Soaring SUV sales keep carmakers on collision course with climate policy | Hacker News Reader

Soaring SUV sales keep carmakers on collision course with climate policy

uk.reuters.com

38 pointsthg69 comments

Buying an SUV is sometimes due to network effects.

If you are in a sedan, it isn't high enough to allow you to see traffic through the windshields of the SUV ahead of you, it's not much different than being behind an 18-wheeler.

So as a defensive maneuver, you also buy an SUV...

I bought a petite Prius due to network effects.

It's nigh on impossible to do parallel parking in most of Boston (especially if you suck at p.parking), but with my Prius it's tolerable.

If you're following the SUV ahead of you at a safe distance, why would you need or want to see through its windshield?

One of the reasons SUVs and pickup trucks are popular here in America is that they're easy to get in and out of. About 1/3 of Americans are obese (far more overweight), and from my observations, many have weak legs and cores. SUVs are part of the same phenomenon that has popularized single-story suburban homes, bottom-freezer refrigerators, etc. I see it as less of a network effect and more of a feedback loop.

Cuz some of us are safe drivers and want to see what is up ahead instead of blindly (literally) following the car in front like a lemming

As someone who drives a bunch of low 90s sedans and wagons I disagree. It's not the crossover SUVs that most people are buying that are hard to see around, it's the pickups, Jeep Wranglers and everything else that has a rectangular cross section that's a pain to see around.

The smaller class of SUVs are still smaller than the station wagons and large sedans they replaced. And the larger SUVs have mostly replaced minivans, which have curiously disappeared from the roads. It's kind of a wash, if you look a little closer.

This. That’s the sole reason I bought an SUV.

And sometimes is due to obnoxiously aggressive marketing.

Gas taxes haven’t gone up in nearly three decades. The cost of driving an automobile is divorced from the reality of what it costs to maintain roads and protect the climate.

They have in California.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article23164...

There's a 1973 video [0] about people shifting away from gas-guzzlers because oil prices have risen so much. I wonder whether we can expect history to repeat itself here:

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClaNhx71XB8

An alternative is that as battery prices drop and an equivalent electric SUV can cost less (with better performance on most metrics) that we'll see a kind of Jevon's Paradox and SUVs will get even bigger.

As with everything else, the answer to combating climate change is Miata.

The answer to just about damn near anything is Miata, of course.

But I formerly drove a Miata, and now drive an American Medium Size (that's a rest-of-the-world extra large) SUV. Same mileage for both, about ~23mpg.

Or a Subaru Brat for those with kids

I have one hypothesis for part of the uptick: rear seat room for carseats. I consider myself the SUV hater of SUV haters, and I reject that you need one when you have kids (such is the idea in my part of the US), but...we bought one last year anyway, mainly to accommodate two rear-facing carseats with two adults in the front. There aren’t many cars that make this work, and you’d be surprised how big of an SUV you have to get to get any more rear seat space than a regular car. Not even most of the “mid-size” models.

I understand why even cheap crappy plastic SUV sell in IE AND UK so well, people are tired of speed ramps and those vehicles are great for driving through crappy roads and speed ramps in housing estates and minor roads in small towns that are cursed with speed ramps. Sitting high enough to see surrounding plus not having to slow down for speed ramps win win

Why are these mutually exclusive? An electric drive train can be fitted to an SUV form factor. In fact, it might be easier to get to an acceptable range (300mi) because there’s more space for more batteries (assuming each battery delivers more range than its weight continues to scale).

I think the easiest way to accelerate decarbonization is to make green tech more desirable independent of the greenness. If people want it, they’ll get it and in that sense SUVs could help achieve climate goals.

Bigger cars are heavier, SUVs have terrible aerodynamic properties, bigger batteries are heavier and consume more resources bring produced. Even electric SUVs aren't really green by any stretch of the imagination.

I would guess that we aren't seeing electric SUVs due to cost.

That being said, I'm not sure why you are being aggressively downvoted as your basic premise is correct. Most people are not going to buy an inferior vehicle (eg small, uncomfortable, slow, less capable, expensive, etc) just because it is green. I know people on HN might, and good for them for doing so, but that's not going to be the case more broadly. If we want mass adoption of green vehicles, either the vehicles have to be relatively on par quality wise with existing non-hybrid gas vehicles, there has to be social status attached to owning one (eg Tesla), there has to be a regulatory change, or the operating cost of gas vehicles has to go way up (ie fuel needs to be taxed aggressively) to cause operating costs to figure strongly in the buying decision.

No one will care when an Explorer gets 20-25 mpg and gas is still under $2.50/gallon. The comfort and utility advantages more than outweigh any possible long-term externalities in the ordinary calculus.

> No one will care when an Explorer gets 20-25 mpg and gas is still under $2.50/gallon.

I was curious if their fuel efficiency is really that low. I've only been interested in smaller SUVs (I've got a Honda CR-V) which are up to around 28 mpg city, 34 highway for current models.

So I went to Ford's site to check. On the page for the Explorer [1] I can't find fuel efficiency info! Searching for "mpg" on the page (or on the pages for specific models) shows hits but Firefox does not actually show them. Disabling styles and doing again finds that those mentions are just in standard disclaimer footnotes.

Even more interesting is this page [2], which lists all Ford SUVs and crossovers. All of the gas powered ones (Ecosport, Escape, Edge, Expedition, and Flex) except for Explorer list their fuel efficiency right there.

Ford seems to be specifically avoiding listing Explorer gas mileage. Expedition is 17/24 city/highway and Flex is 16/23, so it's not like they are unwilling to list low numbers. So what is going on with Explorer?

[1] https://www.ford.com/suvs/explorer/

[2] https://www.ford.com/new-suvs-crossovers/

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