How big trucks and SUVs gobbled up the entire auto industry
How it started
When I was growing up in the Midwest, everyone I knew drove small cars. My dad had a light pink Volvo 240, my mom drove a Dodge Dart, and my grandmother had a 1988 Honda Accord — which would eventually become my first car. We lived in the suburbs, so almost no one drove a truck, but if they did it was something small like a Ford Ranger or Toyota Hilux.
Over time, those small cars were replaced by SUVs of increasing size. Today, anyone searching for anything smaller than a compact SUV will probably come up dry. Ford killed its sedan production in North America a number of years ago. GM took a little longer, but eventually, with the Chevy Malibu leaving the lineup in 2024, it got there as well.
The decisions, the companies argue, were a reflection of shifting customer preferences. Four in five cars sold in the United States last year were either SUVs or pickup trucks. That’s a far cry from the 1990s, when that number was closer to 25 percent of all sales. Americans just aren’t that into sedans anymore, preferring higher riding vehicles that confer a sense of safety and dominance over the road. Small cars were out; big ones — and often really big ones — were in.
How it’s going
But these big trucks and SUVs can be deadly. Vehicles with extra-tall hoods and blunt front ends are more likely to cause fatalities, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. There have been numerous studies and investigations examining how tall, flat-nosed trucks and SUVs are more likely to cause serious injury and death than smaller, shorter vehicles. Larger front ends mean pedestrians are more likely to suffer deadly blows to the head and torso. Higher clearances mean victims are more likely to get trapped underneath a speeding SUV instead of pushed onto the hood or off to the side. And front blind zones associated with large trucks and SUVs have contributed to the injury and death of hundreds of children across the country, studies have shown.
As Americans flocked to these dangerously tall and heavy vehicles, the pedestrian death rate soared: between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57 percent, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports. In 2022, 88 percent of pedestrian deaths occurred in single-vehicle crashes.
When confronted with these statistics, automakers usually point to the increasing use of technology in vehicles — cameras, sensors, blind-spot detection, automatic braking — to help reduce pedestrian deaths. But rarely do they address the role that vehicle design plays in crash fatalities. That’s because big trucks and SUVs are not only popular but also better moneymakers than smaller vehicles. SUVs have a profit margin that’s 10–20 percent higher than smaller cars because they command a higher price while costing only slightly more to manufacture.
“We’re providing the vehicles that consumers want, and playing to the strength of the company,” Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s then president for North America, told The New York Times in 2019.
What happens next
Many people have been sounding the alarm on this trend, notably David Zipper, senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and Verge contributor. In 2023, he wrote in Slate that the story of “car bloat” can be explained by “carmaker profit, shifting consumer preferences, and loophole-riddled auto regulations.”
Those regulations, in particular, came into focus late last year, a few weeks before the November election, when NHTSA, perhaps a bit too optimistically, released a proposal that would strike at the heart of car bloat. Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities — until now.
The rules would update the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), the government’s bible for everything that’s required in a new vehicle before it’s sold — from steering wheels to rearview mirrors — to set testing procedures to simulate head-to-hood impact, with the aim of reducing head injuries. If enacted, automakers will have to test their vehicles using crash test dummies representing adult and child pedestrians for the first time. NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year.
The proposal drew over 5,700 comments, the vast majority of them enthusiastic. But safety groups argue that the rule could have a limited impact, given the focus on the hoods of vehicles and not the front-end design or height. Still, expectations are low that anything will move forward. NHTSA lost about 4 percent of its staff as part of DOGE’s efforts to slash the federal workforce. And advocates I spoke to don’t expect any meaningful safety rulemaking to advance under the Trump administration. Rebecca Neal, a spokesperson for NHTSA, would only say that “the rulemaking is still active.”
Most Americans aren’t aware of the danger posed by these big, hulking vehicles. They think that by ascending into the driver’s seat of a three-row, 4,000-pound SUV, they are not only better protecting themselves, but also their family. Because after all, isn’t it other drivers that are the real problem?
By the way
- Few trends have been more damaging to the environment and public safety than the dramatic growth in the SUV and truck market in recent decades. Between 2010 and 2020, 65 million new SUVs hit the roads in America. Collectively those vehicles will pump about 4.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the next few decades — more planet-warming pollution than most nations have emitted throughout their entire history.
- Many experts point to the “SUV loophole” in tailpipe emission regulation as one source of this problem with car bloat. Passenger cars are subject to one set of emissions and mileage rules, and a broad class of vehicles called light trucks are subject to a different set. At the time these rules were written, SUVs barely existed and trucks were normally used by tradespeople. But over time, this loophole became more significant. Due to their more stringent regulations, small cars became more expensive to manufacture, while trucks and SUVs became cash cows.
- Vehicle design is only one piece in a large, complex puzzle to make roads safer. That includes lower speed limits, infrastructure improvements, and increased enforcement of traffic laws.
- Europe has already gone much further to protect pedestrians, enacting rules that would prevent many of the largest vehicles produced by US manufacturers from being sold on the continent.
- Some countries, like France, Norway, and the Netherlands, apply an added tax on heavier vehicles. Paris, in particular, uses weight taxes and higher parking fees to discourage drivers of big cars from entering the city.
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