Cars are getting bigger. This is a problem for us and for the planet

If, like me, you live in the UK, you’ve probably noticed something: there are more and more sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and similar types of large cars on the streets. These accounted for 63 per cent of new car sales in the UK last year, up from 12 per cent in 2010.

Globally, this figure is around 48 percent and shows no signs of falling. Cars are getting bigger and bigger, and that’s a problem. I work on the links between transport and health. This month, with colleagues, I called The BMJ that measures be taken – at local, national and international levels – to curb sales of these vehicles.

The main categories of car-related health risks are road hazards, pollution, and people driving instead of walking or cycling, which is better for their physical health. Larger and heavier cars are worse for all three risks.

It’s intuitive that larger cars are more dangerous if they hit you. Their fronts are rounder and taller than those of other cars and that’s bad news for cyclists and pedestrians if one of these cars hits you. Last year, I participated in a review of all the studies that looked at what happens when an SUV hits a pedestrian or cyclist. We found that adults were 44% more likely to die if they were hit by an SUV rather than a normal car. The study also estimates that in the United States, 10 percent of pedestrian and cyclist deaths and serious injuries would be avoided if SUVs were replaced by smaller cars. This represents around 1,700 deaths and serious injuries each year.

Cars are also becoming wider – a trend known as “carspreading”. On average, new cars in Europe became half a centimeter wider each year between 2010 and 2024. Road space is limited, and more of that space being taken up by cars means there is less for cyclists or other modes of transport. We know that if more people walked and cycled it would have great benefits for their health. So cars getting bigger means we miss out on that benefit as well.

The extra size of these cars also leads to more air pollution. The move to more electric cars is obviously good news, as it means fewer emissions from tailpipes. But even though SUVs are electric, fine particles from tires and brakes are now major sources of urban air pollution and are produced by both electric cars and those running on fossil fuels. Since SUVs are heavier than other cars, they tend to produce more tire and brake particles. So we don’t see the same clean air benefits with electric SUVs as we do with smaller electric cars.

So what can we do to make fewer of these dangerous, high-emissions big SUVs? My colleagues and I have a few suggestions. There are now clean air zones in some major cities, such as London’s ultra-low emissions zone. These get people thinking about the pollution caused by older cars, even if they don’t target vehicle size. However, the situation is changing in the UK, as Cardiff Council in October approved a plan to charge owners of SUVs and larger cars more for residential parking permits. It means the Welsh capital joins Paris, which has tripled SUV parking charges in its centre, as well as other cities in Germany and France, which charge more to park heavier or larger vehicles.

In addition to parking regulations, national governments could consider changing vehicle taxes, for example, to encourage smaller cars. Taxing large vehicles more would be proportional to their cost to society in terms of road hazards and pollution.

Some people have reasons to need a bigger car. But now that about half of new car sales are SUVs, we need to be clear about the dangers they pose to our health. If we want to have safer streets and cleaner air, we need people to consider these issues when buying a car. We also need governments to do more to bring the costs of these cars in line with the additional danger and pollution they cause.

Anthony Laverty is at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London