repeat after me : FUCK SUVs
You live in a city ? There’s plenty of vehicle options, none of which needs to be an SUV
You live in the countryside ? Buy a goddamn pickup truck that can actually go offroad
SUVs are a plague, stop shoving this abomination down our throats !
How much time is spent off road. I have never seen a legitimate use case for pickups. They are worse vans. I had a 1.6l diesel van for ten years, never found myself in a situation where I thought a pickip would be preferable.
SUVs are luxury comfort and space, its preference as much as I hate them.
In a world of fuel efficiency (and range) being a prime seller … I cannot fathom why low profile saloons (and estates) are not more of a thing. Surely a lighter bodied lower profile vehicle has less drag and therefore better range and efficiency. Surely.
We’re just marketed and, more importantly people are still buying, these bloody great big heavy SUVs with bugger all space inside.
People who buy brand new cars tend to be older and probably are anticipating getting back or other mobility issues before they eventually sell the car. I think that could be a contributing factor.
Fully agree, I also have safety concerns (if they hit you, you’re going underneath, not over the top) and driver competency concerns (i’d probably have more vehicle categories for testing, I find it ridiculous that someone learns in a nissan Micra and then goes out and buys a land rover and that’s just fine, the vehicle is much larger, the amount of vans that have hit my fence because they can’t turn around easily in my cul-de-sac is getting ridiculous, I’d also like to shout out the fucking moron who bumped his suv onto the cycle path the other day without looking causing me to have to break really hard because I nearly ran into the thing, he wasn’t a good enough driver to turn it around on the road, I did shout at him he should think about getting a smaller car that he can actually handle)
if they hit you, you’re going underneath, not over the top
I don’t really understand American car categories, such as SUV, but anyway, older models of the Nissan Leaf have done well in the “Vulnerable Road Users” (VRU) part of crash tests, with the most recent model on the Euro NCAP site scoring 71% in the VRU Protection category.
That’s the 2018 model, so quite old. I wouldn’t expect this latest model to perform much worse than that though and I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs even better. Here’s the side view - it doesn’t look as low and angled at the front as the 2018 model, but you can still see that it’s been designed with not killing pedestrians in mind:
Looks like a kiddie killer to me, bonnet is way too high, can’t see shit out the back.
Looks fugly to boot.
Ever more restrictive crash regs from the EU have reduced the size of the glass house on modern cars and required that the bonnet is higher to protect both the cars occupants but also pedestrians. There is actual science behind it. It’s not the same as the pretty much unregulated American monster trucks.
I do however agree that this should have stayed a small hatch back and not morphed into a SUV.
