Sales of the Ford Ranger are up 42% in January. The 1.87-metre tall 4×4 ute has been Australia’s top-selling car for a while now, and the number of them on the road keeps rising.
But the Ford Ranger is teensy-weensy next to the Chevrolet Silverado. That’s the big ute offering from General Motors ever since it closed down the Holden brand. The Silverado is 1.91 metres tall, more than two metres wide and nearly six metres long. Sales rose 215% in January.
This is what one looked like trying to squeeze into a parking space in January this year.
My head height is just above the bonnet line of the big Chevy. If it hit me while I was walking, I wouldn’t be rolling up the bonnet and windscreen. My neck would probably whiplash and then I’d be smacked back down on to the road.
By chance, a Ford Territory is parked next to the Silverado. That’s what used to count as a big family SUV (the Ford Territory was once among our top 10 bestselling cars), but by contrast it looks modest.
The RAM 1500 is bigger still than the Silverado, selling even more units. Sales were up 150% in January.
Sales of SUVs have been rising for ages. As consumers wanted something bigger than a big SUV, commercial ute sales began to rise. Now American-style pickups have arrived for those who find a standard 4×4 ute a bit on the petite side.
Sales of sedans and 4×2 utes are plummeting. The change in the flow of new cars will slowly change the composition of our car fleet. As old sedans retire, more and more cars on the road will be enormous.
If you like small cars, bad luck. It will soon make as much sense to buy a Hyundai Getz as to push yourself around on a skateboard. You won’t be able to see anything in traffic and will be destroyed mercilessly in a two-car accident.
If you care about your safety and comfort in traffic, the choices of other people matter. This is where the pandemic analogy comes in: big cars are contagious. If others have big cars, being in a small car is less safe, and offers much less visibility.
You might want to hop into your beautiful restored Volkswagen Beetle, but you’ll have a chassis eye-view of the road if you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And if your small car is hit by a big car, you will be far worse off.
ANCAP ratings determine how a car performs compared with others in its class. It says little about how it will perform compared with other types, and certainly not if it is hit by the median car on the road. So while ANCAP hands out five-star ratings to little cars like a Suzuki Swift or Audi A1, that doesn’t mean their drivers survive in a crash. Indeed, light cars have the lowest crashworthiness in a Monash University study, with an injury risk of 23%, compared with 14% for the most crashworthy vehicle, a large SUV (utes are close behind).
Of course, the chance of hurting someone else runs in the opposite direction. Monash also measures “aggressivity”, and on that characteristic, light cars are best, with the lowest chance of hurting another person in a crash. Large SUVs are worst and, again, utes are close behind.
When Monash balances out the crashworthiness and aggressivity to find a car that protects its occupants best without hurting other road users, medium cars and medium SUVs are best. Utes, vans and light cars are the worst.
Is it any surprise that our road deaths are creeping up (by 5% in 2022 to the highest level in five years, including pedestrian deaths up 22%) as our cars become bigger?
The point here is that the safety of Australia’s car fleet is deteriorating, without any oversight. There’s no debate or discussion about this, just a mindless drift driven by big car companies.
There’s no policy trying to reverse the surge to bigger and bigger cars. All there are are limits on the maximum height (4.3 metres), width (2.5 metres) and weight (4.5 tonnes, loaded) of a vehicle before it counts as a heavy vehicle and needs a special registration and licence. So there’s nothing to stop them from getting taller, wider and longer except the dimensions of shopping centre car parks. Expect new shopping centres to have much bigger car spaces.
There is no public debate on the topic of whether we should be supersizing our cars, and no public policy measures, so the outcomes here are consumer-led. Vote with your purchase or get left behind. The big cars are here.
Is your car the tiny one between two monsters? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Thanks for pointing this out it is gross, other people and efficiency don’t get a look in this is a good analogy of Neoliberalism, it is not about the community or a sense of responsibility concerning the environment.
Yes. Thatcher summed it up nicely with her remark denying there is any such thing as society. It’s all just individuals. It’s analagous to a theatre or cinema where all the audience are stting down and all, or nearly all, have a decent view. Then some of the audience stand up so they have a great view, but nobody behind them can see unless they stand up too. Soon all the audience is standing. Then some of them climb on the seats, so everyone stands on the seats. Nobody has a better view than before, they are all worse off, anybody who tries to remain seated can see nothing, but who’s going to make them all sit down? With a neoliberal mindset, telling, or even suggesting, everyone to sit down is nanny state evil socialist oppression and the sky will fall in.
There is another aspect to this these big utes are designed to be pretty easy to service and those parts are cheap and the rest have good longevity, it sounds like what our car industry had to take into account for Aussie conditions doesn’t it?
