Big Cars, Small Freedom

TL;DR;

• Light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and vans) now make up well over 80% of new vehicle sales in the US, pushing truly small cars off the market and super-sizing everything that moves through our cities.¹
• Taller, heavier vehicles dramatically increase the risk of killing pedestrians and cyclists; high, blunt fronts are around 40–45% more likely to cause fatal injuries than lower, sloped cars.²
• SUVs are a climate problem too: if SUV drivers were a country, they’d rank among the top emitters on Earth, and SUVs have been a leading source of rising transport CO₂ since 2010.³⁴
• As cars grow, even bikes are getting dragged into the arms race. Car-horn products like the Loud Mini turning bicycles into mini-cars is a symptom, not a solution.
• Cities can defuse the big-car arms race with weight-based fees, design limits on front-end height, lower speed limits, and by making walking, cycling, and transit the default ways to get around.

A city is a machine for bringing people together. Making every component of that machine bigger doesn’t create more freedom, it just jams the works.

1. The rise of the “big car” and the arms race no one asked for

Walkable cities are efficient, low-carbon, and surprisingly relaxing places to live. You get more people through less space, with less noise, less danger, and lower costs. That’s the whole point of building mixed-use, transit-rich neighborhoods instead of endless sprawl.

But as urbanists like Not Just Bikes have argued in videos like “The Insane Rise of SUVs”, there’s a structural problem that threatens everything we’re trying to fix: the vehicles themselves are quietly mutating. What used to be a street full of cars has become a street full of *big* cars, SUVs, crossovers, and pickups that keep growing taller, wider, and heavier.

In the US, “light trucks” (the regulatory category that includes SUVs, pickups, and many crossovers) now account for roughly 84% of new light-duty vehicle sales; conventional passenger cars are down to about 16%.¹ That’s not a niche market. That is the market.

And when everyone else is driving a tank, it starts to feel irrational not to upgrade. That’s the arms race: each person buys a bigger vehicle to feel safer in a hostile traffic environment, but the net effect is that everyone else especially people walking, biking, or in smaller cars, becomes less safe.

Big cars don’t just fill space; they displace safety, climate goals, and basic livability.

2. Why big cars are so deadly in a city

2.1. Height, weight, and the physics of harm

At a given speed, the kinetic energy of a crash scales with mass. Double the weight, double the energy that has to go somewhere in a collision. For oversized vehicles, that “somewhere” is often the body of a person outside the car.

Crucially, it’s not just weight, it’s geometry. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) analyzed nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes and found that vehicles with front ends higher than about 40 inches are roughly 45% more likely to kill pedestrians than lower, sloped-nose cars.² The National Safety Council reached similar conclusions: SUVs, vans, and pickups pose significantly more danger to people walking and cycling than smaller passenger cars.⁵

A few simplified numbers make this tangible:

Even without doing any math, you can see the problem: if a Corolla nudges you at low speed, it’ll usually sweep your legs and throw you on the hood. Painful and dangerous, but often survivable. If an Escalade hits you at the same speed, it hits your chest and head, pushes you forward, and then dumps you on the pavement under a multi-ton truck.

Unsurprisingly, countries that have leaned hardest into big cars (like the US and Australia) have seen worsening trends for pedestrian deaths, while many countries with smaller fleets have seen much flatter or improving patterns.⁷

2.2. Blind spots the size of children

One of the selling points for SUVs is “better visibility” because you sit higher. But the visibility that matters most in cities is right next to the vehicle, crosswalks, driveways, bike lanes, and sidewalks. Here, big cars are fundamentally worse.

Advocacy groups like Kids and Car Safety have documented the rise of so-called “frontover” crashes, drivers running over children in front of SUVs or pickups because the kids are literally invisible from the driver’s seat.⁸ Estimates suggest:

• Around 60 children in the US are run over by a forward-moving vehicle every week, typically in driveways and parking lots.⁹
• Roughly 75% of these frontover incidents involve SUVs, pickups, or vans.⁹
• About 93% of the victims are aged six or younger.¹⁰

These are low-speed crashes, often by parents in their own driveway. The “safety” upgrade that was supposed to protect families is, in thousands of cases, literally running over their children.

Car companies’ response? Cameras and sensors that add cost and encourage more screen-staring instead of designing vehicles that don’t have child-sized blind spots in the first place.

