Ep. 5 – SUVs, the damage they cause and fairly charging them

Filed under: Podcast

This week I talk with James Ward of the SUV Alliance, a group that is dedicated to tackling the spread of oversized vehicles in our cities. We first try to understand the problem before talking about ways to tackle it.

https://www.suv-alliance.org.uk

Transcript

Kevin Carmody (00:06)
So if you walked down any of the main roads in Birmingham in 2011, counting the cars as it went past, only one in eight would have been an SUV. And today we’re looking at six in 10. Our streets haven’t got any wider, and the parking spaces haven’t grown, but the cars certainly have. And that transformation hasn’t happened all of a sudden. It’s been gradual. And many of us may not have even noticed it. Today, I’m talking to James Ward from the SUV Alliance about what’s called car spreading and why…

Birmingham in this case may have this conversation as particularly difficult. Thank you very much James for joining me today.

James (00:45)
It’s good to be here.

Kevin Carmody (00:48)
Okay, so we’re going to start with that statistic of 13 % to 59 % of car SUV being the dominant vehicle over the past decade. what was the moment that sparked the SUV Alliance saying, let’s look at tackling this?

James (01:04)
Well, the idea for the SUV Alliance came a couple of years ago now, back at the start of 2024, from my own work with AdFreeCities, which is a campaign challenging corporate advertising. And my work there was particularly looking at the car industry advertising. So a lot around kind of greenwash advertising, the lobbying that the car industry does behind the scenes, and so on. And

At the time, we were seeing this just real explosion in the number of SUVs that were being manufactured and being sold and being advertised, of course. And that was something that really spoke to me as a major issue and has done for a number of years. mean, like anyone, you walk down the street, as you said, in the introduction, you just see this proliferation of these large vehicles. So it was very much on my mind. And then I had the opportunity within my work to bring that in the SUV angle.

And so I started speaking to other organisations that I thought would be interested and they all were. It was the easiest sell ever. Let’s do some work on SUVs and everyone was in because it’s just such an obvious, obvious problem that’s only getting worse. So, yeah, quite quickly that came together, the idea of a coalition of organisations. And we spent 2024, most of 2024 kind of behind the scenes.

writing our manifesto, which is a short manifesto, five policy asks that would start to reverse this trend towards ever bigger, ever heavier cars and SUVs. And then in early 2025, we were ready to publish that, make it public. We had a bit of a soft launch online. And then later in March, we did a parliamentary event in the House of Lords sponsored by Jenny Jones, the Green peer

And that was our kind of first, if you like, public event of the SUV Alliance. And then since then, we’ve been working together. It’s a loose coalition of organizations that’s grown steadily over the year. And we’ve run a number of sort of campaigns to raise awareness of the SUV problem and the car spreading problem more generally, and to target some of the kind of

you know, what we might call bad actors in the space who are really sort of pushing this big car topic, big car proliferation. And yeah, it’s gone from strength to strength really. It’s nice to see. I mean, think, yeah, maybe what I said about, you know, the pitching the idea to other organisations and getting the interest straight away. And I’ve found that throughout, know, whether you’re talking to like councillors, policymakers or even the public.

there’s a very latent awareness that more big cars is just obviously a problem. Even people who own and drive them are recognizing that it’s a problem, especially in towns and cities, right? As soon as you try and park one of these big cars, you’re going to learn that they’re not built for towns and cities. So there is a huge latent awareness and a latent desire to maybe see something done about it. So that’s not to say that there hasn’t been pushback and that there aren’t detractors.

But by and large people are quite supportive of the messaging that we’re putting out and the campaigning that we’re doing. So it’s been a fun, fun year.

Kevin Carmody (04:33)
So we should probably do some context here. When we say SUV, I think for most people what comes to mind here is the kind of very oversized Range Rover and that sort thing. I mean, it’s more than that really, isn’t it? The cars across the industry are growing.

