[Tom_77]

Interesting piece in The Guardian about SUVs.

[quote]

Sold as a means of escape from the concrete realities of the modern world, a symbol of individualism and the pioneer spirit, the SUV represents instead a uniform kind of selfishness, a collective indifference to community to which, alas, we are all more or less prone.

[/quote]

 

Topic

[hawkinspeter]

I was under the impression

I was under the impression that SUVs became popular in the U.S. as they overly tax small vans (possibly due to them being imported) and so SUVs exploit a loophole of being like a van, but not taxed like one. However, outside of the U.S., small vans are better in just about every way than an SUV if you want to shift stuff around – probably not as good for signalling your wealth status though which is probably the only reason that people want them over here.

[BalladOfStruth]

bikes wrote:

bikes wrote:

A big car tax might incentivize other solutions though.

Maybe. I’m just pointing out the issues that I can see with such a scheme. I’ve said throughout this thread that almost no one needs an SUV, but some people actually do, and if you’re going to tackle the influx of big SUVs you do need to be careful of how you go about it.

 

bikes wrote:

At the very least, it might make you buy the lighter / smaller 4×4. You might choose to spend more on making your driveway more manageable, or whatever the problem is, rather than on a big vehicle.

A few things I’ll say to this in no particular order are:

Proper 4x4s that you can get equipment/tools/a family in (so, not silly FWD crossovers that are just not capable off-road) don’t really get that small – the only thing I can think of is the Jimny, which is basically a two-seater with no luggage space which has been discontinued in the UK. So, the smallest vehicle that can do this sort of terrain might actually still be quite big.

Sorting out a drive/track is a little more expensive than you might think. We have a section of our drive towards the top where it’s still “ours” but others have right-of-access on it. This means that there are tractors being driven over it all day and it’s in a right state. We’ve had people out to give us a quote on soring this section out – as it turns out, leveling it, digging channels, adding drainage, adding a camber (so the water goes into the dranage), adding a substrate, and properly tarmacking it would cost nearly £300k. So were just going to try and level it ourselves and pour some gravel on it.

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone who lives in the countryside is a tweed-clad millionaire. Most people are just working-class who’s families have been here for generations. Saying to these people “hey, that old beater 4×4 you have, which is just about the only thing that will get down your drive/shared lane in the winter, is now going to cost you 15-20% of your annual income in tax”, is just going to utterly screw them over. Bearing in mind that these people can be 30 miles from the nearest population centre with available employment and there is no public transport of any sort. This is the same reason I’m adamantly against LVT whenever it gets brought up – you can have 20 acres out here and be poor as dirt, and if you sold it all, you couldn’t afford a studio flat in London.

The sort of people buying luxury SUVs (and even the non-luxury ones – you can spend like £70,000 on some Korean Family SUVs now) aren’t going to blink at £5k in additional VED – especially the sort who’ve just spend £200k on a Range Rover/Bently/Urus/etc. So, the “tax them” off the road approach might not even solve the problem in urban areas in the first place.

 

Personally, I think it’s fairer to regulate them off the road with exemptions that you can apply for if you live/work somewhere remote/hard to get to.

bikes wrote:

At the moment there seems to be the opposite incentive, eg the proliferation of pick up trucks. These can be written off as a business expense but then they’re clearly being used for a lot of driving with no tools or materials in them and on normal roads. In fact, I’ve NEVER seen one with anything in the bed! And there are a lot in my area. I have seen them parked up on the pavement completely blocking the way plenty of times though.

That I fully agree with. They need to get rid of the whole notion of a pickup counting as a van and being a tax write off.

[Left_is_for_Losers]

bikes wrote:

bikes wrote:

I agree with the tax by weight idea.

Excellent idea, that will be one way of relieving electric car owners of their saved cash from reduced taxed EV’s and saved fuel costs. I’m all for that. 

[bikes]

I agree with the tax by
I agree with the tax by weight idea. But why not councils and parking permits as well though? If one car takes up 1.5x the amount of space, why not charge more? And also, aren’t local councils responsible for road repair budgets, so they would be keen to minimize the expense that heavy cars cost them?

[bikes]

A big car tax might
A big car tax might incentivize other solutions though. At the very least, it might make you buy the lighter / smaller 4×4. You might choose to spend more on making your driveway more manageable, or whatever the problem is, rather than on a big vehicle.

At the moment there seems to be the opposite incentive, eg the proliferation of pick up trucks. These can be written off as a business expense but then they’re clearly being used for a lot of driving with no tools or materials in them and on normal roads. In fact, I’ve NEVER seen one with anything in the bed! And there are a lot in my area. I have seen them parked up on the pavement completely blocking the way plenty of times though.

[BalladOfStruth]

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

And it’s about peoples perception – higher up =  better sight lines and so on. 