3. Big cars, big climate problem

From a climate perspective, big cars are a slow-motion disaster.

The International Energy Agency has shown that SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the growth in global CO₂ emissions from 2010–2018, behind only the power sector.⁴ More recent IEA updates note that SUVs now account for more than 20% of the annual increase in energy-related CO₂ emissions worldwide.¹¹ One widely cited analysis put it bluntly: if SUV drivers were considered a country, they’d rank around seventh in the world for carbon emissions.³

The underlying reasons are straightforward:

• More weight → more energy required to move each mile.
• More frontal area → more aerodynamic drag, especially at highway speeds.
• Bigger batteries for EVs → more resources mined, more particulate pollution from tire and brake wear.

Even as technology improves (more efficient engines, hybrids, and EVs) we’re squandering a lot of that progress by supersizing the vehicles they power. An efficient big vehicle is still far more energy-hungry than an efficient small one.

If we’re serious about climate targets, “electrify everything” isn’t enough. We also have to shrink the everything.

4. The collateral damage: congestion, parking, and fear

4.1. Space they take, space they steal

Streets are finite. When each vehicle grows in length and width, you don’t just get “more comfortable” cars; you get:

• Fewer vehicles able to queue at each traffic light, worsening delay.
• More aggressive behavior at yellows and reds because fewer people make it through each cycle.
• Parking spaces that no longer fit the local fleet, forcing cities and developers to widen stalls and drive aisles, paving even more land.

On a narrow city street, a row of oversized pickups or SUVs can eat half the usable width of the public realm, forcing cyclists to “take the lane,” hiding cross-traffic sightlines, and pushing sidewalks closer to traffic.

And this is before we count the extra wear on pavement from heavier vehicles, which shows up in municipal budgets years later.

4.2. Streets that feel like war zones

There’s also the psychological effect. When every block is lined with high-hooded trucks, walking or biking stops feeling normal and starts feeling like threading a needle through an armored convoy.

That fear is rational (the statistics on injury risk say so) but it also feeds the arms race. If everyone else is driving something enormous and you have kids, it becomes very tempting to buy your own mobile bunker “just in case.”

Which brings us to one of the strangest ripple effects of the big-car era.

5. When bikes start acting like cars

If big cars are bad for people outside cars, then they’re especially bad for people on bikes. You’re small, you’re quiet, and you’re riding at windshield height next to vehicles with poor side and front visibility.

It’s not surprising that a growing number of cyclists have started to arm up, with lights, cameras, high-viz gear, and yes, car-horn-loud bike horns.

Products like the Loud Mini from Loud Bicycle are a perfect example: a compact horn for bikes that sounds like a real car horn so drivers actually notice you. There’s clearly a market here; talk to people riding in truck-heavy American suburbs and you’ll hear the same story: “I wouldn’t ride without something that loud anymore.”

As a cyclist, this reaction is completely rational. When you’re sharing space with lifted pickups and three-row SUVs, a pleasant little “ding” doesn’t stand a chance. A horn that sounds like it came off a sedan is a way of borrowing some of the respect that big vehicles command.

But as a city, this is a warning sign.

When bicycles start behaving like mini-cars just to survive it’s proof that our streets have drifted far away from being human-scaled. We’re not just building big cars; we’re forcing every smaller road user to adapt to an environment designed around them.

The goal shouldn’t be to turn every bike into a car. The goal is to make streets calm enough that nobody feels they need a car horn on their handlebars in the first place.

6. How big cars sabotage city goals

Cities around the world are adopting plans for “Vision Zero,” climate neutrality, and walkable neighborhoods. On paper, the goals are clear. But oversized vehicles are quietly undermining them.

Here’s how the conflict plays out:

If you’re wondering why Vision Zero progress has stalled in many North American cities even as they redesign streets and lower some speed limits, the changing vehicle fleet is a huge part of the answer.

7. What we could do instead

The good news is that the big-car problem is not some law of nature. It’s the product of regulations, tax codes, and design standards that can be updated.

