Front Burner - The big problem of 'car bloat'

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

SUVs and pickup trucks make up more than four out of every five new cars sold in the U.S., and in Canada, they represented 86 per cent of all vehicles sold in May of last year. Lots of these vehicles bill themselves as “safe,” but safe for who? The drivers and passengers? Or everyone else?David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and a contributing writer at Vox and Bloomberg CityLab, has coined the term “car bloat” to describe the ever-expanding size of the average automobile. He joins the show to talk about the enormous problems these cars are causing, how they got to be so huge, and whether the trend will continue.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine.

But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, it's Jamie. When I'm moving around the city, I am dwarfed by trucks and some of the cars around me on a regular basis. It doesn't matter if I'm walking, riding, even driving.

Some of these cars and trucks are just enormous. Almost everyone I talk to has a story about some tank-sized vehicle nearly taking them out or witnessing something like it. SUVs and pickup trucks make up more than four out of every five new cars sold in the United States, and here in Canada they represented 86% of all vehicles sold in May of last year. Lots of these vehicles bill themselves as safe. But for whom? The drivers and passengers? Or everyone else?

David Zipper has coined the term car bloat to describe the ever-expanding size of your average automobile. He's a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and a contributing writer at Vox and Bloomberg City Lab. He's here today to take us through the phenomenon, the enormous problems these cars are causing, how they got to be so huge, and whether the trend will continue. David, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner.

My pleasure. So, well, a lot of people might have felt like cars are getting bigger just on a gut level. I am one of those people for sure. Can you put some numbers on it for me? How much bigger have American cars gotten over the last few decades? Well, a lot bigger. And I guess I would say this term car bloat that I used to describe the phenomenon is really a conflation of two concurrent trends. First of all, sedans and station wagons are disappearing and being replaced increasingly by SUVs and pickups that comprise more than four out of five new cars that are sold in both Canada and the US now. But at the same time, those individual models, which by the way includes the relatively few sedans that are still being sold, keep getting bigger. With every model refresh, they add a few pounds, they add a few inches.

So the F-150, the Ford pickup truck that is the most popular vehicle in the US and I believe it's the most popular in Canada as well. It is, yep. Is much bigger now than it was 30 years ago. The 2023 model is 800 pounds heavier and seven inches taller than it was in 1991. That's a pretty big change. Wow.

So we're talking about, these cars getting a lot bigger and every pound and every inch is gonna exacerbate some of the harms I'm sure we'll get into that are caused by car bloat. Yeah, I want to talk about the harms and just to state the obvious here I know you know, you're based in the US so much of your research and expertise is based on the US But the North American auto market is so interconnected and Canadians are seeing a lot of the same trends that you're gonna talk about Today as we just discussed with the Ford F-150.

So tell me about the problems that this car bloat is causing. Well, there are a myriad of problems that are being caused. You know, I think the most obvious one, the one that people can sort of sense viscerally is going to involve safety, because a bigger car, a heavier car is going to basic physics, it's going to exert more force in a crash, especially on those who are in smaller cars, and those who are walking or biking. There was a recent sort of deep analysis in The Economist

that was a cover story from just a few months ago called America's killer cars. That was the cover story that basically found that for the heaviest cars in the US, the top 1%, you know, there is a little bit of extra safety that you get if you're inside one of those. But for every life that's saved by them being enormous, 12 people die in smaller cars during collisions. So that's a major ethical problem. And then you think about pedestrians and cyclists, which is a whole other issue because they're likely to be struck because they're so these cars are so tall, they're likely to strike them in the torso or in their head, which is much worse than hitting them in their legs. And just two years ago, in the US, we actually hit a 40 year high in pedestrian and cyclist deaths, which is not a phenomenon that is being seen in

the rest of the world where these SUVs and trucks are not as widespread, not as tall. So, you know, there's a lot of studies also that are neatly tying the risk to pedestrians and cyclists to vehicle size. So that's, I think, one of the first ones, but there's a lot of other ones. And just to sort of hit the high notes,