James (04:52)
Yeah, I mean, this is the reason that that term car spreading was introduced. Because, whether you’re looking at the biggest cars like the Land Rover Defender, or even if you’re looking at the very smallest cars, they’re all getting bigger year on year. I mean, the Mini, right, is the just absolute epitome of this. The Mini used to be mini. It was tiny. It was really small.

you had to fold yourself into it. And now the Mini is huge, right? It’s this massive big boxy car that’s bigger than a lot of hatchbacks even. So that’s just a prime example of car spreading, how cars are getting bigger. Even if you look at like the Toyota Igo, it’s one of the smallest cars that you can get in the UK. And then in recent years, Toyota have launched the Igo X, the crossover version.

Kevin Carmody (05:24)
Yeah.

James (05:46)
which is like the SUV ization of the Toyota Igo. It’s still an Igo, still a small car, but they’ve just put this sort of slightly wider body work on it. And now it’s bigger. So wherever you look within the car market, you see this trend. Cars are getting wider, one centimeter every two years on average. They’re getting heavier, several hundred kilograms over the last few years. And they’re also getting

Bonnets are getting taller, again, at a rate of about one centimeter every two years on average. So all of that is adding up to some quite significant problems.

Kevin Carmody (06:27)
So, mean, why are there so many? mean, who’s, is this consumer demand? Is this the manufacturers?

James (06:35)
Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, like, so if you were to ask someone in the car industry, why are people choosing larger vehicles and SUVs? The industry would say, well, it’s consumer demand, consumer preference. This is just what people want. And that’s a very convenient argument because it lets them off the hook completely. Right. And it just sort of waves some hands over over the issue. I mean, you no doubt there are some people who prefer a larger car. Right. There are benefits of having a larger car. It could be more comfortable. You can get more stuff in them.

They can be very practical. But why are we seeing this happening at such a scale? I mean, last year, 62 % of new cars sold were SUVs. And that’s happened within a space of about 15 years that we’ve gone from SUVs being almost 0 % of sales to being 62 % of sales. That doesn’t just happen by coincidence, which is effectively what the consumer demand argument says.

I think, I mean, fundamentally it’s about profits, right? Car makers get more money from big cars. That’s their motivation. That’s why they want to sell them. They’re doing that within an environment within the UK that’s very favorable to that. So tax is a big one. The UK is a tax haven for big cars. If you were to buy, you know, some of the largest vehicles on sale in the UK, if you were to try and buy them in France, for instance, you could pay as much as 60,000 pounds more.

in tax than you do in the UK. Okay, so it’s a huge kind of loophole, which is enabling people to get these cars in the UK much cheaper than they would elsewhere. And that’s why, you know, countries like France have a much lower rate of SUV ownership. I think that with the SUVs as well, there is an association with kind of glitz and glamour and celebrity, right? We see

celebrities driving these kind of things or being driven in them, being chauffeured in them, politicians as well, know, you see the prime minister being driven around in some great big SUV. So there’s an association there with kind of status ⁓ and the glitz and the glamour of a lifestyle that, you know, some of us might want to live. And so when you have the opportunity to buy one of these cars, that’s what’s speaking to you in the back of your mind. And related to that, of course, is advertising and marketing. And I think that that plays a huge role.

Kevin Carmody (08:39)
Yeah.

James (09:00)
in the proliferation of big cars in the last 15 or so years. I mean, because if you just look at the history of the SUV, they started life as military vehicles, right, back in World War II. And then in sort of 90s, the early 2000s, they were still very much like niche off-road vehicles. And you see that reflected in the marketing, right? An advert for an SUV in the year 2000 was it big car driving up a mountain, right, fording a stream.

Fast forward to now and what do we see? SUVs are being advertised as family cars for the school run, for shopping trips, being advertised as everyday vehicles. You watch an SUV advert now, you don’t see the hills and the streams in the forest. What you see is the car being driven through a city, through an urban environment. So they’ve been reinvented through the marketing away from what they began life as, off-road military vehicles.

reinvented now as everyday family cars. Which, yeah, when you compare them, compare that image to the reality of what they are and what they’re doing and what they’re capable of doing, the harms they cause, you know, that’s really why, that’s my motivation for doing something about this because it’s really quite obscene in many ways.

