Warnings about risks to pedestrians do not deter SUV buyers, concludes a British study that suggests that financial penalties will be necessary to reduce the number of large vehicles on the roads.
Drivers informed about the safety risks that SUVs pose to cyclists and pedestrians have a lot unlikely to give up of purchasing one of these vehicles, completed a new one.
The findings indicate that if governments want to reduce the number of large and dangerous vehicles on the roads, it will likely be necessary to resort to financial penaltiesaccording to the Swansea University psychologists who led the investigation.
Several studies have shown that sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and other private vehicles of similar dimensions, such as pickup trucks, are more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists than conventional cars.
Much of the risk results from your higher and less rounded frontsnotes the British newspaper .
One of the safety studies published at the beginning of the year concluded that, if an adult pedestrian is hit by an SUV, there is an additional 44% more likely to die than if the vehicle was a smaller car. In the case of childrenthis risk is 82% superior.
To test the extent to which this data influenced purchasing decisions, the study looked at a representative UK sample of more than 2,000 people, including conductors and non-conductorswhich were randomly divided into two groups.
Half of the sample saw one of three fictitious SUV advertisementswhich included a warning that the vehicle in question posed a “significantly increased risk of death” to pedestrians and cyclists. The remaining participants saw the same ads, but without the security warnings.
Both groups responded to questions about your knowledge of the risks associated with SUVs before and after seeing the advertisements. Among participants who saw the warnings, this level of knowledge rose from 35% to 54%.
But when the same people were asked whether they intended to buy an SUV, the proportion of those who responded affirmatively it fell only very slightly.
Compared to the group that saw conventional ads, they had only minus 3.7 percentage points of probability to keep the same decision after having seen the safety warnings.
The overall effect, as the authors pointed out, was negligible: 95% of people who said they wanted to buy an SUV maintained this decisiondespite having been informed of the risks.
The impact was almost equally reduced even among the subgroup of the sample who stated that the safety of vulnerable road users was an important factor in car choice. Among these participants, 86% kept their plans to buy an SUV.
Ian Walkerprofessor of Environmental Psychology at Swansea University and one of the study’s authors, has studied what he calls the “normalization of culture car” — the way people tend to evaluate car use based on criteria different from those applied to other areas of life.
“Buying the vehicle we want and driving it wherever and whenever we want, without having to think about the consequences for other people, has become something normalized and rooted in our society over decades,” he stated.
“So it’s not surprising that there is a growing body of evidence showing that asking or encouraging people to drive differently doesn’t work, and that stronger interventions will be needed if governments want to take this problem seriously.”
“This will almost certainly includes having a more honest conversation about how driving, however useful it is for those who drive, imposes harm on other people.”
At a time when the SUVs now represent almost 60% of sales of new cars in Europe, some cities have started to respond to the difficulties these vehicles pose, which also include higher emissions due to their greater weight.
Paris tripled parking fees for SUV in 2024, after a vote among residents. London’s transport authority, Transport for London, is considering impose additional taxes on SUVs in the British capital, partly due to the greater risks they pose to third parties.