you know, a bigger car requires more energy to move. So that's going to mean that it's less efficient, it's going to create more pollution per mile or kilometer that it travels. The heavier car is going to lead to more tire erosion, which is sort of a whole new part of pollution that we're just learning about. It's already led to the collapse of salmon populations in parts of the Pacific Northwest. And something that I think people will sort of sense and just sort of intuitively, a longer car is going to take up more curb space, which leaves less space for other people who want to park their own cars. And that's actually why Montreal has recently adopted in a couple of boroughs, a sort of a tax based

on vehicle weight to try to sort of nudge people away from getting these really large cars that are taking away curb spots a lot of people use. So those are a few of the points that I might note as examples of what I would call negative externalities from Carbloot. Right. I feel that that last point that you made, I park on the street in my neighborhood too and every time I see one of the trucks, it's like, they take up two spots. It's, it can be very frustrating. Is it fair for me to say that these bigger cars are more expensive? That's exactly right.

And that's frankly, part of the reason why we've seen this rise of oversized cars, because they're more profitable for the automakers. Because it's true, there's, for them, there's more material that goes into them, and the price can be significantly higher. It's part of the reason why in the US, in US dollars, the average new car is I think right around $48,000 now, which is hovering around an all-time high. And that's a real issue itself because it makes it hard for people to buy a car

if they can't afford to pay that much Have cars been getting bigger elsewhere too or or is this largely a North American thing? Well, it started off as a North American thing. But now I just wrote a story a couple of weeks ago in Slate, where I said that car bloat is spreading like a disease and it really started North America, but it is all over the place at the moment. If you look worldwide, SUVs and pickups are now about 50% of new vehicle sales. That's up from 20% 15 years ago.

Pickups are not as popular outside of North America, generally speaking. So it's really SUVs that are driving that. So and you see this really happening all over Europe is now concerned about it. You see some countries taking policies to counteract car bloat and it's also a phenomenon that's visible in India, in China, in Japan, and in Australia. So it really is becoming worldwide. I know that Japan has this whole separate classification of small cars called, I think they're key cars, right? K cars, yeah.

K cars, sorry. They're really popular, right? Can you tell me about them and maybe how they kind of buck this trend a little bit? Yeah, so K cars are awesome is my assessment. I love them. But they're really the sort of unique Japanese innovation about really right after World War II when gasoline was expensive and a lot of Japanese didn't have a ton of money. So they're the sort of these miniature cars that are their own classification in Japan going back to you know, the the 50s. And they're still around. They're I think right, don't quote me on this, but roughly 30%

I think of the vehicle market. They're much smaller than you would expect to a full size car to be. They're relatively cheap. They're relatively efficient. And they're very popular within urban areas of Japan because they're easier to park. They're maneuverable. So you can bring them on some faster roads, but you really wouldn't use them to travel all across Honshu Island

or something. But they are a sizable chunk of the auto market there and they have been for a while. But at the same time, the Japanese auto market doesn't revolve around K cars. Japanese, when they're buying full-sized cars, are like everybody else, still buying SUVs and that are getting increasingly large.

So that's a point to keep in mind. Why is it, do you think, that a market for those kind of cars doesn't really exist here? I guess, if I could put this question another way, how did we get here? Well, that's an important question, and I think that there's a number of contributing factors, and you get a different answer based on who you talk to.

And I think a lot of people are sort of partially right. Like if you talk to automakers, they'll say, oh, well, people's preferences changed in North America and increasingly around the world. They just want bigger cars now. And there's some truth to that. I mean, there's some people who probably really like having more leg room and more storage space.

I'm sure that's correct, but it's also a self-serving justification by the automakers, because they're spending billions of dollars promoting their vehicles on TV and various forms of advertising. And for decades, the cars they've been promoting have been SUVs and pickups, not sedans and station wagons. And a truck that says no to nothing.

