Excuse me for a moment while I clamber on top of my high horse to deliver an important public safety announcement: stop buying enormous cars! Please, for the love of God, pedestrians and my tiny chihuahua that is just trying to cross the road, stop this cycle of car-brained insanity.
I write this from the US, where everything (including the presidential ego) is supersized and where going for a walk means having to constantly peer around one enormous truck to make sure you’re not going to get hit by another enormous truck. Still, at least in the US the big cars have big roads to drive down. The trend for bloated vehicles is spreading to places where they’re even more unsuitable. New research has found that more than 1m cars that are too big to fit in parking spaces are being sold in the UK each year.
It’s wrong to call these supersized vehicles sport utility vehicles (SUVs): a large proportion of them are not used for anything sportier than a supermarket run. Rather, we seem to have crossed over into emotional support vehicle (ESV) territory. A lot of the tanks I see on the road appear to serve no other purpose than making their owner feel better about their insecurities.
Large car enthusiasts may protest that this isn’t true and bigger cars are the safer choice. And I can certainly see how it feels dangerous to be the smallest car on the road nowadays. But this obsession with ESVs is proving deadly. “For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles,” a recent analysis by the Economist found. The analysis also found that “the heaviest US vehicles are responsible for 37 deaths in the other car per 10,000 crashes compared with 5.7 for median-weight cars and 2.6 for the lightest cars”. Car bloat is part of the reason pedestrian deaths in the US have been rising.
Still, perhaps this problem is now in the rear-view mirror. Trump’s tariffs are about to make cars – along with everything else – even more expensive. It’s going to be hard to justify a giant car when dinner consists of one $30 egg. It would be a shame if it took an economic crash to trigger it, but there’s a tiny chance the US, forced to tighten its belt, may find itself falling back in love with smaller cars.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
