry for decades, calls it a "prisoner's dilemma" — a situation where consumers who may prefer smaller cars are "being pushed toward larger ones."
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"You could make an argument: how much of it is consumer demand and how much of it is manufacturer push?" said David Adams, president and CEO of the Global Automakers of Canada.
One of the reasons we got here is government regulation. In response to the 1970s oil crisis, the U.S. government introduced a number of measures ostensibly intended to reduce gasoline usage. One of them was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard.
But instead of increasing the fuel economy of every model equally, it required automakers to increase the average fuel economy across their fleets. This created a two-tier system, where smaller cars balanced out the relatively poor fuel economy of larger ones.
The result was that SUVs remained a going concern despite high oil prices, and once oil prices dropped in the early '80s, consumers showed a greater propensity for light trucks.
Early in the 21st century, the U.S. government revised CAFE to tie a vehicle's fuel standard to its physical "footprint," a move that ultimately allowed larger vehicles to get away with lower emissions standards and contributed to what Zipper calls "car bloat."
Because the North American auto market is so tightly integrated, Canadian consumers have been a part of this trend.
For the auto industry, this was an opportunity to "not only make greater profits, but also to be subject to less stringent emissions standards," said Anne-Catherine Pilon, a transportation and mobility analyst at Quebec-based environmental advocacy group Equiterre.
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As more and bigger vehicles surround us on the road, it's led to what many observers describe as an "arms race" where drivers feel they need a bigger and bigger vehicle to feel safe.
Long said this "perceived safety" is really at odds with "the reality that SUVs are much more likely to be involved in fatal traffic accidents than cars."
Studies have shown that in collisions, SUVs are far more likely to seriously injure or kill occupants of other vehicles, due to their greater power and weight, as well as height, which can cause them to hit more vulnerable parts of the car, such as windows.
They're also far more likely to kill pedestrians, especially if they have front ends that are tall, blunt — or, worse, both.
This has been taken into account in vehicle safety ratings in Europe. So far, it's not the case in North America, and Equiterre's Pilon said that means people aren't getting what they need to make informed decisions about SUV safety.
But the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed adding data to safety ratings about the ability of vehicles to minimize pedestrian injuries, following a 37 per cent increase in pedestrian deaths since 2000.
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