Pushback To Car Bloat May Be Growing In Europe As Popularity Of American Testosterone Shitwagons Grows
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Yet even as the reasons to limit car dependence mount, the vehicles themselves keep growing in size. Like for like, bigger cars waste more fuel, spew more pollution, take up more space and pack more punch in a crash. In Europe, where most new cars sold are SUVs, the average vehicle mass has risen since 2010 by 9% for combustion engine cars and by 70% for battery electric ones, according to data from the International Council on Clean Transportation, an nonprofit research organisation. On top of the direct harms, the supersizing of electric vehicles may also have slowed the transition away from fuel-burning ones by pricing people out of clean alternatives.“Europe is at a crossroads,” said Lucien Mathieu, the director of cars at Transport and Environment (T&E), a nonprofit in Brussels. He said the choice ahead was to manufacture the “compact affordable electric vehicles” that China has begun to popularise across the developing world or to embrace the expensive “mega SUVs and monster trucks” that the US has championed. More than 80% of cars sold in the US are now an SUV, van or pickup truck, official data shows.
For now, the SUVs clogging European roads are fairly dainty by North American standards, with the additional threat to human health coming more from higher bumper heights rather than the added pollution that extra weight entails. But even bigger vehicles are revving their engines around the corner. Thousands of pickup trucks such as the Dodge Ram 1500 and Ford F-150 have been driven on to European streets in recent years, evading EU safety standards through a backdoor process that allows individual vehicles to be imported under less stringent conditions. Efforts to close the loophole have been complicated by a US-EU trade deal last year that calls for “mutual recognition to each other’s standards” on automobiles.
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Is Europe doomed to follow North American car bloat? There are some signs that the rise of SUVs may be spurring resistance to car culture more broadly. A handful of European cities began the process of reducing car dependency decades ago, such as the Dutch and Danish cities that removed urban motorways and built bike lanes after the oil crises in the 1970s, but other frontrunners such as London and Paris have only recently taken transformative steps. Their efforts to bolster public transport systems, share road space with cyclists and restrict motorists are being cited across the continent as proof that a shift away from cars is feasible and desirable.
Yet even places of progress show mixed support. In London, the introduction of an ultra-low emissions zone generated so much backlash that it became the face of a widespread conspiracy theory that painted “15-minute cities” as a globalist plot of government control. In Paris, whose transformation under the city’s former mayor Anne Hidalgo was celebrated around the world, public referendums on pedestrianising school streets and charging big cars more to park were won with tepid, single-digit percentage turnout – even though recent municipal elections showed little appetite for backsliding.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/07/europe-us-car-culture-bigger-vehicles-harms-suvs-trucks