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news
"No more giant cars" (credit: Clean Cities)Active travel campaigners call for higher taxes on “supersized” SUVs to tackle “carspreading”, claiming they are more dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians and cause more pothole damage
Active travel campaigners from the UK are calling for higher taxes on the owners of “supersized” SUV to tackle the phenomenon of “carspreading”, pointing out that academic studies show them to be more dangerous to cyclists, pedestrians, and smaller car users, as well as causing more pothole damage while also being unable to fit in most parking spaces.
A YouGov survey conducted in January found that only 18 per cent car owners in Britain held the belief that there shouldn’t be any additional charges on SUV owners. Clean Cities, a European active travel organisation campaigning for healthy and climate-friendly transport, has pointed to this study to demand changes in the current auto taxation system.
Its researchers found that since 2021, around 4.6 million cars have been sold in the UK, which were bigger than a typical urban car parking space — more than 1.2 million a year, with SUV sales figures pointing upwards.
“Supersized” SUVs, which the campaign described as being either more than 1.8m wide or 4.8m long, have been growing in popularity despite them crowding out space in towns and cities, causing more road wear and being more likely to cause fatal injuries for children, cyclists and those driving smaller cars.
> SUVs more dangerous to cyclists than other cars, study suggests
It claimed that if you were to add up just the extra length and width that overhanging SUVs take up, it would stretch for over 192 miles, the equivalent of driving from London to Leeds.
Oliver Lord, UK Head of Clean Cities, said: “Cars are getting bigger every year — while our streets are not. We need carmakers to prioritise normal-sized cars that can be parked more easily and are less dangerous to people walking around. It’s only fair if you want to buy a massive SUV that you should expect to pay more for the space it takes up.”
To tackle the phenomenon known as “carspreading”, the campaigners are calling for fairer taxes in favour of lighter and more appropriately sized cars and for parking costs in cities to be based on the size of a car.
Carspreading (credit: Clean Cities)A new academic paper, published earlier this week, shows that heavier cars are more likely to be involved in fatal collisions, and average car weight in the UK is increasing.
This may lead to a rise in fatal collisions if the trend continues, the academics warn. Reducing car weight could mitigate the severity and frequency of collisions, while academics suggested that policymakers could consider “taxation on heavier cars” and that “local authorities could adjust parking policies to charge higher fees for heavier cars”.
The study, led by civil engineer Ruth Carlson and co-authored by Nima Dadashzadeh, assistant professor in transport and business analytics at the University of Huddersfield, is based on preliminary findings with the full paper out later this year.
> SUVs 'eight times more dangerous' to kids walking or cycling than smaller cars are
New taxes could reap significant rewards for HM Treasury and the Department of Transport. As well as the additional revenue, discouraging sales of heavier cars could reduce road maintenance costs.
According to ‘the fourth power law’’, a formula developed by US Highway Officials, the damage done by a vehicle to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle weight.
A two-tonne SUV therefore does 16 times more damage than a one-tonne car. The potholing of road surfaces is even worse when it rains because heavier vehicles create much stronger hydraulic pressure, forcing water into any flaws and breaking up the road surface.
SUV and cars parked (credit: Clean Cities)Harriet Edwards, a concerned parent from Sutton, said, “It’s not just the added stress of not being able to find somewhere to park, it’s the sense that if I’m involved in a collision with one of these giant SUVs, that me and my family are far more likely to be seriously hurt or killed.
“If you cause more danger, create more potholes and take up more parking space, it’s only fair that you pay a little bit more.”
Figures from the RAC show drivers encounter an average of six potholes per mile in England and Wales and the cost of pothole damage to vehicles is around £500 on average, with more severe repairs costing considerably more. According to the AA, fixing potholes is a priority for 96% of drivers.
Edmund King, the president of the AA, is on record as saying: “Better maintenance of the road network is the number one concern of drivers as damage costs a fortune and potholes can be fatal for those on two wheels.”
Child walking in front of SUV (credit: Clean Cities)According to the YouGov polling, 61 per cent of UK passenger car owners agree that “SUVs take up too much space”, while only 19 per cent disagree. Further, 71 per cent of car owners also agree that SUVs make parking more difficult, while only 15 per cent disagree.
A 2023 study from the US also found that SUVs are causing more cyclist injuries, with crashes with SUVs resulting in 55 per cent more trauma and 63 per cent more head injuries than crashes with cars, owing to taller front-end designs.
A year prior, another US study showed that SUVs are eight times more dangerous to kids walking or cycling than smaller cars are. It also found that although SUVs are involved in much fewer crashes than standard cars, they are twice as fatal.
Adwitiya joined road.cc in 2023 as a news writer after completing his masters in journalism from Cardiff University. His dissertation focused on active travel, which soon threw him into the deep end of covering everything related to the two-wheeled tool, and now cycling is as big a part of his life as guitars and football. He has previously covered local and national politics for Voice Cymru, and also likes to write about science, tech and the environment, if he can find the time. Living right next to the Taff trail in the Welsh capital, you can find him trying to tackle the brutal climbs in the valleys.
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37 comments
A lot of large SUV drivers seem to be fat. Maybe owning a large, wide car makes them feel slimmer. A bit like buying their clothes from Jackamo ( don't make me run!)
The w@nkpanzer tax
Take a minute to watch cars go past.
MOST have just 1 person - even the huge cars
"Cycle infra is a waste of space, I rarely see any cyclists there" tho...
My son really didn't want to go to school this morning. We managed to get him to go, but as he was running late I said I'd take him on the GSD. We would have made it in time, except we got stuck behind a Range Rover struggling to squeeze down a residential street with cars parked (and in the process of parking/dropping off) on either side of the road. But, of course, it's only ever cyclists who hold up drivers...