Hi, Dad. Can I get them a ride? Yeah. The Silverado Trail Boss and Chevrolet. F-150 makes hauling easier with a max available payload. Haul up to 2,440 pounds with ease. And the reason for that is what we were just talking about before. SUVs and pickups are more profitable. So there's a little bit of causality that's worth

keeping in mind. These are vehicles that automakers have been promoting. But at the same time, too, there's been at least in the US, a sort of you've had a federal policy perspective toward car size, that I would argue is exactly the opposite of what we would want. I mean, there's all these negative externalities, these problems that are created by large cars that those buying them don't experience, like the safety harms to others and stuff like that. So what policy should be doing is to discourage large vehicles or at least force those who buy them to recognize the societal costs with taxes or regulation. Instead of doing that, the US has done the exact opposite. We've actually encouraged oversized vehicles in several ways, such as our fuel economy rules,

known as CAFE, that have a loophole for what are called light trucks, SUVs and pickups, that basically allows automakers since the 70s to have a more lenient standard for how efficient their vehicles will be with regards to emissions, with regards to consuming gasoline if it's an SUV or a pickup versus a sedan or station wagon. So that's an incentive to go toward a bigger model, right? Yeah. And there's even something that I think is truly

bonkers for reasons that make no sense to me. We have a tax code called Section 179 that allows small business owners like chiropractors or real estate agents to deduct the cost in their taxes of a vehicle that they own and use partially for work. But only, Jamie, if that car weighs at least 6,000 pounds. What? Really? Yeah. So if you get like a Hummer, all good. You can save tens of thousands of dollars, but if you buy a sedan, you save nothing. It's insane. And that has actually been on the books for decades in the US. It's known as the Hummer tax loophole. And it's crazy. But that's how we've

structured our policy in the US to actually encourage carpload, I would argue. In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine.

But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. Hi, I'm Steve Patterson, host of The Debaters, a comedy podcast where Canada's funniest comedians debate the world's silliest topics, like maple syrup versus honey. Your suggestion that syrup is only good on pancakes, that's so untrue.

There are a million different things you can use maple syrup on. Two, give me two other things. Forget the million. Crepes? That's French for pancake, buddy. That's the Bare Knuckle Round, everybody. That just got sticky. Listen to the debaters wherever you get your podcasts. I feel like there's also a cultural significance at play here, too.

Trucks, of course, are like a feature of country song lyrics. Chevy and country music grew up together. On back roads, over campfires. When friends get together, and the work's all done, there's one place to go when the weekend comes. For a country, and look at that truck. For a country. Their soul does like this strong, tough choice.

America is still the land of rugged individualists. I go around, I want strong as I could be. I go around, nothing ever got to me. And every one of them demands something different from their Chevy truck. With best in class flame strength and payload, only F-Series has been number one for 29 years running. F-150, America's strongest truck, is built for time. That's it, boys.

Fight it out for second place. Built for time. You know, how much of the demand for big vehicles comes from the place that, like, the pickup truck holds in North American culture, you think? Yeah, well, there was a very good story in an auto media outlet called The Drive. I didn't write it, but the headline of it was, you don't need a pickup, you need a cowboy hat.

And what that story was explaining was a survey of the behavior of truck owners that found that more than two-thirds of them in the average year haul something at most once per year. Most of them are probably hauling nothing at all, zero to one times per year. And about 30% never even put anything into the truck bed, Jamie. So that's pretty strong data suggesting that the popularity of pickups is, shall we say, vibes-based for a lot of people. Not everybody, but a lot of people. I know that you touched on this briefly at the beginning, but what about the idea that

people do feel safer? They make you feel like if something happened, you would be in a better position. Well, Jamie, that's one of the hardest things about car bloat, to be honest with you, because if you feel that you feel like, gosh, I really feel like I should get an SUV because I want myself and my loved ones to be safer. You're not totally wrong if I'm completely honest, because marginally you are a little bit safer in a bigger vehicle. The problem is that extra weight,

that extra size might make you marginally safer, but it's gonna make everybody else on the road a lot less safe. This is what the studies and the data show. And the problem too is that if you do upsize the car that you get, you're now encouraging everybody else to go out and get an even bigger car because- It's like an arms race.

