In 1972 the Club of Rome published the report Limits to growth about, among other things, the exploitation of natural resources. That title can now be placed on a black book about the physical growing pains of cars. They pay little attention to boundaries and are steadily getting bigger and heavier.
In my testing practice for NRC I experience it personally. Parking garages and car washes, usually built for less extensive transport, are a problem for many new cars. But even in new parking garages I often cannot or hardly get them through the entrance. The risk of damage is enormous. With a huge Chinese SUV, the Nio EL8, I got stuck in a Belgian parking garage with no way back. Concrete guide walls on either side of the entrance made an impossibly sharp bend to the right after the barrier, making it impossible for me to squeeze the more than five meter long car through without a scratch. Humiliated, I heard the screeching scratch of alloy on concrete – goodbye, right rear wheel! I looked up the width of the car on Google. This amounted to two meters seven excluding exterior mirrors. Even recognized mega-SUVs such as the Lamborghini Urus (2.01 meters) or the Rolls-Royce Cullinan (2 meters) are less impressive than the neat Nio. Since then, I check the width of every test car before I take it through the car wash, and more often than I would like I hand in those things dirty under the motto ‘better smeared than damaged’.
Normal middle class people also gain chronic weight. CBS has figures. Cars from 2024 are on average 5 percent longer and 3.6 percent wider than cars from 2016. Their average weight increased even faster by 26.9 percent, from 1,224 kilos in 2016 to 1,554 in 2024. This has everything to do with the battery packs of electric cars weighing hundreds of kilos. The average weight of electric cars in 2024 was 1,875 kilos, compared to 1,217 for a petrol model. The energy transition demands it and those batteries are simply heavy, nothing can be done about it. In terms of dimensions, yes. These are partly related to the space for the batteries, but there are plenty of manufacturers who manage to pack large battery packs into relatively compact bodies.
The CBS figures for 2016 provide an average space take of 7.39 m by multiplying length and width per car.2 on. In 2024 this will already be 8 m2. If you multiply those figures by the number of Dutch passenger cars in 2016 and 2024, 8.6 and 9.4 million respectively, you arrive at a total surface area of 63.55 and 75.2 million square meters. That is an increase of 11.65 km2an area of more than 1,600 football fields. In reality it is of course more. Firstly, the exterior mirrors are not included in the calculation and the doors also have to be opened. Cars always take up more space than they cover and therefore parking spaces are always sufficiently longer and wider than the car, although to a decreasing extent.
In countries with rising population densities and shrinking public space, governments should set limits. They also do this by making inner cities car-free and adjusting the parking standards in new-build areas, resulting in fewer parking spaces per home. But there is no way to regulate it, and that is why the ball is now in the manufacturers’ court. The proliferation of their offering no longer knows any limits. More and more cars are approaching or exceeding the two-metre limit in width and the growth fever is infecting all levels of the car hierarchy. The Volvo 960 Station, an enormous car by the standards of the time, was 1.75 meters wide and 4.81 meters long in 1995. The new Ford Puma, intended as a small hatchback, is five centimeters wider and, including the exterior mirrors, eighteen. The ES90, the latest large Volvo, is 2 meters wide and five meters long with the mirrors folded out – and has less luggage space than the Ford.
Over longer periods, the growth figures are even more striking. A comparison between long-running models now and their predecessors in 1975 is revealing. The VW Golf then: 3 meters 70 by 1 meter 61. Now: 4.28 by 1.79. Porsche 911 then: 4.29 by 1.61. Now: 4.54 by 1.81. Toyota Corolla then: 3.99 by 1.57. Now: 4.37 by 1.79. How ironic: Just as the electric car is shedding its polluter stigma, it is taking back its antisocial stigma with its brutal annexation of public space.
How is that possible? Part of the explanation is that car design demands more and more space even without batteries on board. The space that manufacturers gain by blowing up models is immediately lost to heavy, space-consuming safety features and the increased need for luxury. Not only airbags and reinforcement beams, but also the twenty or more speakers of premium audio systems make doors and window pillars increasingly thicker and heavier. All brands want to achieve the maximum five stars in the Euro NCAP crash test, and many new car buyers find it difficult to suppress their hedonistic needs. People want SUVs with big wheels, cars that make an impression.
While obese cars are also a plague for their drivers. I experience almost every week how you constantly get in the way of yourself and others with those big brats. Internal roads are not built for it and your garage at home is of less and less use now that they no longer or hardly fit in, so you are condemned to your driveway or the street – with all the risks of costly confrontations between curbs and your absurdly large wheels. Evasive maneuvers by oncoming cars lead to serious damage to verges on rural roads that have become too narrow. In recent years I have seen how often SUV drivers have difficulty keeping their large containers on the right side. Especially in bends, they simply enter the wrong side of the road. Because I know those cars, I know the reason: they lack any overview. There are more reasons for this than the vehicle volume. Poor visibility due to large blind spots also contributes to derailed driving behavior in parking lots and on public roads, despite parking cameras and guiding safety assistants that have to keep the car on the correct side of the road. You feel like the captain of a supertanker in such a giant.
It is an antisocial and unsustainable development. Cars, even the smaller ones, have to shrink. Favorable exceptions such as the Hyundai Inster show how it can be done. Hyundai managed to design a compact car with more than enough space for four adults and luggage. It is 1 meter 61 wide and 3 meters 82 long, at least twenty centimeters narrower and shorter than the average compact hatchback. It goes far enough and charges fast enough for a foreign holiday; it is the first small plug-in car I dare to take to the south of France. It is a hopeful success, which is largely related to the liberating feeling of no longer being in the way and being able to move normally in traffic. Less is more.
Yet the fat ones are still in the majority. And because manufacturers do not automatically set a good example, governments must put pressure by setting limits on growth. By imposing a responsible maximum for the dimensions of passenger cars. It is inevitable that cars will be higher than before with battery packs under the floor, but something can be done about length and width. Feel free to set the width limit at 1 meter 85. Otherwise we will soon have to build massively wider internal roads and larger parking garages. And shrinkage is not a sacrifice. Look how much space that 1.75 meter wide Volvo 960 offered; 1,702 liters of luggage space with and 491 liters without the rear seats folded down. The new, much larger Volvo ES90 with its measly 424 liters cannot compete with that. Isn’t it cynical?
An effective approach is of course complicated. You don’t want to pinch off buyers who need large cars, while they are already burdened more heavily through higher purchase prices and taxes. You don’t want to penalize a Golf driver for the growth curve of his car. A good start would be an active incentive policy for small cars. Of course you can. The average occupancy per car is slightly or well below two people from country to country. In traffic jams you almost see commuters sitting alone in the car. Then you may rightly wonder what they are doing in their inflated golden cows. These are crooked dwellers on wheels.
Japan set a good example with the kei cars, a category of small city cars that were eligible for attractive tax benefits under strict conditions regarding maximum dimensions and engine capacity. That legislation inspired Japanese car manufacturers to develop generations of innovative mini cars with astonishing amounts of interior space. At least they intervened in time. Now that the number of passenger cars in the Netherlands has passed the ten million mark, the alarm can also be sounded here. The situation is becoming untenable.
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