Mad At You 'Cause Your Car's Too Big

Christian Wolmar, writing in the Guardian and reprinted in last week's The Week points to an interesting trend in the growing size of cars in Europe, which are growing a centimetre wider on average every two years, and there's genuinely no law stopping them until they reach the legal width of an actual lorry.

So your neighbour's SUV is legally permitted to keep bulking up until it's the same width as an HGV, because nobody thought to write a rule that said "maybe don't." SUVs now comprise 30% of cars in England's cities, compared with just 3% 20 years ago — a tenfold increase in two decades, achieved not because we suddenly all became farmers or started towing horseboxes, but because manufacturers make more margin on a big car than a small one. This isn't really a story about consumer taste. It's a story about profit dressed up as choice.

And the parking space math is brutal: around half of new cars sold are now too wide for the minimum on-street parking space in many countries, with the average new car creeping from 177.8cm to 180.3cm wide in just five years.

I personally would not call this evolution, it's more of an arms race nobody agreed to enter, fought entirely at the expense of pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone trying to reverse into a space built for a Nissan Micra.

Someone else is already paying for this

The bit of the article that really got me was the tax comparison, because it turns out this is one of those areas where Britain has quietly decided to be the world's doormat. A BMW X5 bought in France racks up an acquisition tax bill roughly 32 times higher than the equivalent UK charge, and a UK buyer of an X5-style SUV pays around £3,200 in VED against £66,600 for the same car in France. France has built a weight-based "malus" specifically to punish exactly this kind of car, while we've built... nothing. We've built a tax system that essentially subsidises the vehicles most likely to kill a child if it hits one, and most likely to eat two extra parking bays doing it, and, more mundanely, more likely to do damage to our roads.

I don't think Sadiq Khan's flirtation with extra parking charges for SUVs is radical. I think it's the absolute minimum, and it's mildly embarrassing that a mayor floating a modest parking surcharge counts as bold policy in 2026.

Final Thoughts

What strikes me most is how normalised "carspreading" has become — we've collectively decided that the correct response to increasingly dangerous, increasingly enormous private vehicles is a shrug, while cyclists get lectured about high-vis jackets. Wolmar's right that advertising restrictions and a proper weight tax would do more in a year than a decade of strongly worded council motions. Until then, enjoy squeezing out of your car door sideways in Tesco car park, because apparently that's just how it is now.

Sources: Guardian/Week coverage via No2NuclearPower; Fleet News, "Half of new cars too wide for parking spaces"; ETA, "£50k pollution tax on large SUVs in France"; Transport & Environment UK, "UK still a tax haven for big, polluting SUVs"