Australia is under attack from an invasive species: absolutely massive trucks. The epitome of the trend is the enormous RAM 3500 and its obese American stablemates, the RAM 2500 and RAM 1500. The Chevrolet Silverado is an equally obscene American lump. These are sold as passenger cars but their scale resembles a bus or truck.
Even before the American trucks landed on our streets, jutting out over the edge of the parking bay and blocking footpaths, we had swung to big utes. Hilux and Ranger have been battling it out for supremacy since 2018, as the next chart shows.
What’s interesting is to look even earlier. We weren’t always obsessed with massive utes. In fact, the biggest-selling cars in this country were, for several years, petite. We drove hatchbacks.
What was going on? If you look at the following chart you get a hint of it. Fuel rose to $1.50 a litre in 2011 and stayed there. We fled from big, thirsty family cars to smaller, more frugal ones. Then petrol prices slumped in 2015, and after a bit of a lag, the mega utes came onto the scene.
This raises a possibility. The current terrifying rise in fuel prices could easily lead to another changing of the guard. Honestly, who wants to buy a three-tonne truck when the price of diesel is $2.249 a litre?
We may even be able to see something like this happening already. Sales of light commercial vehicles and utes are up only 0.4% this year, even as the overall vehicle market is up 9.9%. That means they’re a shrinking part of the market. Meanwhile small and medium SUVs are growing their share of the market very quickly.
The pivot
If fuel prices remain high, we could see a pivot away from big heavy cars and back to smaller ones. Not necessarily hatchbacks. Even if we all went back to medium SUVs that would be a big improvement.
Such a change won’t necessarily happen immediately. Consumer behaviour is herd-like. One reason to buy a RAM is because Andrew from work has a RAM. Also, consumers and suppliers must dance a tango. Toyota will turn some production lines back to Corollas and Camrys if they sense demand rising, but that will take time.
All this is without even talking about the rise in electric vehicles, which are in the ascendancy and provide some refuge from high fuel prices, albeit not total refuge because electricity prices are high too!
Why be so mean to big cars?
Big cars are a mix of good and bad for their owners. For everyone else, they’re just bad. Which is the exact sort of thing we should regulate.
- If a big car crashes into a small car, the small car occupants are more likely to die because of the high centre of mass and the mass differential, while the driver of the big car probably lives.
- Big cars have worse visibility around them at low speed.
- Big cars block everyone else’s view in traffic, creating an arms race where if you’d like to gain some situational awareness on the road, you too need a big car.
- Big cars kill pedestrians and cyclists at higher rates.
- Big cars don’t fit in car parks easily.
- Big cars do more damage to road surfaces.
- Big cars emit more pollution, usually.
It will always be easier to discourage big cars in a period where consumers are swinging away from them anyway. It’s better to nudge people in the direction they’re headed already.
So how do we tax big cars to encourage consumers to buy smaller ones? The answer is to do what Europe does.
France brought in a weight tax in 2020, whacking vehicles over 1,800kg with an extra tax of €10 for every kilo over the threshold. A similar tax in Australia would add about $7,250 to the price of a RAM 1500, which weighs 2,500 kg, and $3,000 to the price of a Hilux, which weighs 2,100kg. Enough to deter their purchase perhaps? Certainly enough to slow down the pace of our arms race towards ever larger vehicles.
The rush to EVs is moving us towards smaller vehicles, but not necessarily lighter ones. An EV battery is a very heavy thing. This means EVs in an accident deliver a lot of force to the thing they crash into, and have longer stopping distances. It also means EVs generate a lot of tyre wear. And as car engines become cleaner but cars become heavier, tyre particles are a significant part of the air pollution from traffic.
EVs struggle with wind resistance at speed, so most EVs are not tall. But they can be very heavy. And what’s more, to make EVs seem cool and expand the segment, many brands are introducing big electric trucks. Tesla has its CyberTruck and Ford is bringing in the Ford F-150 Lightning, available with a battery of up to 131kWh and a weight of 2,800kg.
The EV tax introduced in Victoria could come in handy here. The tax of 2.8 cents per kilometre just needs to be discounted for lighter vehicles and, boom, you’ve got a structure that encourages buying a lighter car. Which is exactly the sort of behaviour we should be encouraging.
Are you sick of seeing big utes and American-style trucks on our roads? Have you embraced the massive car craze? Or are you looking to transition to an electric vehicle? Let us know your thoughts 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.
We’ll have won the war on massive trucks and utes when we’ve stopped the insanity that permits such things to exist in the first place.
And stopped the accelerated write-off.
you wouldn’t have anything in the supermarkets or shops to buy if you declare war on large vehicles!
Pretty sure that there were well stocked shops a tad before vehicular behemoths began crumbling the streets and intimidating other road users.
Perhaps commerce could adapt to smaller payloads?
