Crazy ...

SUVs drive trend for new cars to grow 1cm wider in UK and EU every two years, says report

The Guardian

Bigger cars more likely to kill people, release more toxic gas and are outgrowing design of cities.

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France has fought the trend towards heavier cars more than most of Europe’s big economies. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images.

New cars in the EU and UK have grown 1cm wider every two years, the Guardian can reveal, driven by large luxury SUVs whose sales show no sign of slowing. (...)

New cars have become so bloated that half of them are too wide to fit in parking spaces designed to the minimum on-street standards in many countries, the report found. The average width of a new car in the EU and UK passed 180cm in the first half of 2023, having grown an average of 0.5cm each year since 2001. (...)

In the mid-1990s, the EU banned vehicles wider than 2.55 metres to stop trucks and buses from growing too large. But the legislation did not create separate limits for cars, which analysts say have started to cross key thresholds for which roads and cities were not designed. (...)

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Tags: #cars #suv #uk #vs #road_kill #exhaust #pollution #air_pollution #parking #road_safety

How do people even come up with ideas like this?

Pepper spray for the school run? The weaponised SUV set to terrify America’s streets

The Guardian

The extreme features of the Rezvani Vengeance – including electrified door handles and blinding strobe lights – are wholly in tune with lethal trends in the US market. (...)

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Road warrior … the Rezvani Vengeance SUV. Photograph: Rezvani Motors.

[T]his souped-up SUV boasts bulletproof glass, blinding strobe lights, electrified doorhandles, and wing mirrors that can shoot pepper spray – handy for putting those pesky cyclists in their place.

“Vengeance is yours,” trumpets the website, which details how the car can release a dense smoke screen to confuse people following you, as well as detect electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons. Always handy for the supermarket run. (...)

Which brings us to the most frightening thing about this weaponised monster of an SUV: that it is aimed not at military personnel, but at everyday soccer moms. (...)

This steroidal tank might seem like an anomalous extreme, but the truth is it represents the broader rise of the average US consumer vehicle into a supercharged killing machine. With its added tactical weaponry and paranoid styling, at least the Vengeance is honest about it.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, drivers behind the wheel of an SUV are two to three times more likely to kill a pedestrian in a collision than when driving a regular car. (...)

It comes down to simple physics: SUVs are more lethal due to their enormous weight, much taller front ends, and poorer visibility. While a regular car generally strikes a pedestrian’s legs, throwing them on to the bonnet, an SUV strikes their upper torso, or head, and then crushes them under the wheels.

Following the American love for supersizing everything, from Big Macs to McMansions, it is no surprise that the sale of ever bigger, ever heavier cars has mushroomed. Some reports show that 80% of all car sales in the US are now SUVs or pickup trucks. (...)

According to a Governors Highway Safety Association report, pedestrian fatalities have rocketed by 54% over the last decade. Cars might have grown safer for the people inside them, but not for walkers, cyclists or bikers. (...)

SUVs are killing us in another way too, as some of the world’s worst polluters. It was recently found that they are the second biggest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade, eclipsing all shipping, aviation, heavy industry and even trucks. (...)

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Tags: #cars #car_industry #us #united_states #suv #compact_car #pollution #exhaust #road_safety #pedestrians #cyclists #road_deaths