This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on October 25, 2024. 

This is the second in a series of three articles looking at the ongoing trend in North America for ever bigger and taller pickups and SUVs, and some of the problems these pose both for human health and safety, and for the health of the planet. In this article we look at what has driven the trend, and what it means for the climate, the environment, and our cities. Part 1 is available here, and part 3 here. 

In March 2022, Lisa Roberts – a former journalist and NDP MLA in Nova Scotia – wrote an opinion piece for the erstwhile Atlantic Canadian Saltwire media network. Her piece was called ‘Trail of tragedy follows pickup trucks.’

In it, Roberts said she winced when she heard about yet another pickup truck striking a cyclist in Halifax, sending the cyclist to hospital with “life-threatening injuries.” That reminded her of two other collisions that “shattered families” the previous year, both involving a pickup truck colliding with a pedestrian or a smaller vehicle.

“Larger, heavier vehicles mean more serious injuries and not for those in the larger, heavier vehicle,” Roberts wrote. “And trucks have gotten larger without being more functional. My grandfather’s pickup truck, which hauled firewood regularly, was easier to get into and had a longer bed.”

“For the sake of our health and safety, we have to talk about trucks,” Roberts urged.

So far, it appears Roberts’ plea for a meaningful conversation about large pickups has gone largely unheeded in this part of Canada.

‘Inequality is bad for us’

For Roberts, the subject of big pickups and SUVs and road safety is “fairly personal.” She’s a mother and a cyclist, she witnessed a girl killed by a vehicle when she was young, and several of her friends were in a traffic accident when she was in high school.

In an interview, Roberts expressed frustration with the vehicle bloat:

I just think it’s so unfair that while some folks are trying to make moves towards living a lower carbon-intensity lifestyle, which in the city can mean bicycling, scootering, walking, at the same time some people are making our streets more dangerous, because of the changes to vehicle size over the past 15 – 20 years. These are the same 15 – 20 years when we have all, by and large, been quite aware of the threat posed to us all by climate breakdown. So, it’s a thing that kind of makes me crazy sometime.

Roberts also worries about the way large vehicles are advertised:

In some of the ads is a very explicit message that you can be safe inside your [large] vehicle, you can have serenity inside your vehicle. It’s really a false message, but also – for me – a very dystopian one, which is that with enough privilege, with enough money, you can somehow ride out climate change, you’re going to be okay because you can afford the $80,000 hulking, climate-controlled tank. And I find that very anti-social in the most basic sense.

“We’re all better off when we’re all better off,” said Roberts.

“There is no way to insulate yourself as an individual from the changes and the experiences that are going to visit us because of the changes that we have already made to our atmosphere,” she added. “So these ads [for large pickups and SUVs] are marketing something that is actually not available, which is individual security. And folks outside the vehicle be damned.”

“This is the most compelling reason for regulation,” said Roberts. “We drive a hatchback, and we are actually at risk because of the discrepancy in size and weight if we are in a collision with a large SUV or pickup. It’s wonderfully metaphorical, because inequality is actually bad for us.”

Roberts said regulatory changes are needed, but also recognized that it’s complicated because of North America being “effectively one market” for the auto industry. She added:

At different times the federal government has provided significant support to the car manufacturing industry, which is a super important industry, in terms of employment. And, it just seems like it would make sense that those industries also play their part in adapting to our climate reality, and in responding to safety issues.

A loophole big enough for trucks to pass

The rise of the giant SUV and pickup in North America can be traced back to 1975, ironically, to a law in the United States. intended to double fuel efficiency in vehicles and reduce pollution, and make automobiles more environmentally friendly.

At that time, light trucks – small pickups and vans – accounted for less than a fifth of all vehicles sold in the U.S. They tended to be commercial vehicles used by tradespeople, small businesses, fishers and farmers, and others with heavy loads to haul.

For these reasons, and because of heavy lobbying by U.S. automakers, light trucks were exempted from the new fuel efficiency regulations.

