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More than 1m cars sold in UK each year too big to fit typical parking space
(www.theguardian.com)
I fucking hate SUVs and its owners omfg, they pmo so much
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
221 points (99.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
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Cars are getting fat, expensive and just boring, I'll stick with my old banger
How big are these things? My dad owns an old landrover defender (the boxy one) and that thing fits just fine into every space and lane. (He also lives in the countryside and has to use an unpaved road just to leave his house)
I point this out when people complain about the size of roads and parking spaces. You bought a car that big, what did you expect, the roads to magically grow?
Cars seem to, though. Somehow, every new model for some reason seems to be slightly larger than the last.
Cries in North American, where suburban streets are wider than freeway lanes
That's a good thing. If they can't find a parking spot, thats a good thing.
Why are they legal in the first place then?
Because of short term profits.
Good question.
Vehicle tax should be doubled for any such monstrosity. They also block visibility on the roads and are a hazard to cyclists and pedestrians.
I really don’t get why people like to buy such huge gas guzzlers and somehow those are the people I hear complain about gas prices the most
We should really just have EU law that over a certain size requires a new license that isn’t automatically given to people that have one now.
I reckon doing what Norway does and just tax them by the weight of the vehicle to to discourage people buying them while alps making those that do pay for the extra wear and tear in the roads they cause.
Road damage goes up proportionally to the 4th power of vehicle weight: double the weight, 16 times the damage. Vehicle tax should include that as a component. That also indicates that we massively subsidise the use of huge lorries to transport goods.
Sadly this does discourage EV growth which I do think still should continue instead of having fuel cars. I'd love if air quality would go up again.
This could be offset by tax rebates for the EV, or by taxing gasoline and diesel so much that you break even or still come out on top even with the weight tax.
Stop fossil fuel subsidies in terms of fuel for vehicles and use that budget to: subsidize EV adoption + charging instead.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/fossil-fuel-subsidies
Issue with this? The people who already don't have much money will have a very hard time as driving will be even more expensive for them and getting a new car already requires a good amount of spendable money (certainly when they'd have to sell their car to an exporter with less people wanting gas cars). I personally don't know how we'd tackle this issue.
I'm also for a usage based tax, after x Liters of fuel you pay more taxes (on a yearly basis) but don't think they could realistically do this
Cyclists will be thankful that they're being killed by electric SUVs, not petrol SUVs.
I’m also for a usage based tax, after x Liters of fuel you pay more taxes (on a yearly basis)
That'd require a tachygraph or intrusive surveillance of road use. Taxing vehicle dimensions and weight is much simple.
IMO the money would be better spent to subsidize electrified trasnit. In north america that money could also be used to support dense housing projects along that transit corridor, providing more ridership for the new transit and tackling the housing crisis. This is a better solution because electrified transit is even more energy and resource efficient than private electric vehicles and the transit is more accessible to everyone than private electric vehicles are
Oh yeah 100%
Here in the Netherlands our public transport is pretty well done, but the main issue is that the cost of tickets is unbearably high for our train system so having that cheaper would certainly increase ridership and decrease car dependency
Its so hard hearing the term "car dependancy" come out from the netherlands while I'm stuck in North America. Theres definitely room for improvement still in the netherlands but at least the bones of the city are still intact. Its arguable harder to fix most of north america in its current state than starting fresh would have been.
Oh yeah it isn't nearly as bad as the US but outside of big cities you're still dependent on your car
Forget about the housing. If the cost of personal-car commuting were to skyrocket, people would naturally gravitate to be near transit hubs.
North America has a density problem ever since they bulldozed downtowns to build surface level parking. We need to increase the density in those areas to support transit. For the most part that housing doesn't exist, and what does is often considered luxury and is in high demand because even north americans like transit oriented developments.
Someone has to increase the density around major transit corridors and the private sector has proved they only care about developing luxury condos in those areas. A government run and funded affordable housing initiative could help people who need access to transit the most move into transit oriented neighborhoods.