Kevin Carmody (10:06)
Yeah.

There was that ⁓ Toyota advert that was pulled ⁓ for the damage that the SUV was done and seen in that kind of just driving through nature and advertising standards pulled it.

James (10:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was

back in November 2023, I think it was. It was actually a complaint by AdFreeCities against an advert for the Toyota Hilux, which is big American style pickup. And the advert showed them driving through this kind of natural terrain, tearing up the ground, tearing up some streams. And the tagline for the advert was Toyota Hilux born to roam. So we lodged a complaint with the advertising regulator about this.

and the depiction of these cars being driven off road. And yeah, and the regulator sided with us in the end and banned the adverts on the grounds that they were socially irresponsible for depicting irresponsible way of driving in nature, which was quite a bit of a, I don’t want to overstate it, but it to us felt like a bit of a landmark moment of a recognition that these vehicles are.

are damaging, right? They’re damaging to the planet, they’re damaging to the natural world. ⁓ And I think, you know, it doesn’t take too much sort of mental work to associate that with the damage that they’re doing within urban environments as well.

Kevin Carmody (11:48)
So it would be worth taking a moment to talk about how dangerous these cars are. I mean, not just as we say, they the damage. Yes, they are heavy and big and they damage infrastructure. They produce more pollution, whether it is at the tailpipe or whether it’s particulate matter through the weight of their tires and their brake pads.

James (12:17)
and

Kevin Carmody (12:17)
⁓

So yeah, so they’re very polluting vehicle, but they’re also very dangerous. They’re very dangerous for the rising bonnets and the risks that causes for not just, you know, that kind of initial weight of kinetic weight of impact, but also the risk of being pulled underneath the vehicle as well. Yeah.

Okay, your effectiveness there was using the regulator. Now we’ve talked about how important some of these SUV companies are for the British economy. We talk about the politicians that are using ⁓ Land Rover’s…

You you won’t see a minister really moving around in any other car. And that’s because it is considered one of the great success stories of the British automotive industry, these large luxury cars. And we have that in the Midlands, in Birmingham, in spades. I mean, it is estimated that the that JLR impacts something like 60,000 jobs in the Midlands. I mean, it adds several billions to the

UK economy, how do we then, in a city like Birmingham, which is, you know, do we do we ask the local council to regulate that?

James (13:37)
Yes, I think within the kind of climate movement, there’s this idea of the just transition, right? So you’ve got all these horrible companies, fossil fuel companies who are polluting the world and destroying the planet. Within those, you’ve got all these workers who are incredibly skilled and incredibly technically capable at what they do. And the idea of the just transition is let’s stop doing fossil fuels, but let’s support that workforce.

to transition to using those skills and that expertise within the green energy sector, right? If you’re currently working on fossil fuels, you could quite readily transfer that to green energy. So we’re keeping that expertise, we’re keeping those skills and we’re keeping those jobs, we’re just getting rid of the horrible bit, which is the fossil fuels, right? It’s getting rid of the bath water and keeping the lovely clean baby at the end. And the same kind of argument applies here, right?

within JLR or the UK car industry as a whole, you’ve got thousands, tens of thousands of people doing incredible work, incredibly skilled jobs, incredibly talented, capable people. There’s no reason that they have to be limited to making massive, dangerous, polluting SUVs. JLR could, if they chose to, stop producing these big cars, and they could instead shift production to

small and affordable electric cars. They could do that. They could even manufacture alternatives to the car, like public transport, buses, trains. They could make electric cargo bikes. Right, the only reason that they’re not is because they’re currently making so much money making these massive, massive cars, which ultimately are not being sold to the people who work there, who probably don’t, you know, are not being paid enough to buy one, a 110,000 pound Land Rover Defender.

