bloated vehicles

A giant white pickup truck with raised suspension and massive wheels is parked in front of a small black car on a gravel parking lot.

This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on October 28, 2024. It is the third and final article in a series 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 governments in Canada could, at least in theory, do to tackle the bloat. Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.

For 10 years Ben MacLeod watched from afar what was happening in his home town of Halifax, and was pleased to see HRM Council undertaking “progressive initiatives” on traffic safety, and the “gradual construction of the bike lane network.”

“It was exciting to see them moving in the right direction,” he said in an interview.

MacLeod, an urban planner and sustainable transportation advocate, had moved to Hong Kong in 2012, and in 2022 moved back to Halifax, where he grew up.

“I was excited to come back to see what’s changed,” he said.

What MacLeod didn’t bargain on, what made him “a little bit shocked” when he got home, however, was the “design trends” in the vehicles on the roads, and how prevalent big vehicles had become.

“Eighty-six percent of new vehicles in Canada are now SUVs [sports utility vehicles] and pickup trucks, which is shocking,” said MacLeod, who doesn’t own a car and mostly gets around on foot or on bicycle.

Read more

A large black and shiny GMC pickup in a parking lot, with a smaller silver Tucson SUV on its right. Behind the pickup, underneath the large green letters saying "Sobeys" is the entrance to the store.

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.

Read more

A new and very shiny large silver-grey pickup in a car dealer lot, with a massive chrome grille, and the letters, GMC, in red in the middle of the grille.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Examiner on October 24, 2024. It is the first of a three-part series. Part 2 is available here, and part 3 here. 

Why this series

Just after the turn of the millennium, in 2002, American journalist Keith Bradsher wrote a book called High and Mighty. SUVs: the most dangerous vehicles and how they got that way.

The book begins: “Sport utility vehicles have taken over America’s roads during the last decade, and are on their way to taking over the world’s roads. The four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a romantic vision of outdoor adventure to deskbound baby boomers.”

Bradsher continues:

Yet the proliferation of SUVs has created huge problems. Their safe image is an illusion. They roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and they are dangerous to other road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians. Their “green” image is also a mirage, because they contribute far more to smog and global warming … The success of SUVs comes partly from extremely cynical design and marketing decisions by automakers and poorly drafted government regulations. The manufacturers’ market researchers have decided that millions of baby boomers want an adventurous image and care almost nothing about putting others at risk to achieve it, so they have told auto engineers to design vehicles accordingly. The result has been unusually tall, menacing vehicles like the Dodge Durango, with its grille resembling a jungle cat’s teeth and its flared fenders that look like bulging muscles in a savage jaw…

Cadillac, a division of General Motors, rushed the Escalade onto the market in 1998, a little over a year after the Lincoln Navigator went on sale and was an instant hit. To make the Escalade, GM essentially put lots of chrome and optional equipment on a GMC Yukon Tahoe SUV. The Tahoe, in turn, uses the underbody and a lot of other parts from the full-size Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. So Cadillac was essentially taking a [US]$20,000 work truck, tricking it up with lots of chrome, leather seats, and a fancy stereo, and selling it for close to [US]$50,000. This is how automakers have earned enormous profits on full-sized SUVs.

That was 22 years ago.

Since then, everything Bradsher predicted has occurred, possibly even exceeding his gloomy forecast. The vehicles have grown much bigger and even more menacing, and far more numerous, marketed to more and younger demographics. Compared with the front ends of today’s pickups, the grille of the Dodge Durango of yesteryear looks as harmless as a kitten’s nose. In 2024, the best-selling vehicles in the U.S. were the Ford F-series, the Chevy Silverado, and the Ram pickup trucks, with some starting at over $100,000.

In 2023, for every regular passenger car sold in Canada, six trucks — primarily larger pickups, SUVs, and vans — were sold. The same is true in Nova Scotia.

Across North America, road safety and environmental groups have been blowing the whistle on this vehicle bloat for years, and numerous studies show that big vehicles threaten lives and living environments. Even The Economist recently ran a front-page story about big cars and pickups killing Americans. But so far in Canada, regulators don’t seem to be listening.

This series of three articles looks at what is driving the trend for ever bigger and higher pickups and SUVs, and the many reasons this is bad for people, roads, cities, the environment, and the climate. We start by looking at the risks these oversize vehicles pose to other road users.  

Read more