>especially since I see more and more of those trucks in Paris, France
Yep, this trend exploded almost everywhere in Europe and I think I found the answer to why. Lots of my male colleagues at work (devs in Europe) are married and have kids on the way and when discussions came at lunchtime about buying a new family car for taking the kids places it seemed like the choice is always a SUV. Whenever I ask them why a SUV, even though they usually prefer sleek sedans, the answer is always "my wife/girlfriend says she feels safer in a big, tall car", which mostly makes sense as throughout history, females' reproductive and nesting choices have had a major impact on shaping male behavior and various aspects of society like real-estate and now car choices.
It's sad that this kickstarted what is basically an arms race on the road since nobody feels safe anymore driving their kids in the traditional European compact car when everyone else is now in big heavy SUVs with poor visibility and easily distracted by their phones or infotainment touch-screens so this fear drives them to one-up their "competition" with bigger and heavier cars to make sure their kids have a perceived higher safety in case on an accident.
> in the EU a _lot_ of people think that driving a SUV without needing the off-road capabilities is at least egoistic if not outright asocial.
In general I used to believe this (in the US) as well, but now everyone and their grandmother has one, so it's kinda hard to paint everyone with that broad a brush. (Attempting to do so is itself egoistic and asocial.)
> people insisting on driving a SUV without a need for it are using it like an armor they ware because they are afraid of the outside world.
It's an arms race. If everyone is driving an SUV except you, and you get into a crash, you're more likely to get more hurt than if you'd been driving an SUV as well. So more people drive SUVs, which encourages more people with a lean toward that mindset to drive them, and so on.
Another driver (heh) of the SUV surge was children. In the 80s and 90s, many US families turned to minivans when they'd have a couple kids. Easier to load and unload the children, more space to carry things. But minivans were uncool and became associated with the boring suburban soccer mom/dad (especially men hated this, of course; driving around in a minivan was emasculating). SUVs brought most of the same benefits: extra cargo space, sometimes an extra row of seats, and easier to load and unload the children. And they were cool! I mean, "SUV" has "sport" right there in the name! Sports are cool!
SUVs also handle a bit better than minivans, which are often just lumbering box-vehicles. Sure, an SUV usually doesn't handle as well as a sedan or coupe, but it's a decent middle ground for people who believe a sedan doesn't suit their needs.
Another reason -- possibly the primary initial reason -- is profit-driven marketing. I don't know if it's still the case, but there was a loophole in US vehicle emissions laws that would allow for less-stringent emissions standards past a certain vehicle size. So SUVs allowed manufacturers to spend less money on increasing fuel efficiency and reducing emissions, and, to boot, also sell the vehicles at a higher price. So they manufactured demand with marketing that glorified the high "command seating position" that you get with vehicles like SUVs, and of course everyone ate that up. This highlights why I'd love for all advertising to be illegal: it's just emotional manipulation to get people to buy things they don't need.
I don't personally like the proliferation of SUVs myself (and drive a 4-seater, AWD coupe, myself, and drive it in heavy snow just fine), but I perfectly understand why it's a thing, and have stopped bothering to begrudge people for their choices in this regard.
>“I want a car that will ‘win’ if I get in an accident”
That's not at all an American exclusive. I live in Europe and everyone parrots the same line when they justify why they're getting a SUV even though they live in the city and never go off-roading.
A work colleagues who just got a baby recently told me he had to get a SUV even though he wanted a sedan because his wife pushed for the SUV with the same argument: "I feel safer in one." What's a guy to do? Do you want to risk for your wife and child to "feel unsafe" because you're too cheap to buy your family a SUV? Same with my cousin, she just got a baby and pushed her husband to get a SUV for the same reason, so I'm definitely seeing a pattern in my circles as well as on the streets.
The estate/station wagon and the mini-van were the traditional vehicle of the family here but now SUVs and the jacked up cross-over abominations are flying off the shelves here. Just look at Volvo's UK line-up[1], it's 8 SUVs and 1 crossover. WTF?!
Justified or not, consumers are noticing this arms race, and manufacturers are more than happy to market and sell you bigger and taller cars for you to "feel safer" in, if you've got the cash.
> Just look around you. How often do you see families where the man is driving the big fancy SUV and the woman is driving the smaller "second" car?
Maybe it's a regional thing, but around here the big SUV replaced the minivan as a "women's car". I hear safety (i.e. wanting to "win" in a crash, often phrased exactly like that) as a common reason for the choice.
Their husband will drive a similarly-huge truck, usually.
SUV's are very popular among women - 43% of buyers. The industry research says that women feel safer driving them - the size makes them feel more protected, and the ride height lets them see the road much better. (Lest it go unsaid, women are on average less tall than men)
These are the reasons my wife cites preferring her Honda Pilot to her previous cars.
>The SUV fascination is not driven by some desire to have a safer vehicle either...
That is absolutely part of it. It's only one reason among many (style, higher sitting position, emissions regulations, etc) but I often hear people make comments about smaller cars being unsafe, or push others to buy an SUV when they have kids "for their safety."
> I think people delude themselves into thinking they're purchasing an SUV to...travel with kids...
There has been a big change in the US that pushed many families to select SUV's and bigger cars in general: child seats became mandatory. These were rare during the 70's and earlier. They take up quite a lot of space when rear-facing (and if you use them strictly according to guidelines, they will be installed rear-facing for a very big part of their service life).
During the 70's it wasn't unusual to see families cramming groceries and shopping items in between where their children sat in the car, and anywhere else the items would fit, for that matter; you can't do that any longer, and in fact higher child safety awareness in cars even discourages that practice because of the possibility those items become missiles during an accident.
Nor is this practice recommended for where the adults sit. So a lot of families end up going with SUV's or minivans (why station wagons are not picked is another tragic story), to have enough to safely carry passengers, shopping, and sports/activity gear.