There is a longstanding rule of thumb which can be used to estimate the amount of road surface damage done by vehicles of different weight. Basically, it is the ratio of the heavier vehicle to the lighter vehicle, raised to the power 4 (How Much Damage Do Heavy Trucks Do to Our Roads? | Inside Science).
So, for example, to work out how much more damage a 2-ton vehicle does than a 1-ton, it is:
2x2x2x2 = 16 times as much.
If we are talking about a 3-ton vehicle. it is:
3x3x3x3 = 81 times as much.
Yet, as it stands, we all contribute to road repairs via our tax dollars and other imposts, regardless of the weight of the vehicle we are driving.
I think there is a fair argument for having some kind of weight tax on vehicles.
The non-commercial ones, at least. Can you imagine if the same approach was applied to eighteen-wheelers? They’d be taxed off the roads and we would all have to revert to rail to transport goods.
(Oh, and a 100 kg rider/bicycle causes
1/10x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 = 1/10,000 times as much damage as a 1-ton vehicle.)
I’m sure the people with oversized vehicles they drive everywhere has a lot of overlap with the people complaining about the poor condition of local roads.
More people driving heavier vehicles will mean more broken pavement and councils that can’t afford to repair their local roads. Roads which survived fine in the 90s are getting pummeled to death 30 years later.
I wonder in what State driving on pavements is allowed ? It appears to me that small local roads which haven’t seen a truck have more pot holes than the roads used by trucks
Licence fees in WA are based on weight.
A big caravan or boat needs a big heavy tow vehicle. So should people owning caravans be forced to also own a small car as well? It’s of little use to complain about the result of a policy. Complain about the policy.
Because of the increasingly large trucks these days, the amount of freight carried by rail Melb-Sydney is less than 5% of the total.
Rail only uses a third of the fuel per tonne/kilometre and has to pay full track access charges whilst trucks just pay rego. It’s no surprise that roads are deteriorating so much because of the huge axle weights on them. But rail freight seems to be a complete orphan in terms of tangible support from Government to effect modal change.
Yes – but never seen rail deliver goods to the business door – so it is more logical to use trucks point to point without double , triple , quadruple handling
Very few ocean going ships “…deliver goods to the business door…” which is why there are things called ports.
These tend to have wharves where cargo is transferred to drier forms of carriage – even the 2 at Port Botany, NTAL & CTAL (once owned by Patricks of malign memory) which were designed for HGVs to pick up directlyhave rail links, now rusty through disuse, which connected to what was once the main sidings near White Bay.
True but that’s why inter-modal centres exist. Trains do the long haul taking a couple of dozen B-doubles off the highways per train and the loads are reorganised for local delivery by truck. The irony is that there are truck freight interchanges that do the same thing for interstate truck loads and containers. There is in reality little need for interstate long haul trucking.
Tax them out of existence
You will be waiting a long time for our governments to do anything that might upset some of their voters. They have been pussy footing around re fuel standards for years. As for tax lurks, they love them.
How about doing something about the crazed view of dominance and hyper-masculinity (whether actual or sublimated) that underpins this monster worship? And provide, faster than at the current glacial pace, a nation-wide network of user-friendly recharging stations.
Important, as evidence shows in Europe economics does the job of faster transition to EVs and renewable sources, with decline in emissions; locally we have government policies and support for low fuel and vehicle emission standards, to keep fossil fuel prices lower.
why do people compare Australia to
Europe- which has nothing in common geographically – we should be comparing ourselves to USA , Russia, South American countries – large land masses – not Europe – whose only legacy in the last century has been 2 World Wars – which Australia, USA , India and South Africans had to sort out for them.
Muddying the water with a personal anecdote about ‘Europe’ deflecting from climate science, fossil fuels & falling costs of renewable sources?
Reality that some people in Australia have is that we should follow the influence of far away Anglosphere of US & UK; that latter state used to be part of the EU, a massive joined up land mass with Schengen Zone mobility?
More to the point, those of British/Irish heritage, according to the last census, are now down to 54%, kept up no doubt in regions vs. urban areas, as we are becoming more Eurasian nowadays.
Ridiculous! – Current demographic and ethnic composition are totally OFF the point! As is the weird assertion that ‘all the commentators ‘ must be Yes voters! Is Desmond for real or is it just a wind up/piss take?? If Desmond exists, he is the problem!
Our large land mass average distance per trip is lower than Norway, we shouldn’t worry about EV range anxiety and we don’t need monster trucks, Oz is one of the most urbanised countries on the planet
About 30 years ago I worked with a fellow in Warwick Queensland who used a Land Cruiser with a big bullbar at the front as his town/family car – never went out bush or on the beach with it.
I asked him why he drove that and not a smaller car, and he said “to make sure my family is safe when we’re out on the road”.
I asked him “what about other road users” to which he replied ” my only concern is the safety of my family”
Until he got hit by a semi-trailer with a bull bar. 😉
Those d0uchebags are everywhere.