We are crying ot for a decent homegrown car industry that is partially funded with taxes like many other countries do, it has to do with identity and travelling , high stakes for s and a big vote winner. But can an ostensibly Neoliberal government get their heads around practical egalitarian vehicles with all the Neolib noise and pressure… hmm at this stage I doubt it
Yeah… let’s not worry about what the extra weight is doing to our road system.
Trucks damage roads not utes.
The whole point is that these are called/classified as ‘utes’ whereas they are really ‘trucks’.
How many 4X4 dual cab ‘utes’ weigh less than 2.2T
Aren’t monster utes breeding because there’s a tax incentive for tradies to upgrade every 2 years or so? There was a recent article pointing out these things cost as much as a Porche!!
Add in the sheer number of tradies employed continuously tearing down and rebuilding the capitals and it all makes sense.
In other countries tradies drive “white vans” – you hardly see a ute in UK / Europe.
I have relatives who drive these monsters – all former tradies – climate change deniers, LNP voters etc…
Yes, there is, Nick- but apparently I’m the problem because I want to be able to see round and over them and get my elderly mother and clients with disabilities home alive and in one piece.
It seems I buy mud in a spray can and live in a prestigious suburb, too. In actual fact I live in a rented dog box with no public transport and a 15 minute drive to the nearest shop.
I can only surmise a lot of the scoffing commentators here live in well serviced areas, where they’re not competing for road space with trucks and tradies on quite the same scale.
Either that, or sticking to their small vehicles, unable to see a damn thing, is the hill they’ve chosen to die on, scoffing at those of us who went for safety because we have to drive and because somebody else’s tax breaks and lack of government regulation forced us to with their last breath.
Safety for you, but not pedestrians or vulnerable road users obviously.
How does your elderly mother even get into it?
Actually my elderly mother (85) finds it easier to get in and out of my Prado (which is required for caravan towing) than my usual drive of a Mazda 6 wagon, which is hard for her to get down into and up out of.
Nothing but contempt for the hollowed-out souls who buy these monstrosities.
“But I’m not a monstrosity. I’ve got “kids on board” and their lives take precedence over yours!”
Not only do they have ‘kids on board’ when it suits, they also ‘need’ those behemoths for ‘going off-road in the bush’. As if that were some kind of right or entitlement.
A good business idea would be to provide a ‘spay on’ mud service for the wealthy 4×4 owners in prestigious suburbs. An additional extra, if expensive, would be tastefully decorative insect bodies for the windscreen, so that the neighbours and drivers of puny cars could believe you were a rugged bush type and not some poseur.
I thought that mud was already available in a spray can from Super Cheap?
In the UK this is often referred to as the ‘Chelsea tractor’. Sure enough, that wealthy inner London borough, not noted for its expanses of challenging off-road terrain, is inundated with 4x4s.
They’re Toorak Tractors here.
And the people who drive them “Toorak Tractor Benefactors”
My family has an Everest. I would have rathered a VW Caddy (Leisure Activity Vehicle) as it carries more and has more space, despite being smaller, but fashion dictated my spouse insisting on the Everest. It’s a pain in the arse to load due to its height.
And yet my mum did fine with three kids in a 79 Corolla.
I didn’t realise there were so many small dicks around.
The line of tall parked vehicles by street kerbs makes every corner a blind corner. Trying to turn right is increasingly risky due to reduced visibility and people preferring to play chicken over slowing to allow cross-traffic.
Or even reversing out of a car space at a shopping center. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
By getting a bigger car than yours, the Joneses are making sure that their bad driving kills your family rather than theirs. That’s war. We could limit the arms race in vehicles by taxing them in proportion to their mass. After all, it is the mass of the bigger car that punches its way through the flimsier shell of your more modest car.
Yes, and if road taxes are supposed to pay for roads it again makes sense to tax based on mass, because it is generally found in research that the wear a vehicle does to the road varies with the fourth power of its mass, e.g. when a vehicle is twice as heavy as another it will do sixteen times as much damage to the road during the same journey.
Add an uptick in tax for each 10cm in height or width greater than a sedan. The tall and wide vehicles negatively impact safe driving by small vehicles too. When we cannot see through them, we miss school zone signs and oncoming traffic.
Which is why it’s always amusing to me when an aggro driver rails at me on my bicycle for not paying to use the road like they do through the fuel excise. This happens only rarely as I live in the city and am usually passing between lanes of cars stuck in traffic.
Incidentally, the best visibility is from a bicycle. Necessary as cyclists have to anticipate the moves of all the vehicles in their immediate vicinity, especially as so many drivers don’t bother to indicate.
That problem was noted back in the 1930s by Winston Churchill, who insisted that car owners pay a motor vehicle tax, not a road tax, for the privilege of putting their vehicles on the road; because if it was called a road tax the ones that paid it would falsely presume they therefore owned the road.