Top 3 reasons why cars are getting bigger

It may not have escaped your attention that new cars seem to be getting bigger, from the slightly portly to the morbidly obese, this is a phenomenon that seems to be…pardon the pun…growing!

UK roads are not known for their generous proportions, neither are our parking spaces for that matter so why on earth do new cars keep getting bigger and heavier?

The 2020 Landrover Defender is 16% wider and 12% heavier than it’s predecessor.

The 2019 BMW 3 Series’ weight grew by an astonishing 42% with it’s waist band now some 27% wider than in the 1983 model.

1) Safety

Nowadays cars have crumple zones and are fitted with a raft of safety technology which all needs somewhere to live. Those multiple airbags need space and weight a bit too but they make your car a far safer place to be compared to cars of previous generations.

2) Big = Better

This really began with the dawn of the SUV era but people now want large cars, if most people had the option of choosing between a Ford Fiesta or a Ford Kuga they’d take the Kuga, often for fairly shallow reasons. We somehow feel that bigger cars are better, and say more about us and how successful we are. People have also become accustomed to the higher driving position often offered by larger cars as we’ve become far more familiar with driving in SUV’s.

3) We are more demanding

We, the car-buying public, demand more and more of our cars, not only do we want comfort, we want performance, we want MPG/range, we want space for a month’s worth of luggage and we want a 0-60 time of <6 seconds. The side effect of this is car growth, EV and Hybrid technology means we need to find room for batteries and electric motors, for ICE-powered vehicles we need ever-increasing amounts of technology to produce a car that will perform up to standard, and gone are the days of roof racks, we want to be able to get 5 adults and 38 carry-on suitcases into a car or else “it’s not big enough”.

At the time of writing, I am considering how I only add to this issue as am certainly guilty of point 3 myself. The times are changing folks but if we don’t put a lid on things we’ll get to the point where some parts of the country are almost unpassable by 4-wheeled traffic, and your local supermarket car-park will resemble day-one registration at fat camp.

It’s not all doom and gloom, micro cars are now also becoming “a thing” and will surely become more popular for inner-city dwellers in years to come as parking space becomes more scarce and nipping around city streets becomes more difficult.

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