How the automobile industry turned us into SUV drivers. Automakers focus on bigger vehicles amid lenient emissions regulations, higher profit margins.Andre Mayer and Emily Chung · CBC News ·Jun 24, 2024 Despite the higher price tag, SUV and truck sales have grown exponentially in North America in recent decades, eclipsing sedans in the process. SUVs and trucks now represent 86 percent of vehicle sales in Canada. Last August, Paul Marriott emailed CBC's What on Earth? newsletter to share his frustration buying a vehicle. In looking to replace his 2006 Toyota Matrix, a compact hatchback, the Ontario resident had detected a pattern. "It is impossible to buy a new small car," he wrote. "Gone are the Honda Fit, the Toyota Yaris, GM Spark, Nissan Versa, Ford Fiesta, etc. Apparently, people only want SUVs."According to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, 86 per cent of all vehicles sold in Canada in May were classified as SUVs or pickup trucks. And Europe and Asia have developed a greater taste for them, too.But the ubiquity of SUVs and trucks isn't an accurate reflection of what people want to drive, say industry analysts. The trend has been greatly influenced by a combination of savvy marketing, government regulations that incentivize bigger vehicles and limited supply of more modest ones. Indeed, much of it is driven by one simple economic fact. "Smaller cars are less profitable," said Stephanie Brinley, associate director at U.S.-based transportation consultancy S&P Global Mobility. In recent years, auto manufacturers have phased out many smaller vehicles, citing weak demand, in favour of an ever-growing array of SUVs and light trucks. Not only do they cost more to purchase and fill up, but they are having an outsize effect on global warming. As the International Energy Agency points out, if SUVs were a country, they would be the fifth-biggest emitter of CO2. Vehicles have not only become bigger, but around 2015, SUVs and trucks for the first time outsold sedans in the U.S. and Canada. In 2018, Ford announced it would no longer make compact vehicles like the Fusion, Focus and Fiesta in North America anymore, leaning even more heavily into SUVs, crossovers and trucks. "You could make an argument: how much of it is consumer demand and how much of it is manufacturer push?" said David Adams, president and CEO of the Global Automakers of Canada. One of the reasons we got here is government regulation. In response to the 1970s oil crisis, the U.S. government introduced a number of measures ostensibly intended to reduce gasoline usage. One of them was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard.
But instead of increasing the fuel economy of every model equally, it required automakers to increase the average fuel economy across their fleets. This created a two-tier system, where smaller cars balanced out the relatively poor fuel economy of larger ones. The result was that SUVs remained a going concern despite high oil prices, and once oil prices dropped in the early '80s, consumers showed a greater propensity for light trucks......read on https://www.cbc.ca/news/suv-