Our cars have cancer

I made a quick grocery run during the lunch hour, and, as usual, noticed that my car was made invisible when I parked it. My little Honda Fit was surrounded monstrous huge pickup trucks — trucks that I could barely see over the hood when I stood next to them, with looming huge intimidating grills, and increasingly tiny beds. This is the consequence of taking the truck analog of testosterone, you become huge in certain ways, but shrink where it counts.

Don’t try to tell me these are work vehicles. These are costly signals emitted to flaunt membership in a club of assholes. It’s become obvious and unsupportable.

This year, the average weight of a new car in the US was more than 4,300lb (2,000kg) – a full 1,000lb (450kg) more than in 1980. It’s not just that people are opting to drive larger models; the same models themselves have expanded. You can see the evolution most clearly with pickup trucks. Take, for example, the iconic Ford F-150, as Axios does in this comparative graphic (see above). Since 1970, the truck has become progressively larger, even as its bed – the fundamental point of owning a pickup truck, one would think – has become smaller.

You all know the Irish Elk went extinct, right?

These are gas-guzzling killers. Out here in the rural US (also, coincidentally, Republican US) the roads are full of these monsters. I just looked out my office window at the university parking lot and didn’t see any F150s or Dodge Rams, but any trip outside our environmentally conscious bubble means you have to share the road and parking lots with something equivalent to a tank.

It should be obvious that bigger, heavier cars are an ecological disaster. Without the trend towards bigger and bigger SUVs, global emissions from the motor industry would have fallen by 30% between 2010 and 2022. And even though a heavier electric vehicle (EV) is still preferable, emissions-wise, to a lighter petrol-engine vehicle, a lighter EV is obviously more efficient than a weightier one. The heavier the vehicle, the larger the battery it requires – and with it, more critical metals, and more electricity required for each charge.

The arms race in vehicle size is also a safety disaster, for other drivers and certainly for pedestrians. The individual logic makes sense: would you want to drive on the same highway as Mr Tinydick’s 7,000lb (3,175kg) Dodge Ram if you’re in a Mini? Of course not – in a collision, the Ram would probably just drive straight over you, like a monster truck rally malfunction. And the driver of a similarly sized vehicle wouldn’t even see a small child in front at close distance. The macro-level effects are deadly. In the US, deaths in car crashes rose by 33% between 2011 and 2021, while pedestrian deaths have risen by 77% since 2010.

Meanwhile, in France…

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has now proposed tripling parking rates for SUVs in central Paris to €18 an hour, and €12 an hour for the rest of the city. The measure, which would include hybrids and electric vehicles over a certain weight limit – though with an exemption for Paris resident parking – would affect roughly 10% of the cars in the city. And beyond Paris, Tesla’s 6,800lb (3,080kg) Cybertruck probably won’t be coming to Europe at all, because at that weight, it requires a trucking licence to drive (I write this with a sigh of relief).

Compare the best-selling vehicle in France with the most popular road-thing in the US:

I swear, this entire country is fucked.