This gave the automakers a giant loophole, big and wide enough to drive a truck through, which is more or less what they then did.

All the automakers had to do was enlarge passenger vehicles, plop them onto light truck chassis, and market them as family passenger vehicles, while lobbying regulators to classify them all as light trucks.

Thus, an emissions loophole begat the SUV, and the automakers’ lobbying bore fruit, making them absolutely enormous profits.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accepted the industry’s contention that these new, larger “utility” vehicles should be classified as light trucks. In 1977, the U.S. government adopted the EPA definition of a light truck, meaning these vehicles didn’t have to obey pollution, fuel efficiency, and safety standards of regular automobiles.

In his 2002 book, ‘High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV,’ American journalist Keith Bradsher explains how it happened:

When the United States imposed safety, environmental and tax rules on automobiles in the 1970s, much tougher standards were set for cars than for pickup trucks, vans and the off-road vehicles that have since evolved into sports utility vehicles [SUVs] … Many of these loopholes still exist, and have spread to other countries that have copied American regulations. The result has been a public policy disaster, with automakers given an enormous and unintended incentive to shift production away from cars and toward inefficient, heavily polluting SUVs.

The ‘most advertised products’

To make sure the new bigger “light trucks” sold – and sell they did – automakers and dealers spent a fortune on advertising. In 2001, according to Bradsher, the spending on SUV advertising made them among the “most advertised products” in the U.S.

No surprise that the same has happened in Canada, where the auto industry is so closely aligned with that in the U.S. that automobile regulations and trends mirror those south of the border.

Since then, automakers have never stopped pushing the newer, larger vehicles, even as the availability of compact cars went steadily down in North America.

The advertising of these huge vehicles was as aggressive as their huge and menacing front ends, often showing them careening through stunning wilderness landscapes and waterways, where no motorized vehicle should go. It worked like a charm on urban and suburban buyers in North America.

The ads are ubiquitous, inescapable, and omnipresent online and on television.

A pickup with a ‘beast-like snarl’

Some 4×4 pickups are sold as “off-road” vehicles, as if North America’s ailing wild areas need still more marauding vehicles destroying precious wetlands, delicate ecosystems, and wildlife habitat. To make them even more intimidating and dangerous to others, pickups can be “lifted” on still higher suspension with bigger tires. They are given names like “raptor” and “rebel.”

Here is Car and Driver’s description of the 2024 Ram 1500 TRX pickup – price US$ 98,335:

A beast-like snarl snorts beyond the crest of a muddy ORV [off-road vehicle] trail, but this is no ordinary wild animal or hog, it’s the furiously quick 702-hp Ram 1500 TRX. Under the hood, a powerful supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 sucks up fuel as if it were drinking from a garden hose. An eight-speed automatic transmission handles gear shifts and the truck’s four-wheel drive system carries this enormous off-road animal in even the most treacherous places. The TRX only has two predators to look out for: the 700-hp Ford F-150 Raptor R and the quickest truck we’ve ever tested, the all-electric Rivian R1T.

The 2024 “Oversized Danger” report from Canada’s Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards (C.R.A.S.H.) offers a scathing assessment of the ads:

Pickups are today often marketed with an implicit (or explicit) appeal to machismo or as playthings for adventure and amusement. One ad [from a Ram truck commercial that aired regularly during the 2023 NHL playoffs] tells us: You loved to play in the mud as a child; “the only things that changed are the toys.” The callous irony of these ads is that they treat consumer amusement as more important than the safety of other road users.

‘These stupid trucks are literally killing us’

In his YouTube Not Just Bikes video, “These stupid trucks are literally killing us,” Canadian-Dutch urbanist Jason Slaughter said this of the epidemic of big SUVs and pickups:

Cities around the world are trying to build more walkable neighbourhoods and viable alternatives to driving. Unfortunately, as engineers, planners and advocates try to repair the mistakes of the 1960s and build the cities of the future, there’s a growing trend that could undo all of that hard work: the growth of SUVs and light trucks. I really don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if there’s a positive goal that cities have for the future, SUVs fight against that; they’re just bad for cities, really bad.

