Ian Warden | Fighting sumo-size SUVs with pixie power

Giant sports utility vehicles (SUV) are everywhere now, on the road and in car parks looming large, all around pixies like me and my little red transport of delight.

Often, when parked between two of these monsters, I feel rather as a sightly-built man might feel standing at a urinal while flanked, their smoothly massive hips next to his ears, by two enormous sumo wrestlers.

I know that I am not imagining the rise and rise of the hulking motor vehicle because the worldwide phenomenon has just been forensically reported, explained and deplored by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker.

She opens her piece "Why SUVs Are Still a Huge Environmental Problem - The world is moving toward heavier cars at a time when it should be doing precisely the reverse" with the thumping observation that, "Last year, the world's SUVs collectively released almost a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide".

"If all [these] vehicles got together and formed their own country," she continues, "It would be the world's sixth-largest emitter, just after Japan.

"[And] it gets worse. Globally, SUV sales continue to grow, even though, last year, total passenger-vehicle sales fell. And the trend has now spread to electric vehicles: in 2022, for the first time, the sale of electric SUVs edged out the sale of other electric cars."

I had somehow felt I was doing a moral, planet-considerate, praiseworthy thing in driving a small car but had not quite understood precisely how I was setting such a good example until I read Ms Kolbert's fact-based lecture against hulking cars.

"The move toward bigger and heavier vehicles, it seems pretty obvious, is incompatible with the goal of reducing global emissions. An International Energy Authority report notes that the average SUV consumes about 20 per cent more fuel than the average medium-sized car does to drive the same number of miles. Fuel use translates directly into CO2, so the average SUV is also releasing twenty per cent more carbon per mile driven," she writes.

"The calculations become more complicated when the vehicles are electric, but the same basic math applies. Heavier vehicles require more energy to move around, and so, until the world is operating on zero-carbon electricity, the more an EV weighs, the more emissions it will produce. Heavier vehicles also require more materials to produce, and therefore more energy goes into processing those materials.

"Why is it that the world is moving toward heavier cars at a time when it should be doing precisely the reverse? Probably the reasons are complex, but a big one is that carmakers like it this way. They make more money on SUVs"

This is because, she points out, "average prices for SUVs and so-called crossover vehicles [are on average] 51 percent higher than those for sedans and hatchbacks of comparable sizes, even though the SUVs cost roughly the same as cars to produce".

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And then we, the bourgeois purchasers, indulge the carmakers' greed by buying their colossal juggernauts.

Why oh why do we do it?

Ms Kolbert doesn't go into this but of course it must have something to do with ostentatious consumption, with showing off.

Some years ago there was a popular song with the blush-making title Penis Size And Cars (the ABC's Triple J played it again and again and again.)

I remember enjoying the song enormously on my car radio secure in the knowledge that it wasn't a song about me because, driving a little Holden Barina, I obviously had no need to use my car do any false trumpeting about my true self.

But I digress, and think a more universally appealing title for the song might have been Ego Size And Cars because of course it is universally true that the well-to-do with inferiority complexes feel gnawed by the need to show off their wealth.

So many of the hulking SUVs on our roads are breathtakingly expensive. At times, parked at my local shops in my $12,000 second-hand Up! I am flanked (like my slightly built man flanked in a urinal by two sumo wrestlers) by Audis and Porsches the size of cruise ships (how they cast my Up! into their massive shadows) costing more than $100,000 each.

Perhaps these charabanc-sized vehicles (how lonely their drivers look in the immensity of them, like the unhappy woman in the "lonely mansion" of Dolly Parton's Silver Threads And Golden Needles) are owned by the sorts of superannuation multi-millionaires enjoying the obscene tax advantages the Albanese government is daring to dream of shrivelling a teensy bit.

Ms Kolbert itemises the many environmental sins the SUVs commit because of their sheer size (even their big tires, wearing away, commit more particulate pollution than smaller tires do) and looks at how governments might set registration charges on the basis of vehicle weight.

France already does this, and Washington DC is to introduce weight-based registration fees next year. When will the ACT government, so progressive in so many ways, entertain this big idea?

For "small is beautiful" I remind myself, as (with a little wholly forgivable smugness) I drive daintily about my business in the ACT with the environmental harmlessness of a nimble pixie springing from one toadstool to another.

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