Kevin Carmody (15:19)
Yeah.

James (15:32)
These cars are being sold to millionaires who live in Dubai and the UAE. So I’m not going to shed a tear about JLR and their business model when ultimately it’s not on me. I’m not the one who’s accountable for the decisions that being made. And neither are the 60,000 people who work there. It’s the people at the top. It’s the decision makers who are, like I say, making a decision to manufacture these kind of big cars and the problems that they cause.

And instead the question needs to be to them, why are you not doing otherwise? You could. You’ve got the workforce, you’ve got the skills, you’ve got the manufacturing capability. You could do better in the world. And why aren’t you?

Kevin Carmody (16:15)
Yeah, yeah. And this is, ⁓ you know, how much this is, is part of that drive for growth at any at any cost.

James (16:23)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Carmody (16:33)
So some of the solutions that you’ve been working on to tackle this, could you talk through some of the ideas that are in your manifesto?

James (16:46)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so it’s quite short. It’s a five point manifesto of relatively accessible policies that government at local level and national level could implement to start turning the tide against ever bigger, ever heavier cars and SUVs. So just really threw them off. So the first one is about tax, right? Closing those tax loopholes that mean that, you know, buying a big car is much cheaper here than it is.

elsewhere in Europe, for instance. And particularly doing that through a linking vehicle exercise duty to a vehicle’s weight, right. So it’s currently linked to pollution, the more polluting your car is, the more you pay in VED, same mechanism, but also connecting it to weight as well. The second ask in the manifesto is about vehicle size regulations. Okay, so again, there’s a huge

loophole, don’t even know if that’s the right word, black holes may be more appropriate within the UK legislation, that you can effectively manufacture and sell a car that’s as big as a single decker bus in terms of its dimensions without any kind of extra regulation, without any extra licensing requirements or anything. And that’s the reason why we’re seeing cars get wider and wider and, you know, these taller bonnets, taller bonnets, year on year. So we’d like to see some attention brought to that.

and maybe a tightening of those regulations and particularly on bonnet height. You can make an argument that cars are getting wider because they’ve got more airbags inside or something like that. Bonnets, zero reason for that. It’s a purely aesthetic choice by the manufacturer to make a car with a bonnet that’s 80, 90 centimetres a metre tall. But the effect of that on safety and particular children’s safety.

is just so catastrophic that I don’t see any reason why we should enable cars to just have taller bonnets. That should clearly be regulated. And the data on that is very, very clear. It’s a very clear case for that. So just going back to the manifesto, the third ask in there is about local authorities introducing weight-based parking charges for cars.

Again, kind of similar model to the pollution based charging that many councils do already. But this time would be about the vehicles weight. And actually that’s an area where we’ve had success because you might have seen or heard Cardiff City Council earlier this year actually voted to implement a policy doing that. So that now, as that comes into force in Cardiff, heavier cars over 2,400 kilograms, I think it is.

will now have to pay an additional charge to get a resident parking permit. And Cardiff isn’t alone there. Globally, lots of cities in Europe are doing this. Paris, very famously, has done it successfully. SUV use in central Paris dropped by, I think, two thirds within the first three months of them introducing a weight-based parking charge, right? So that’s a just massive success. very clear, yeah, exactly, very clear indication that these things work.

Kevin Carmody (19:46)
Wow, wow.

James (19:52)
and a lot of other European cities as well that I could list ⁓ if you wanted to. ⁓ Fourth, Manifesto Ask is a slightly more technical one, but it’s addressing this other trend, parallel trend that we’re seeing with the electrification of cars, that as cars electrify, they’re often becoming SUVs as well, which is…

Kevin Carmody (19:52)
Yeah.