His narrative continues:

SUV drivers themselves are twice as likely to be killed in a rollover than car drivers, as SUVs make congestion worse because they take up more space on the roads. They have terrible fuel economy, too. And the list goes on and on.

And to be completely honest, I’m making this video because I’m absolutely fed up with the conversation around SUVs and light trucks. We’re constantly being told that doing anything about the astronomical growth in the average size of motor vehicles would infringe on the freedoms of people to do whatever they want. But your freedom to swing your arm ends where my face begins. And SUVs are a giant punch in the face to everyone who doesn’t drive one. In short, SUVs are oversize, ridiculous, unnecessary death machines that are literally killing people, even their own drivers.

Irony is a lost cause on the Internet.

The gateway ad for Slaughter’s YouTube video slamming big SUVs and pickups, when I first watched it in September 2024, featured a giant SUV barreling through wilderness where it simply should not have been, or go. Ever.

UK bans ads, not so North America

In late 2023, the UK advertising standards council banned Toyota’s “Born to Roam” ads online and on billboards. The ads showed large, diesel Toyota SUVs that were “driving off-road through natural environments, including rivers, before moving to drive as a pack through a cityscape.”

Following complaints about the ads from the UK groups Adfree Cities and Badvertising, the UK advertising watchdog banned them because they “presented and condoned the use of vehicles in a manner that disregarded their impact on nature and the environment. As a result, they had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society.”

However, Toyota ads celebrating similar feral packs of Toyota SUVs and pickups live on in North America.

Vehicles for shopping, pleasure and commuting

For all the marketing of these pickups and SUVs as tough, rugged off-road vehicles for tough, rugged outdoorsy people, in reality, many of them never see anything but smooth pavement on roads and in parking lots. Some are used to haul campers, or trailers carrying actual off-road all-terrain vehicles and side-by-sides that are also popular for tearing through and tearing up the wilderness in North America.

But a survey in the U.S. found that by far the main reasons people drive F-150 pickup trucks are shopping, pleasure, and commuting.

Look around any shopping centre parking lot in almost any city in Canada and there will be no shortage of towering monster trucks and SUVs, many polished and gleaming like the family silver. Stick around to see some of the drivers who clamber in and out of them, and it’s obvious these are not exactly heavy-duty working vehicles required to haul a heavy load over a back country road.

Pickups the ‘new normal‘

Lachlan Barber is an urban and cultural geographer, now based in Ottawa. A few years ago, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Memorial University, where he undertook research into pickup trucks as the “new normal” in Newfoundland and Labrador.

There, as in much of North America, light trucks had become the most commonly purchased vehicles, and Barber wanted to examine their new popularity.

In an interview, Barber explained that Newfoundland is a “very specific context.”

“Roads are really rough and there are moose on the roads, and people feel safer in larger vehicles,” he said. But there’s more to it than that, Barber believes.

“They were originally work vehicles, and the early iterations of pickup trucks were really designed for work. But now they’ve become sort of luxury vehicles,” he said, adding:

They’re designed to look appealing in a certain way. And what’s the appeal? People talk of cars offering freedom. So maybe the ultimate kind of freedom is having something that gives you pleasure, and makes you happy, but that disregards everyone else or the environment around you.

In 2019, Barber’s study was published in the journal Gender, Place & Culture. The paper states that pickups are “understood as useful and necessary for driving on poor roads and in inclement weather and for performing certain kinds of activities and tasks.” But, it notes, “Trucks are a mainstream phenomenon around which masculinist, sexist language and gendered stereotypes are reproduced and rendered as unproblematic.”