Ehh maybe, but being higher up and being able to see over other cars is only a benefit until everyone else has an SUV. Also, they get this “far away” visibility by trading visibility of what’s close around you. It’s much more difficult to see what’s immediatley around an SUV, especially behind – I drove a freind’s XC40 the other week, and when reversing, the nearest ground you could see was miles away – like the other side of the road to the car-park I was in. You could have half a playground of kids behind you and you’d never know – and that’s not even a big SUV.

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

SUV’s are categorically more safe though, whether that’s down to the size or whatever, the end line is that they are more safe, and some data to back this up:

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/latest-driver-death-rates-highlight-dangers-of-muscle-cars

7 out of the top 10, and the majority in the safest cars are SUV’s 

Firstly, that’s a US article so it’s bringing their absolute leviathans into the equation (an Escalade is actually bigger than a Sherman tank). Secondly, the article literally concedes the point I made above that the saloon cars are only “less safe” because they’re being hit by large SUVs – it even says that “Seven of the 20 vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates are large or very large pickups, and four more are midsize SUVs”. That’s not a probelm that SUVs are solving, it’s a problem that SUV’s are creating.

Somone on Reddit the other day posted a picture of a Hyundai i40 next to some new GMC SUV thing (no idea what model), and the bonnet of the SUV was actually higher than the roof of the Hyundai. Of course the Hyundai would come off worse in a crash between those two – that doesn’t mean the Hyundai is inherantly “unsafe”, it means that the SUV is an utter liability and it shouldn’t exist. An SUV would come off worse if it was hit by a lorry – does that mean SUVs are unsafe and we should all be driving articulated HGVs?

As for your point about SUVs being here to stay – unfortunately, you’re probably not wrong. They’re an unjustifiable menace, but I don’t see any of the empty-suits in Government doing anything about them any time soon. I’m just saying that they’re not here for any good reason. They’re not better or more practical than normal cars – they actually worse, almost nobody can reasonably justify owning one, and we could easily regulate them out of existence without affecting anyone’s quality of life.  

[Left_is_for_Losers]

I don’t disagree with your

I don’t disagree with your points, I think If i was the Penguin below, I would have gone for a Skoda Superb, so much space and affordable and practical too. But the truth is, SUV’s are here to stay. 

And it’s about peoples perception – higher up =  better sight lines and so on. 

SUV’s are categorically more safe though, whether that’s down to the size or whatever, the end line is that they are more safe, and some data to back this up:

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/latest-driver-death-rates-highlight-dangers-of-muscle-cars

7 out of the top 10, and the majority in the safest cars are SUV’s 

[BalladOfStruth]

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

SUV’s will also never die due to other features

Such as?

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

popular amongst slightly older people for visibility (like being higher up)

SUVs are well-documented for having significantly worse visibility than lower cars – hence the Americans constantly running over their own kids in them.

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

more space

SUVs are famous for having less space than the equivalent model car. The Tiguan feels noticably more cramped than the Golf, the X3 is noticably more cramped than the 3 Series, etc. And as I’ve pointed out below, they fail in luggage capacity too with multiple compact estates shitting all over an alarmingly large SUV for boot volume.

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

feeling more safe

That’s dubious at best – it used to be that SUVs would almost always roll in even the most minor crashes due to the higher centre-of-gravity (and the amount of videos I’ve seen of ’70-’73 plate Range Rovers upside-down in London recently doesn’t make me think that’s changed much). SUVs are only percieved as more safe because you’re more likely to be hit by an SUV these days. You can hardly commend something for solving a problem that it caused in the first place.

An SUV is a worse car than the equivalent estate in every concievable way – it’s bigger, heavier, less spacious, less nice to drive, cramped, difficult to see out of, dangerous, more expensive to buy, and more expensive to run.

SUVs are popular for the same reason that those stupid-as-fuck low-crotch trousers (that made it almost impossible to walk) were a few years back – they’re fashionable. All of this extra damage, extra danger, extra pollution, and extra space being taken up is purely down to vanity not necessity.

[Left_is_for_Losers]

SUV’s will also never die due

SUV’s will also never die due to other features, popular amongst slightly older people for visibility (like being higher up) more space, and the feeling of feeling more safe is something people also like. 

Like it or not, SUV’s arent going away, they are the new norm. 

[Left_is_for_Losers]

mark1a wrote:

Just my $0.02, you exclude VW on the grounds of reliability but would’ve considered Skoda? 

The VW family is generally considered one of the most reliable, and certainly fairly easy to fix due to the crossover of parts etc. 

[BalladOfStruth]

FlyingPenguin wrote:

No, they still exist, but they are getting rarer and from brands that I trust the options just weren’t there.  From your list I would immediately exclude about half of it because I don’t trust them.  Peugeot, Vauxhall, MG, VW.  They will never get my money because I just don’t regard them as reliable brands.  I’m not buying shit.