Here are concrete, city-scale and national-scale moves that would flip the incentives:

7.1. Stop giving big cars regulatory freebies

• Close the “light truck” loophole. The category made some sense when it mostly covered commercial work vehicles. Today, it’s being used to exempt family SUVs and crossovers from stricter fuel and safety rules. If a vehicle is used like a car, regulate it like a car.
• Test for pedestrian and crash compatibility. Safety ratings should explicitly account for what happens when a large vehicle hits a smaller one or a person outside. If a pickup shreds the crash structures of a compact car, that should tank its safety score, not leave it untouched.
• Set limits on front-end height and shape. The UK and EU are already debating caps on bonnet (hood) height to protect children; proposals include limits around 85 cm (≈33.5″).¹² That kind of clear, physical constraint is more effective than hoping “market forces” will reward kinder designs.

7.2. Price in the harm big cars cause

If a vehicle takes up more space, causes more road wear, and poses more risk, it should simply be more expensive to store and operate in dense cities:

• Weight- and length-based registration fees. Charge more each year for heavier and longer vehicles, especially in urban ZIP codes.
• Progressive residential parking permits. First small car: cheap or free. Second giant SUV: expensive. Extra tiers for oversized pickups that don’t actually fit standard spaces.
• Insurance premiums that reflect external risk. If your vehicle’s design puts other people at higher risk, your insurance should cost more, even if your airbags and crumple zones make you safer.

You don’t have to ban big trucks outright. You just have to stop subsidizing them and start reflecting their true social cost.

7.3. Build for humans first, not trucks

Finally, there’s the design of the street itself:

• Lower default speed limits on urban streets, especially where the vehicle fleet is heavy. Energy scales with the square of speed; shaving even 10 km/h off typical speeds drastically reduces the lethality of any collision.
• Narrower lanes, more protection. Physically protected bike lanes and crossings reduce conflict between big vehicles and vulnerable road users. It’s much harder for an SUV to “just drift” into a protected lane than a painted one.
• Design for smaller vehicles. Encourage cargo bikes, microcars, and vans by giving them access, storage, and charging that oversized pickups simply don’t fit. Make it easier to drive something reasonable than something absurd.

None of these measures will kill car culture. What they will do is reward people who choose vehicles that fit into a humane city, and discourage vehicles that turn every street into a low-speed demolition derby.

8. Shrinking the car to grow our freedom

We’re used to thinking that “more car” equals “more freedom.” More power, more room, more metal around you. But in a city, every extra inch of car takes freedom away from somebody else; the kid trying to cross the street, the cyclist squeezed into the gutter, the bus stuck behind a wall of trucks.

Big cars are a kind of pollution, just as real as exhaust: a pollution of risk and space.

Yes, if you’re stuck in a car-dependent suburb where everyone drives an SUV, buying your own feels like self-defense. And yes, if you ride a bike through that environment, a car-horn-loud device like a Loud Mini can feel like a sane upgrade. Those are understandable choices given the rules of today’s game.

The point is to change the game.

A city where small cars, bikes, and pedestrians can coexist peacefully is not a fantasy; it already exists in much of Europe and in pockets of North America. Getting there doesn’t require hating cars. It requires right-sizing them, and then designing streets where, as Not Just Bikes likes to say, you don’t need a car at all for most daily trips.

The smaller the cars, the bigger the freedom for everyone who isn’t inside one.

Footnotes

Sources

• International Energy Agency. “Growing preference for SUVs challenges emissions reductions in passenger car market” (2019); and “SUVs are setting new sales records each year – and so are their emissions” (2024).
• Auto Innovators Association. Reading the Meter sales snapshot, August 21, 2025.
• Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). “Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians” (2023).
• National Safety Council. “Road to Zero: Oversized Passenger Vehicle Safety Risks” (2024).
• Kids and Car Safety. Frontovers fact sheet and data resources.
• Niko Kommenda. “SUVs second biggest cause of emissions rise, figures reveal”. The Guardian (2019).
• Transport & Environment. Reporting on bonnet height trends and calls for EU/UK limits, summarized in coverage such as The Times’ “SUVs drive up bonnet heights in ‘threat’ to children.”
• CarSized.com and TrueCar comparison tools for dimensional data on Cadillac Escalade and Toyota Corolla models.
• Not Just Bikes. “The Insane Rise of SUVs” (YouTube video and transcript), used here as inspiration and background on SUV history and marketing tactics.
• Loud Bicycle. Loud Mini product page, as an example of car-horn-loud bike horns emerging in response to increasingly hostile traffic environments.