Electric SUV concept car [image credit: motorauthority.com]
The report headline also claims this ‘is terrible news for the planet’, because they are obsessing about harmless trace gases in the atmosphere. But the motoring public don’t seem to share their misplaced concerns, as ever-popular SUVs outnumber electric vehicles by about 40 to 1 worldwide.
Sales of hefty and heavily-polluting SUVs have doubled in the last decade – outweighing the progress made from electric vehicles, says WIRED. Can cleaner SUVs offer a way out?
The phenomenal rise of the SUV all started with a squabble over chicken.
It was 1963 – the height of the Cold War – and US president Lyndon Johnson was fuming over a tax that France and West Germany had imposed on cheap, intensively-farmed US chicken flooding European supermarkets.
In December 1963, after months of failed negotiations, Johnson retaliated.
He slapped a 25 per cent tax on imported potato starch, brandy, dextrin and, crucially, light trucks. The effect was immediate.
Volkswagen stopped shipping pickups to America and Japanese firms pulled their models from the country, while American manufacturers renewed their focus on much larger vehicles. While the other taxes were later repealed, the levy on trucks was permanent.
In that single executive order, Johnson cleared the path for the SUV to dominate the roads of the United States and then the world. Buoyed by lenient fuel emissions standards and forgiving regulations, oversized cars became the new normal.
Between 2010 and 2018 the number of SUVs in the world increased from 35 million to 200m. Now 40 per cent of annual car sales are SUVs – double what it was a decade ago.
These prodigious vehicles brought with them an outsized impact on the environment. With lower fuel efficiency and higher emissions than normal cars, the rise of SUVs is outweighing the benefits of the growth in electric vehicles.
According to the International Energy Agency, SUVs alone were the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions between 2010 and 2018 – only behind the power industry.
And our taste for heavier, more polluting and – in some cases – more dangerous cars is not abating. In the US almost half of all cars sold are SUVs, while in India that figure is approaching one in three, and rising.
But as automakers come under increasing pressure to curb their emissions, the future of conventional SUVs is starting to look under threat.
Will the rising tide of regulation and electrification be enough to undo our environmentally disastrous love affair with SUVs?
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
December 6, 2019 at 04:37AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 