Introduce a large car specific driving test that's harder to pass, requiring more training and a requirement to have a specific large car licence. Actively enforce parking within marked bays.
"A new academic paper(link is external), published earlier this week, shows that heavier cars are more likely to be involved in fatal collisions..."
should be
"A new academic paper(link is external), published earlier this week, shows that DRIVERS OF heavier cars are more likely to be involved in fatal collisions..."
"A 2023 study from the US also found that SUVs are causing more cyclist injuries..."
should be
"A 2023 study from the US also found that DRIVERS OF SUVs are causing more cyclist injuries..."
Or be consistent and make it read: "A 2023 study from the US also found that SUVs are causing more BICYCLE injuries..."
No humans involved, nothing to worry about.
I'd like to see limits set for vehicle power. For instance a 5-seater vehicle is limited to 100 kW (135 PS/BHP). This would make large and heavy vehicles slower and safer as well as reducing environmental impacts.
And as a recent report in the Guardian showed, a million cars a year are sold in the UK that are too big for standard parking spaces. Back in the seventies, we called it conspicuous consumption, flaunting your wealth and arrogance. Tax the pips till they squeak: and then a lot more.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/04/more-than-1m-cars-so...
My EV estate is over 4.8m
and is wide.
I didn't want it to be that big, I just wanted an electric version of my previous estate.
You know you could have bought a smaller car, right? Other cars are available.
My EV exceeds the size. It's the smallest vehicle available which can transport my wife's trike (excursions or rescue).
Which means that even SUVs are a minor issue, it's construction vehicles, HGVs and buses that disintegrate roads.
Except that there are a lot less of those than there are SUVs. And they're generally closer to 'enough vehicle for the purpose', as opposed to the SUVs, which are mostly 'more car than is necessary'.
(Though reducing reliance on HGVs, particularly in urban areas, would be great too.)
So, do those buses do as much damage per person as a w@nkpanzer?
Given that the usual formula for road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power - they do a lot more damage per person.
Even comparing with a bus packed full of people and a single-occupancy SUV.
Heavy cars certainly don't help. And not all roads carry buses. I do now notice the impressive damage to roads at well-served bus stops though.
I don't believe that additional taxation is going to make a huge amount of difference for many SUV devotees; someone who can afford £100,000 plus on a Range Rover or a Porsche Cayenne probably isn't going to be that bothered by a few quid extra in tax. The solution is surely to make them impractical and inconvenient to use; ban non-commercial vehicles over a certain size from using municipal car parks and on-street parking spaces and introduce width restrictions in appropriate areas and refuse to issue residential parking permits on the streets below a certain width and people would soon start looking for smaller vehicles.
Absolutely. Since sumptuary laws have a spotty record and making stuff unfashionable is a tricky business, we'll have to go with interventions like you suggest.
Wait - why don't we make our streets narrower?
What's that? People say they're already "too narrow" for pavements or cycle space? 😢
That's a good point.
I dunno. If a lot of these SUVs are bought on finance, then proportionately an extra £300 per month in VED, or whatever, might sway things, but perhaps less than a change in the car financing market.
(I have heard the car financing marking described as 'the next sub-prime crash' because there is so much potential bad debt there. This might have a bigger impact on the growth of cars than anything else.)
I'd like to see 'colour and sound' rules for motor vehicles. SUVs for example, would be available only in a patchy mixture of barbie pink and 1980 Austin allegro brown, and would emit various donkey noises every few seconds.
My first car was a 1979 mini in that shade of British Leyland brown. I loved that car, but it was (literally) a shit colour.
Relevant to this thread, of course, because no model car shows how bloated cars have become more than the mini.
Mine too. Hid the rust fairly well.
Weren't the original Range Rovers diarrhoea brown so they didn't stand out at the shoot and startle the game?
Car financing has a lot to answer for. It is a valuable service for many, but I'm sure most normal people with needlessly large and flash cars have done so because the financing system encourages it. It also means people who are spending £xxx every month feel obligated/entitled to get their money's worth. I also blame that for the increase in insurance costs for those of us with more modest vehicles.
I'd not be upset by restrictions to ownership, and some will love the opportunity to show off that they can afford to tax their oversized car. But in reality there will be some who will think twice about getting a car with the tax premium. I'd also argue that simply discovering that one of the cars they are considering will be subject to the 'anti-social, road damaging, w@nker tax' will encourage them to be more realisitc about the practical challenges of driving a large vehicle on residential streets.
I'm sure for many, buying a stupidly large car is like buying a sofa. It looks a good size in the show-room, but it's only when you get it home you realise you have to take the doors off their hinges to get it into the living room, and that it dominates the space.
I'd go so far to say that if our government can speak to our neighbours (hahaha) and agree on what constitutes 'over-sized', and we all set the premium charges for VED and parking permits accordingly, then the car manufacturers will react accordingly. At the very least, they need to make more noise about the trend towards heavier vehicles making the problem of potholes worse.
Or we could adopt the Japanese approach..
"So, you'd like to buy one our cars...? Ok, let me check our appointment calendar, to see when we can come and measure your parking space..."
Not unless theVED is made eye wateringly expensive.
My proposal would be to base VED on a formula where the negative features of the vehicle were multpled together and divided by the positives. So, you would multiply the mass by the Co2 emissions by the litres/100km by the size and divide by the pedestrian crash rating.
This way, you could massively increase the tax on SUVs in a transparent way that didn't impact smaller, safer, greener vehicles.
But down the line it can put a big dent in its resale value which ups leasing costs and the amount of cash an owner is throwing at their status insecurities.
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