As the SUV Alliance we want to see a reduction in the number of large cars and SUVs on the UK’s roads. However, we do understand that larger cars can be preferable to disabled people and those with impaired mobility. The larger interior of an SUV may be more comfortable, easier to get into and out of, or perhaps just has more room for mobility aids and other equipment.

What do we think about when we say “vehicle safety”? Vehicle safety is often invoked in adverts for cars, where “5-star” safety ratings are proudly displayed and imagery shows the driver and passengers protected from harm by savvy technologies.. 

The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) has written to the Wimbledon tennis organising committee, the AELTC, questioning the use of large Range Rover SUVs as official vehicle during the tournament, and offering use of black cabs as a safer and more sustainable alternative.

British drivers significantly underestimate the road danger risks of SUVs, and providing more information does little to change drivers’ plans to buy SUVs in future, according to new research. This strengthens calls for tougher restrictions such as higher taxes or design limits on SUVs and larger cars.

The SUV Alliance responded to the Committee’s call for evidence ahead of the hearing. Our response is summarised below and can be read in full here. But let’s first take a look at what some other organisations had to say on the question of growing vehicle size.

The grassroots group Bristol Against Carspreading launched earlier this year to build popular support for measures to tackle carspreading in the city.

Members of the SUV Alliance, alongside allies, signed a letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan earlier this month, calling for swift action on carspreading. The letter was prompted by the publication of London’s Vision Zero Action Plan 2 which took firm aim at larger cars and SUVs as a growing source of road danger in the capital.

A new report from SUV Alliance member Transform Scotland centres the challenge of tackling carspreading within the wider context of improving kerbside space. This helps us see carspreading in the bigger picture and opens up new policy approaches to address its harms.

Large cars and SUVs are squarely in the cross hairs for Transport for London and the Mayor of London in their updated action plan for achieving zero road deaths within the capital by 2041.

Following campaigning from the SUV Alliance, the newly published Road Safety Strategy, the government’s first such strategy in a decade, includes commitments to ‘understand safety concerns regarding increasing vehicle size’.

With more and more larger cars on UK roads, pressure on that humblest of public goods - the parking space - is growing. A typical on-street parking bay measures 2.4 metres wide and 4.8 metres long, yet in 2024 over half of new cars sold were either too wide or too long to fit in such a space.

Heavier cars offer limited safety gains for occupants, but do put other road users at higher risk, according to a new study from the US-based IIHS.

“We urge health professionals, as opinion leaders in society, to raise their voices in supporting the health and environmental case for policy action.”

Cardiff is the UK’s first council to introduce weight-based parking charges, a key ask of the SUV Alliance manifesto.

The Swiss city of Zurich this month voted, by popular referendum, to introduce higher parking charges for heavier cars, making it the latest European city to act against carspreading in this way.

Clean Cities and The SUV Alliance were proud to host the Reversing Carspreading conference in September 2025. The conference brought together the growing movement against larger cars to look at how we can take action locally and nationally over the next year.

A new framework for trade agreed between the EU and US risks watering down EU road safety standards and flooding EU roads with large, dangerous US trucks and pick-ups.

As of 6 April this year, anyone who owns or leases a double cab pick-up truck – i.e. a truck that can carry the driver plus four passengers – will be paying a lot more tax. This is because HMRC re-classified a double cab pick-up truck as a car, rather than a commercial vehicle. Commercial vehicles enjoy certain advantages, like a flat, lower rate of benefit in kind (BIK) deductions for employees.

In 2024, 3,696 people were killed or seriously injured on London’s roads. Each one is a tragedy, and each one was preventable. At least, that’s the motivating principle of London’s Vision Zero strategy, an ambitious goal to eliminate road deaths and serious injuries in the capital to zero by 2041.

The latest study on SUV road danger has concluded that being hit by an SUV as opposed to a passenger car increases fatality risk and injury severity among pedestrians and cyclists, with the strongest effect in children.