It's exactly an arms race. And if you're familiar with the idea of a prisoner's dilemma in game theory, I think that's where we are right now, where you could argue, and I think I would argue, that we might all be better off in a society if we all had smaller cars. But because some people have really big SUVs and pickups, there's an incentive for everyone to get an SUV and pickup that's bigger, even if they wish they didn't have to.

This is a regulatory failure, I would argue. This is a place where you would need regulators at the national level to come and prevent this kind of an arms race from taking hold, which I hate to say it, but it really has on both sides, I think, of the border. And I'm just trying to put myself in the position of the people who wanna buy these bigger vehicles.

What about the argument that in the US and Canada, there's a specific geography at play that might need these kinds of trucks? I take your point that data shows that people aren't really hauling a lot of stuff or even using their truck beds. But, you know, even I'm just thinking about the climate here in Canada. If I live in a rural area with snow, you know, and the roads aren't always plowed properly, maybe I need one of these vehicles to kind of get in and out of my driveway. I mean, by all means, some people absolutely do need four by four. Some people absolutely need pickups to get around for their work completely.

But I think that the plurality or even majority of buyers of a lot of these cars aren't going off-roading. They're not carpenters. They're people who are going no place more adventurous than a shopping center on a Saturday morning. And a lot of the people who are buying pickups and SUVs could do what they want to do or need to do just as easily in a smaller vehicle. But that's not what they're getting.

And there's really no inducement for them to get a smaller vehicle a lot of the time, which again, to me comes back to a regulatory failure because there should be some sort of like attacks or regulation that sort of encourages them to think about going smaller if they could do everything they want to in a smaller vehicle. Do you see any winds changing here? Does it feel to you like we might be close to some sort of tipping point on this issue? Do you think that people's attitudes are changing or actually are they just going in the other direction or staying exactly where they've been for a long time now? Yeah, I think about this a lot because I don't think the harms of car bloat are up for debate among researchers. We have the data. We know that big cars are a contributing factor to the US road safety crisis, that

they're contributing to climate change, so forth and so on. We don't need more research to show that. It's kind of like tobacco findings in the 1950s, if you will. We already knew then that tobacco was creating harms, but that hadn't really penetrated the zeitgeist. But I think we need now, and what you're pointing to is sort of like, are people really sort of mobilizing around this and recognizing that it's a problem? And I think we're starting to see signs of that, interestingly.

In the US, there was a survey from YouGov earlier in 2024, about a year ago, that found that over 40% of people say that cars have gotten too big in the US, which I find remarkable because nobody in the federal government has really made that point or been pushing that idea. People sort of figured that out on their own. And at the same time, in cities in particular, where you have a lot of pedestrians and cyclists, you are seeing some pushback to oversized cars, like in the District of Columbia, where I live.

Now there's a weight-based registration fee that forces those with the biggest cars to pay seven times more per year to register their vehicle in DC than those who have smaller ones. And you may be familiar with what Paris has done. It was a citywide vote in February to charge SUV owners a lot more to park in the city itself. You're starting to see stuff like this come together and people

are trying to recognize there's a problem. And I think what I might suggest is that I don't think we're going to see a lot of national movement to address this in Canada or the US because of the lobbying might of the auto industry and the sort of like identitarian connections that a lot of pickup and SUV owners have. But at the local level, at the provincial level or the state level in my country, I think you could start to see like vehicle weight fees and like in Montreal, those parking fees. I think that actually could be where this begins and hopefully gains momentum. That's really interesting. David, this was great. Thank you so much. No, my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Jamie.

All right, that is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Joythashan Gupta, Lauren Donnelly, Cecilia Armstrong, Matt Amha, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee and Evan Agard is our video producer. Music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you next week. [♪ music playing, fades out. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.