And, Barber writes:

The identities tied to fishing for a living and the sea as a way of life may be lessening, but new hegemonic masculinities reflecting connections to Alberta, mobile work, and increased consumer power have developed. Within them, the truck figures prominently. It is perhaps not surprising that trucks contribute to both injustice and unsustainability …

‘False narrative’

Albert Koehl is a coordinator of C.R.A.S.H., the Canadian Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards. That initiative is working to bring the problems of ever-larger and higher SUVs and pickups to the attention of the public and those who make policies.

Koehl admits it’s not an easy task, and they’re up against a powerful, moneyed industry using a “very compelling narrative that if you buy one of these big trucks, you’re going to be tougher, more adventurous, better.”

“You see it now in movies, where the hero drives one of these absurdly oversized vehicles,” Koehl said.

But, he said, it’s a “false narrative.”

“These vehicles don’t make you more mature or adventurous in any way. What they absolutely do is make it more likely that you will kill someone if you hit them while you’re driving one.”

Koehl calls it a “vehicle arms race.”

He noted that the large pickups are not even particularly functional, and don’t do anything the marketers say they do. Truck beds are no larger than they were in pickup trucks of yesteryear, and in some cases are smaller. Because they are higher, they are also less accessible.

“How do you even match a fraction of the advertising carmakers are doing, and undo that with public awareness campaigns?” asked Koehl. “It’s just absurd. That’s why we need a policy of intervention by each level of government. We’re not going to get it from the automakers.”

Koehl said C.R.A.S.H. met recently with Transport Canada, and pointed out that the easiest first step for the federal government would be advertising warnings.

So far, though, the reaction they’ve had from the federal and provincial governments on this issue has been “disappointing.”

“But that’s not surprising, given how powerful this industry is and how reluctant politicians will be to take on this contingent of drivers,” Koehl added.

“It’s a tough one for politicians,” said Koehl. “On the other hand, what we explained to Transport Canada, that it’s clear that more Canadians are being killed by these vehicles. I mean, do you need anything else to convince people to act? The safety aspect is going to be something very difficult for politicians when they’re called out on it.”

SUV fleet a top global CO2 emitter

In addition to the risks the large vehicles pose to other road users, Koehl pointed out that they are also terrible for the climate and for cities.

“We’re building these absurdly sized, gas-guzzling vehicles when we should be building gas-sipping vehicles,” he noted.

He is also concerned about how much space the pickups and SUVs take up on roads and in parking lots.

“Why do we allow these big vehicles to take up all this space and pay the same price as a tiny vehicle?” he asked. “These vehicles cost more money, too. I would like to see how many people complain about the carbon tax, who drive one of these big vehicles.”

There are people who need a tough, powerful vehicle for their work, including farmers and some small businesses, but the federal government gives both groups a refundable tax credit for the carbon pricing charges.

Are giant trucks more useful than small ones?

Some of the tiny trucks used in Europe have more carrying capacity than a giant North American pickup truck.

And as Slaughter noted in his video, ‘These trucks are literally killing us,’ we need only look across the ocean to see that it is possible for tradespeople to function very well without giant, fuel-scoffing pickup trucks:

It’s very apparent in Europe that actual trades people, you know, the people who actually need a vehicle with lots of space on a regular basis, almost universally choose vans. A typical European van will easily carry more than a pickup truck, and certainly more than an SUV. And the lower bed is easier to load, too. I really struggle to understand how a DHL delivery driver can do his job with a Kangoo van, but a middle-aged suburbanite thinks they need a Chevy Silverado to buy groceries …

And, Slaughter added, “I’m not even going to go into the fact that so many professionals here in the Netherlands, whether they’re a handyman or doing package delivery, can do their job just fine using cargo bikes.”

Slaughter pointed out that station wagons are far more useful than SUVs for city dwellers, with “more storage space, better fuel efficiency and plenty of room for kids.”

‘Autobesity’ bad for air, roads, nature

But autobesity has other drawbacks as well, starting with tires and the space they take.