James (20:18)
Kind of a double whammy really because now you’ve got a car that’s heavier because it’s an SUV and it’s got the bigger body work and it’s also heavier because it’s got a battery in it and batteries weigh lot and you need a bigger battery for a bigger car so you’re just every time you’re just you’re just Upping upping the weight and the weight is what makes them dangerous So you’ve got a bit of a double or even triple whammy there with electric SUVs Or even a quadruple whammy because an electric SUV being heavier

makes them less efficient, right? So if you’re owning that car and you’re having to plug it in and charge it, you’ll be paying more to charge it than if you had a small lightweight electric vehicle. So the fourth manifesto ask has a slightly jargonistic ask to kind of address that through like mandatory battery efficiency. And then the final manifesto ask, the fifth one, is another one for local authorities and it relates to SUV advertising.

So councils often have control over portions of the advertising estate that we see within towns and cities. And they can write into their advertising policy kinds of products that they don’t want to see, that they don’t want to advertise. So a lot of councils prohibit advertising for obvious things like, … weapons. And other councils might have stronger policies for, … adverts for alcohol, gambling.

Junk food, a lot of councils do. Some have even gone so far as to restrict advertising for fossil fuels and fossil fuel products. And we’d like to add SUVs to that list for obvious reasons. Seeing these, I’ve got examples of SUV adverts in bus shelters. So you’ve got people who are waiting for the bus who’ve made a choice to take the sustainable transport choice and the car industry is saying, hey you.

Your chump don’t get the bus by this big car. And that just has no place, I think, in our towns and cities. It’s not contributing positively to public life, and we shouldn’t see it on our streets. So yeah, that’s our five-point manifesto. And yeah, viewed in the whole, it’s tackling those kind of elements that I mentioned earlier of why we’ve seen this proliferation, this car-spreading effect. It’s the advertising and the marketing. It’s the policy loopholes that allow for this. And it’s the tax breaks as well.

So we’re kind trying to deal with all of those in a five-point manifesto.

Kevin Carmody (22:41)
And what are some of implementation that seen? mean, we’ve talked about the Cardiff parking charges. Has Anywhere banned SUV adverts?

James (22:52)
Yeah, actually, yes. Yeah, Edinburgh City Council back in May 2024 implemented a kind of quite very strong advertising and sponsorship policy, included ⁓ fossil fuel products was the kind of main category. And then within that, they specified SUVs and even electric SUVs. that’s, you know, that that’s that’s the key point. You know, we shouldn’t

turn a blind eye to these bigger cars just because they’re electric, right? That doesn’t solve any of the problems and actually, as I’ve said with the weight issue, actually makes some of the problems worse. So electric SUVs are definitely a part of this kind of critique that I’m presenting here.

Kevin Carmody (23:32)
Yeah, they’re no less dangerous because they’re electric. And, you know, they’re built in carbon cost as well of producing these in the first place.

James (23:35)
anything more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Life cycle emissions for all cars are quite high and SUVs are even higher. you know, I mean, I don’t want to sort of be disparaging towards electric vehicles, right? You know, if you’re replacing a petrol car with an electric car, that’s a good thing on the whole. But if those, if the electrification of cars means that we’re just going to get loads of SUVs, then that’s not a good thing. You’ve just taken a step sideways, not forwards.

Kevin Carmody (24:03)
Yeah,

yeah. And then, I mean, there’s something we have in Birmingham is the clean air zone, which does not do sliding scale pricing. So, I mean, that could be another way of managing the types of vehicles that you have, know, so let’s go within like, you know, within cars, a way of kind of managing what type of vehicles as you say, if you if

almost any size can be considered a car within UK legislation, then it’s hard to tackle that. right. So I think my question for you then is if you were to choose one of these as your favourite methods, ⁓ which tactic do you think would be the most effective? Would it be tackling the advertising? Would it be?

⁓ would it be the parking charges? What would you think would be the most effective?