 

 

mark1a wrote:

Just my $0.02, you exclude VW on the grounds of reliability but would’ve considered Skoda? You know they’re basically the same platforms?

Yeah – not criticising how you’ve spent your own money, but I can’t help but notice a few flaws in the logic here. The first post essentially said there are no family estates anymore so the SUV was the only option – I thought of 28 off the top of my head and I will have missed some.

Now you’re arbitrarily writing off half of the brands and doesn’t look like this is based on research. For example, you said that the VW Passat is “shit” and “unreliable” (despite it scoring 96% in a reliability survey, compared to the Hyudai Tuscon’s 97%) and the Skoda Octavia would be worth more of a look – but they’re the same car underneath.

Again, the comments on load space don’t seem to be based on research – for example, the Ford Focus estate (a “small car with an estate back”) has a luggage capacity of 575 litres with the back seats up compared to the Tuscon’s 539. The Passat is 640, the Seat Leon (also an estate back on a “Golf-sized” hatchback) is 620, etc. I can’t be bothered to pull up the specs for each car on the list, but SUVs are generally pretty cramped inside as a fact of their form-factor. The only car smaller than the Focus on that list is the Mini, so I wouldn’t be surprised if every other car on that list can actually out-load the Hyundai.

Not wanting to look any further than the immediate area is your choice, but if I was going to drop *looks up the price of a Tuscon* £32,000 on something, I’d be happy to go to the next town over if it meant getting the most suitable car – last time I bought a new car, I was going 40-45 miles out to check out my options.

The insurance point is fair enough – the second list are all a little higher insurance group than the others (not excessively though – like 23-30). Some are comparable, such as some versions of the Audi A4 Avant being the same group as the Tuscon (19).

Like I said – you’ve look around and got what you want and that’s fine. But nothing you’ve written really suggests that it was the only option and you had to get an SUV.

[mark1a]

FlyingPenguin wrote:

No, they still exist, but they are getting rarer and from brands that I trust the options just weren’t there.  From your list I would immediately exclude about half of it because I don’t trust them.  Peugeot, Vauxhall, MG, VW.  They will never get my money because I just don’t regard them as reliable brands.  I’m not buying shit.

Others on the list fall down on the specifics of the interior and load space, the Clubman and Focus for example, which are small cars with estate backs rather than full size estates.  

Others just aren’t available locally to test drive, the MG, Leon and Swace for example, we’ve got dealers for most of the rest.

As for the second list, the brand and/or sporty nature makes them insurance liabilities, even if we can get them used.

To be fair, we probably could have given the Skodas more of a look in, but I don’t have the patience to make it a project at some point it became “what can we get that’s reliable and from a locally available brand that is within budget”, and the options are much narrower than they were 5-10 years ago, when I’d have had a whole heap of options from basically evey brand.

Just my $0.02, you exclude VW on the grounds of reliability but would’ve considered Skoda? You know they’re basically the same platforms? I have a VW Caddy van (with rear seats, windows, etc) it’s a 2017 LWB I’ve had from new and I’m keeping it for life now, it’s the perfect vehicle for rural transport, bike trips, family holidays (3600 miles of last chance easy European tour of FR/BE/NL/DE/CH/IT) with 4x people, luggage and bike. Cheap insurance, VED, servicing and apart from a battery problem fixed under warranty, has never been anything other than reliable. 

I like Hyundai too as it happens, the other car in the household is an Ioniq 5; best EV currently on the market IMO, and I had one of the first BMW i3’s back in 2014, no comparison really. 

[ktache]

No more new Volvo estates now

No more new Volvo estates now. Just their pointlessly huge vehicles now.

[FlyingPenguin]

No, they still exist, but

No, they still exist, but they are getting rarer and from brands that I trust the options just weren’t there.  From your list I would immediately exclude about half of it because I don’t trust them.  Peugeot, Vauxhall, MG, VW.  They will never get my money because I just don’t regard them as reliable brands.  I’m not buying shit.

Others on the list fall down on the specifics of the interior and load space, the Clubman and Focus for example, which are small cars with estate backs rather than full size estates.  

Others just aren’t available locally to test drive, the MG, Leon and Swace for example, we’ve got dealers for most of the rest.

As for the second list, the brand and/or sporty nature makes them insurance liabilities, even if we can get them used.

To be fair, we probably could have given the Skodas more of a look in, but I don’t have the patience to make it a project at some point it became “what can we get that’s reliable and from a locally available brand that is within budget”, and the options are much narrower than they were 5-10 years ago, when I’d have had a whole heap of options from basically evey brand.

[ktache]

By us, my brother and I.

By us, my brother and I.

[Author]

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