So yes, you can advocate for smaller cars, but you should be up front about the trade-off. Either more trips are made, wasting time, money and fuel, and/or safety is compromised, and/or lifestyles are drastically altered. To sell these compromises, you have to offer a benefit more compelling than "catastrophic outcome that doesn't affect you now might be averted". I'm not saying we shouldn't adopt small cars (I bike most days myself), I'm laying out the reality on the ground to convince the mass of developed world citizens to adopt them.
>Can't figure out why folks in Suburbia with one or two kids would choose an SUV. I much prefer my Subaru, but it's mostly relegated to date nights at this point in my life.
Station wagons and minivans are being shelved by auto-manufacturers because environmental and safety regulations have a blind spot for "light trucks" which SUVs fall under. The solution to this problem is to either tighten the regulations around SUVs or loosen the regulations around cars.
In my experience in America, women prefer huge SUVs while men prefer more sporty cars, or trucks. Huge SUVs are slightly feminine because they're good for getting the kids to soccer practice. SUVs ate the market for vans, another vehicle good for moving a bunch of kids around.
That's just my observations. The data might say otherwise.
> Can't figure out why folks in Suburbia with one or two kids would choose an SUV
It’s a mixture of status and an erroneous belief that people are going to be performing the tasks that necessitate an SUV more often than they actually will. Many also have a preference for sitting high (because it makes them feel powerful maybe?) and think SUVs are safer (which they are for their occupants, but to the detriment of everyone else on the road). But mostly status.
Minivans and estate cars aren’t “cool” in the US so people won’t consider them despite the fact that they frequently serve drivers' use cases better in non-rural areas.
Heavy marketing was done to make them popular, and once they reached a certain threshold, their size created an arms race, since they blocked visibility for everyone not also in an SUV.
>The rest of the world can fit 4 people, a dog and their stuff in a normal sedan or station wagon.
The demographics who are doing most of the complaining about the proliferation of big vehicles generally wouldn't be caught dead doing this (let alone doing it regularly) because it's not acceptable for people of their means if you catch my drift.
They also tend to complain and complain and complain about people buying trucks and SUVs they "don't need" and then the nanosecond they see someone doing "truck stuff" with a station wagon or crossover they're hand wringing about safety and margin for error.
Basically this is a social norms problem and the groups complaining about it are the ones who created the mess.
> and the ride height lets them see the road much better.
Ah... and then everyone will get a SUV with similar mentality and then we will get SUV-extra even higher and "sturdier" to feel even safer?
FFS... world is not hostile, riding in compact city-car is not harmful. At best it's the mentality that "everything outside wants to kill me" o_O Get a tank maybe?
I think it's even more toxic than that: it's an arms race. I have known people who have told me in so many words that they bought SUVs primarily so they could see around/over all the other SUVs already out there. Though they didn't say so, I'd guess they also feel like their odds of survival in a crash with one of those other SUVs when they're in one themselves vs. being in a regular car. (Maybe that's what you were getting at with your "perceived safety" point but "full size truck" is ambiguous.) Many people buy SUVs out of fear or its cousin insecurity, not because of any practical value it has over a sedan etc. In fact, just about every SUV owner I've known complains about terrible mileage, sometimes about difficulty getting in/out or poor ride characteristics as well. They feel they have to make those tradeoffs, mostly because others already did.
You think it's all dudes driving these things though? Surely yeah, that's the case for big stupid pickup trucks. But SUVs are driven by anxious Starbucks moms. "I need to feel safe." Hausfrauenpanzeren.
> Cars are getting too big; why are manufacturers pushing “crossovers” and SUVs on consumers and why are consumers buying them? I could write pages on this point alone.
I think this is partially a race to the bottom (or to the top, as it were).
When you're driving your low-riding sedan in traffic, if the car in front of you is an SUV, you can't see beyond it. If most cars become SUVs, you can't see two cars ahead almost ever. That's a crappy feeling - I for one feel less safe, less able to predict if an emergency stop is going to happen - so I'd be unconsciously nudged into buying a taller car myself.
> If they made roomier cars I’d be all for it, but they don’t.
I drive a full-sized Volvo wagon. I've also driven a full-sized Ford Taurus wagon. Plenty of room for two tall kids (my son is 6'4", my daughter is well on her way to 6'), and in the days of my Taurus, it would carry a child, a baby seat, a stroller, even a bicycle and a trailer.
Besides a thing about SUVs versus car form factors, I have test-driven Volvo's equivalent SUVs, and while they often claim similar cargo volume to the wagons, I find the wagon's long and low profile more useful for the kinds of things I tend to carry. Bikes are a lot easier in a wagon, in my experience.
YMMV.
Of course, there are F-150s and Chevy Suburbans and extra-long Escalades for those who absolutely, positively want to drive a truck.
Yep, this trend exploded almost everywhere in Europe and I think I found the answer to why. Lots of my male colleagues at work (devs in Europe) are married and have kids on the way and when discussions came at lunchtime about buying a new family car for taking the kids places it seemed like the choice is always a SUV. Whenever I ask them why a SUV, even though they usually prefer sleek sedans, the answer is always "my wife/girlfriend says she feels safer in a big, tall car", which mostly makes sense as throughout history, females' reproductive and nesting choices have had a major impact on shaping male behavior and various aspects of society like real-estate and now car choices.
It's sad that this kickstarted what is basically an arms race on the road since nobody feels safe anymore driving their kids in the traditional European compact car when everyone else is now in big heavy SUVs with poor visibility and easily distracted by their phones or infotainment touch-screens so this fear drives them to one-up their "competition" with bigger and heavier cars to make sure their kids have a perceived higher safety in case on an accident.
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