James (25:03)
Hmm. I mean, yeah, it’s a really good question because you’ve got to sort of balance the idealistic side of what I hope would kind of work versus the practicality. Because actually, as we have this year, working with local authorities can actually be so much more effective and efficient than trying to get national government to implement change, you know, so much faster.

as was the case with Cardiff. They’ve come through with that policy in a relatively short space of time. I think they were consulting on it last year and already they’ve brought it through into implementation. actually we may well see local authorities really leading the charge on this through the parking front. I suppose I should say because sometimes this comes up on social media when I’m talking about this.

You know what I’m saying? All these big problems with SUVs and the solution is parking charges. And people will say, that seems a bit of a small niche solution to what feels like a very big problem. But I mean, the reality of it is that councils are quite limited in what they can do, right? They don’t have infinite powers. You can’t just ban these kind of cars, even if you wanted to, which would not be a good idea, right? But you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to. know, councils have the powers that they have.

Kevin Carmody (26:20)
Yeah.

James (26:25)
And amongst those powers are control over parking charges and control over advertising. So that’s why those are kind of our policy asks there. But even so, it is quite effective. Paris example, like I say, within three months of raising the charges on heavier vehicles, SUV use in that city dropped by two thirds. That’s just astronomical levels of success that they’ve had there.

Kevin Carmody (26:51)
Yeah.

James (26:53)
So I think, yes, seeing more local authorities across the UK follow suit and add those weight-based parking charges, I think would be very, very impactful. ⁓ it’s, you it’s a, you’re then kind of catching people on the day to day, right? People who are actually owning and driving these will suddenly realize, this is now costing me a lot. Next time I, you know, when I replace this car in a few years.

I’ll think about this and I’ll get a smaller one.

Kevin Carmody (27:25)
think there’s something to be said for pilot schemes like the one in Cardiff to kind of set an example of what’s the acceptability of this of introducing these charges. So I’ll use the example of in the 20 mile an hour reduction in Wales and their expectation of it being

James (27:36)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Carmody (27:51)
you know, is it going to be a huge fraud or is it going to be accepted? And now as we’re seeing, you know, the data coming out of what an effective solution it has been in saving lives, the conversation changes as is this an acceptable thing? An example is in Edinburgh where they have banned pavement parking. And this is it was showing that this had that the expected backlash.

James (28:03)
Mm.

Mmm.

Kevin Carmody (28:21)
was almost, it just didn’t come. There was no backlash there. And now it’s a safer city to walk around. So I think there is something to be said for pilot projects.

So thank you very much, James, for your time talking with us today. It’s been very interesting and it’s really good to talk more about the SUV Alliance, the work you’ve done, and how effective it can be in other cities as well, and how we can replicate that in Birmingham. So thank you very much.

James (28:58)
Thank you very much for having me, Kevin. It’s been wonderful.

Kevin Carmody (29:01)
Thanks a lot.

Kevin Carmody (29:10)
So let’s be clear about this. This isn’t about demonising JLR or the thousands of Birmingham families whose livelihoods depend on them. This is a company that is woven into the city’s fabric. Real jobs, real mortgages, real lives. But there is a tension that we can’t ignore. Birmingham has over 900 deaths a year linked to air pollution. We have children who can’t be seen over the bonnets of cars. have streets that feel increasingly hostile to anyone who’s not in a vehicle. These are real problems.

The question isn’t whether SUVs benefit some people in Birmingham, which we know they do. The question is whether the costs, in terms of air quality, in safety, in road maintenance and in public space, are being fairly distributed. Right now the profits go up to the manufacturers and the shareholders, while the costs are increasingly burdened on everyone who lives here. This is not an anti-current anti-progress, it is just a question.

Is the current deal actually working for Birmingham or is it working for the car industry at Birmingham’s expense?

If we can’t have this conversation in a city that knows the car industry as intimately as we do, then where else can we have it?

If you want to know more about the SUV Alliance, you can visit their website SUV-Alliance.org.uk. If you want to know more about Better Streets for Birmingham, BetterStreetsForBirmingham.org, where you can join us for free. My name’s Kevin Carmody. Thank you very much for listening. I look forward to seeing you again next time.