America’s obsession with big cars has fatal consequences
For all the grim tales of guns and opioids, the thing that really hits you as a visitor to the US these days is the cars. Literally, for too many people. In 2021, road fatalities were the second leading cause of death among Americans aged under 45, ahead of Covid-19, suicides and gun violence.
On a visit to the US last month, three things made a strong impression: the sheer size of the cars; the relative lack of electric models with their characteristic hum; and speed limits that seem entirely optional. All, I think, stem from the same underlying tendency: to see driving as an expression of personal freedom.
To an extent, a similar dynamic plays out the world over. Just look at the furore that has accompanied recent schemes to curb residential traffic in the UK. But, when it comes to vehicles, the US really is exceptional.
The average new American car purchased in 2021 weighed 1.94 tonnes, fully half a tonne more than the European average. Purchases of SUVs and “light” trucks together now account for four out of every five new vehicles bought in the US, up from one in five 50 years ago.
The pattern of car purchasing maps on to the US political divide. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to buy a new vehicle of any kind, and vastly more likely to buy a big one. About 65 per cent of buyers of the largest pickup trucks, utility vehicles and SUVs last year were Republican, compared with just 15 per cent bought by Democrats, according to a survey by the research company Strategic Vision.
And this isn’t driven by America’s political geography. Whether you look at buyers in dense urban centres or isolated rural areas, trucks and SUVs are red, small hybrids blue. The divide becomes even more stark when Americans are asked to pick which attributes they look for in a new car: “aggressive”, “powerful” and “rugged” all rank among the top five selected by Republican-leaning purchasers. The US fleet of huge vehicles is down to identity, not necessity: individualism on wheels.
This would all be a mere curiosity except that these vehicles have a variety of lethal qualities. As American cars have bulked up, the number of fatalities for the drivers and passengers inside these rolling fortresses has fallen by 22 per cent. But the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 57 per cent. According to an estimate by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, the lives of 8,000 pedestrians could have been saved between 2000 and 2018 if Americans had stuck to smaller vehicles.
For many inside the cars, too, the association of individualism with driving proves lethal. Almost one in 10 drivers and passengers in the front seat of US cars do not wear a seatbelt, and 45 per cent say they often drive at least 15 miles per hour above the speed limit on motorways. In the UK, both measures are way lower, at 3 per cent.
The grim result is that half of the car occupants killed in the US in 2020 were not wearing seatbelts vs 23 per cent in the UK. Speeding is implicated in 30 per cent of fatal crashes in the US but just half of that in Britain. All told, 43,000 people died on America’s roads in 2021, the highest mortality rate in the developed world by some margin. By my calculations, a fifth of those could be averted every year if rates of speeding and seatbelt-wearing matched peer countries.
Finally, there’s the environmental impact. Less than 5 per cent of new US cars last year were either partly or fully electric, compared with 17 per cent in Europe (rising to 86 per cent in Norway). As a result, the average new US car emits twice as much carbon dioxide per mile as its European counterpart, all while carrying the same number of occupants as in the UK — 1.5 people per trip, weighted for distance driven.
The US has the ideas and ambition to lead on the energy transition, and can learn from local schemes where traffic calming measures, such as in New York City, can reduce road deaths. Ultimately, though, solving environmental and public health challenges requires prioritising the collective good. The evidence suggests that when it comes to cars, that’s just not the American way.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com
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