Should Adverts for SUVs be Banned?

Automologist MAC highlights a new campaign that wants to temper our love for big cars. 

What do you think? Should adverts for large highly-polluting SUVs be banned? In the UK, a new campaign is highlighting the increasing damage that is being done to British roads by the global trend for ever-larger personal vehicles.

Everywhere you go these days (I know with lockdown, none of us are really going that far but…) you will see an ever-increasing number of SUVs on the road. In good old Malaysia, even the two ‘budget’ car manufacturers, Proton and Perodua, both manufacture two variants each. But it is this rapid increase in the numbers that is going to jeopardise reaching climate targets that are really essential for our long-term future.

The New Weather Institute, which is a charitable think-tank that targets climate issues, believes that car brands are disproportionally promoting larger and more polluting SUVs, not so much because the public wants them but apparently because they make a higher profit margin on the more expensive end of the market.

Doing a trawl online, it really was possible to see any number of adverts for SUVs, but very few for EVs. SUVs now make up almost 40% of all new cars sold whilst electric variants less than 2%. Here is a scary statistic: almost 7% of the cars sold in the UK last year were too big to fit into a standard parking space.

The well-intentioned folks over at the New Weather Institute have drawn parallels on previous ad bans – they claimed that tobacco advertising was cancelled when we learnt how bad smoking was for public health so then why not adverts for SUVs now we know the damage cars are doing to the environment? Andrew Simms, who is the co-director of the Institute, believes “it is time to stop adverts that make the damage worse.” Going all out, he even invoked the pandemic in his thinking when he continued by saying, “In a pandemic-prone world, people need clean air and more space on towns and city streets.”

In fairness, largely due to fears of catching the virus, the public has eschewed public transportation of late and sales of bicycles have soared as commuters have renewed their love of what was once thought of as a bygone mode of transport to get to and fro work. The argument from the institute is that the oversized SUVs in congested urban settings is undermining the effort to reallocate public space away from cars and give it to pedestrians.

Of course, singling out SUVs is to a larger extent ignoring the advances the automobile-manufacturing industry has made to increase efficiency. The average cars across the fleet is now some 43% more efficient than twenty years ago. It is the public that has decided that they want the SUV due to aspirational issues and, well, just how damn good the new ones are to drive, and I am talking from personal preference here.

Still, if we cannot gradually convince the consumer that less is more, then how are we going to lower global emissions? Oh yeah, that’s right – get on your bike!