The roads don't care about whether the car is ICE or EV. There are plenty of gigantic SUV's that are hybrids or even electric. Eventually we will see electric 18 wheelers.
There should be an additional tax on ICE's for their emissions as well to capture that higher externality. But remember EV's are not emission-free. Anything with tires is a source of pollution.
Personal vehicles cause a lot of problems for humanity, and only some of those are exclusive to ICE's.
A large percentage of microplastics come from car tyres.
Just another reminder that EVs don't magically make cars green or safer. You still have the ashphault, the tire pollution, brake dust, end of life recycling, stormwater runoff, noise pollution, roadkill, wasteful car centric planning, and dangers to pedestrians.
Just stagger the classes not just by size and/or weight but also by motor type. For instance, a tax class for ultracompact cars could look like this:
- Length ≤ 3400 mm
- Width ≤ 1480 mm
- Height ≤ 2000 mm
- Curb weight ≤ 1000 kg (ICE), 1200 kg (hybrid, BEV)
(I basically went with Japan's current definition of kei cars and replaced the displacement restriction with a weight restriction.)
If you tax them the same as gasoline, sure. In the Netherlands, there are so many huge EVs, and I think that's partially because all EVs, large or small, weren't taxed. We made a distinction between gasoline and diesel for tax, no reason we can't do that with EVs.
Not all EVs are bloated SUVs.
Small EVs generally have more weight tho
I really don’t get why people like to buy such huge gas guzzlers
As a dumbass American who's been considering that for forty years, let me try to help: The short answer is, very tiny pee-pees.
I wish I had a better answer, but that's honestly the majority reason. They do bang on about "safety" a lot, but when that's scientifically proven to be false they still say it so - back to item number 1.
Over here, the enormous gas-guzzlers eventually weren't enough so they had to super-size even them. Now we have these gargantuan death behemoths everywhere for absolutely no reason (well, for one reason).
It's not just ICE cars that are huge. Even new EVs tend to be unnecessarily large SUVs or Sedans.
Very much, I drove an ID.4 as a company car for 6 months and it was such a horrible experience. Huge and just to move 1 55kg person c'mon man.
Also drove a Tesla M3 after that and was already much better, low on the floor and felt much safer and good to drive. Would love to have an electric version of my Toyota Yaris (hybrid), its a great size for me.
Oh even better? Cheaper public transport so I don't have to take the car to save money!!
You can get all kinds of small EVs in the UK at least: Mini, Renault 5, Fiat Panda, among others, as well as the relatively shitty Vauxhall Corsa. Toyota made a bet on hydrogen engines instead of EVs, so that electric Yaris might take a while to materialize.
Its green and eco-friendly so i can waste as much of that extra energy as i want seems to be the attitude people have. We've made emissions be the spotlight of our energy crisis when the total amount of energy we use is still important, potentially even more important than just reducing emissions alone.
This really annoys me too.
Good luck, given all the car lobbying going on here...
Its so sad, here in the Netherlands if public transport was just cheaper it'd already be able to replace almost all my commuting. But I pay less for my car driving somewhere AND back than a 1 way train ticket.
I live in Dublin (NOT UK but there are many similarities) and this drives me fucking crazy. We have teensy-weensy little roads all through the city. they have made it so there's parking on both sides of these little roads, and they are two-way streets. This is just possible for two smaller cars, like a civic or a yaris to squeeze by one another.
enter the one person in a range rover or BMW suv and everybody's gotta fucking wait for these hulking ICE powered shit boxes to clear the road.
Forget parking at shopping centres with them around as well. They will stick out in the front or back, which takes up two spots, of course. Full sized American pick up trucks have started to show up, also, not a blemish in the flatbed.
The road taxes are based on weight, so they do pay significantly more than I will with my 1.4l engine, but not enough for them to not care that they cant see things that are in front of them, that they'd kill every occupant of a normal sized care they hit (its a big part of why they report to like owning them, for "safety" read: killing a family of 4 in a corolla with my truck that I use to drive to work alone)
I do not like it!
I hate seeing shitty trends in the US being exported
"what? This sidewalk or bike lane fit perfectly"