Tires are made of rubber and petroleum-based compounds, and tires of any size are an environmental problem. Bigger and heavier vehicles require bigger and heavier tires, compounding what is already a serious global problem. About three billion chemical-laden tires are produced every year, and 800 million of them become waste annually. Their recycling is energy-intensive.

Particulate matter pollution from the wear of brakes and tires and erosion of road surfaces is also a serious health problem, as research is now showing. Researchers suggest that decreasing vehicle mass could mitigate this.

SUVs are wider than cars, and so take up more space on congested roads and highways, on roadsides, and in parking lots.

To accommodate larger vehicles, parking spaces will need to grow, a terrible waste of crucial space in urban areas where housing is desperately needed. And paved surfaces increase flood risk and temperatures, worsening impacts of the climate crisis.

High costs for owners, high climate costs

Isabelle Joncas, project manager of sustainable mobility with Équiterre, writes that citizens often find themselves buying vehicles much bigger than they need. Car dealerships offer ever fewer compact models, and consumers are persuaded that an SUV or pickup or CUV (crossover utility vehicle) is “practical, functional, safe and adventurous.”

This has high climate costs, said Joncas:

If ranked among countries, the global (worldwide) fleet of SUVs would be the world’s fifth largest emitter of CO2, according to the International Energy Agency reporting in May 2024 . In Canada, sales of SUVs are on the rise. They reached 85% of the total vehicle sales at the end of 2023.

Fossil fuel burned ‘for nothing’

In an interview, Joncas said that on average, an SUV consumes 20% more gas than a car. “This is petroleum being burned for nothing because people could move around with regular cars.”

“Ten years ago, most people would own a car,” Joncas said. “They could still go about in a car. Winters are not worse than they were. People don’t have more kids than they did. Family size has actually reduced.”

Équiterre is running an awareness campaign on the impact of SUVs, with a petition asking the federal government to regulate car advertising to reverse the trend towards ever larger light trucks.

Équiterre also provides a handy webpage that compares the impacts of different vehicles, noting the number of seats and whether they burn gasoline, diesel, or are hybrid or fully electric. The page grades different vehicles on their environmental footprint, safety, and their cost. It also notes that on average, SUVs cost $10,000 more than a car, and more than $4,000 extra every year.

Joncas conceded that the Équiterre campaign can evoke strong reactions. “We knew that people are attached to their vehicle,” she said. “It’s their personal decision. And they don’t want to be told what to buy or not to buy because it’s their money and their spending status.”

Inspired by what is happening in France

Joncas thinks we should be looking to France, where people now pay an emissions tax – a malus – based on the number of grams of carbon dioxide a vehicle emits when they register a new vehicle. The amount of the tax is no longer capped, and may exceed 50% of the price of the vehicle.

The special tax applies to vehicles heavier than 1,600 kilograms, that emit more than 110 grams of CO2 per kilometre.

Wheelchair accessible vehicles, persons with mobility cards, and electric and hybrid cars are exempt from the tax, and there are also reductions available for families with three children or more.

The French government provides a useful calculator showing vehicle owners ways they can qualify for reduced emissions taxes.

However, the costs of driving heavier and large new vehicles in France can be very high, Joncas said.

“Not only is it becoming more expensive to park a large vehicle in French cities like Paris and Lyons,” she notes. “But for a large SUV, like a Hummer, the malus alone could be €60,000 [$90,000].”

Asked if she thinks such a policy would fly in any province in Canada, Joncas imagines what would happen were she a politician in this country trying to bring in a similar tax on high-emissions vehicles.

“I wouldn’t be re-elected, and I would probably be killed,” Joncas said, chuckling ruefully.

Still, she said, she’s inspired by what France is doing, and she believes it’s important to get the debate started on ways to reverse vehicle bloat in Canada.

End of Part 2.

The third and final article in this series looks at some of the solutions being proposed to solve the health and environmental problems caused by large pickups and SUVs in Canada. Part 3 is available here. Part 1 is available here.

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