It’s the car of the future. It’s taking off in markets all over the world.
The electric vehicle? Hardly. It is the sport utility vehicle, the rugged, off-road gas-guzzler that America invented and the world increasingly loves to drive.
With incomes rising and gas prices low, drivers in China and other countries are ditching their smaller sedans for bigger rides at a rapid pace. For the first time, S.U.V.s and their lighter, more car-like cousins known as “crossovers” made up more than one in three cars sold globally last year, almost tripling their share from just a decade ago, according to new figures from the auto research firm JATO Dynamics.
“Everyone is jumping on S.U.V.s,” said Matthew Waiss, JATO Dynamics’ president for North America.
The ascent of S.U.V.s and crossovers is already slowing progress in reining in emissions from the world’s cars and trucks, major emitters of the gases that are warming the planet. Transportation accounts for an estimated 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with cars and trucks making up the biggest share.
Between 2005 and 2008, the average fuel economy of new cars worldwide improved by about 1.8 percent a year, according to the United Nations’ Global Fuel Economy Initiative. But since then, that pace has slowed to 1.1 percent in 2015, the latest data available, far below the near 3-percent clip needed to simply stabilize emission from the world’s car fleet.
There are no signs that trend has improved since then, said Anup Bandivadekar, who heads the passenger vehicle program at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit institute affiliated with the United Nations initiative. “It’s making progress in fuel economy increasingly difficult,” he said.
The global S.U.V. boom is a roadblock in the march toward cleaner cars, which has been aided by advances in fuel-saving technology and hybrid or electric vehicles. Compared with smaller cars, S.U.V.s are less efficient, generally by about 30 percent.
S.U.Vs are also less likely to go electric soon. There are technical hurdles to powering a larger car with batteries, and the perception among many automakers remains that drivers of S.U.V.s value power and performance, and don’t want to be constrained by the range anxiety of battery-powered cars.
For the moment. Tesla’s Model X is the only major fully electric S,U.V on the market. The company has sold about 40,000 since they went on sale in 2015.
The S.U.V-building bonanza contrasts with promises made by automakers of big investments in electric vehicles and other low-emitting vehicles. At the same time, they are pouring resources into far more polluting S.U.V.s.
General Motors, which unveiled its Chevy Bolt electric car in 2016, has sold about 25,000 of them in the United States, and the model hasn’t received updates that might spur sales this year. This month, though, the automaker announced it was spending $265 million to build its new Cadillac XT4 crossover at its plant in Kansas City, Kan.
General Motors continues to invest in clean car technology, including all-electric cars, a spokeswoman, Laura Toole, said. “It’s encouraging to see overall industry fuel economy improving ? especially given the significant market shift to crossover and S.U.Vs,”? she said in an email.
Volkswagen made no S.U.V.s to speak of a decade ago, plans to sell almost 20 new S.U.V. models worldwide by 2020 and expects those models to make up 40 percent of its global sales. Currently, Volkswagen sells just four S.U.V. models.
A Volkswagen spokeswoman, Jeannine Ginivan, said the company’s S.U.V.s were filled with technology that bolsters the car’s efficiency.
The S.U.V’s global dominance today has roots in the United States of the 1970s, when automakers started confronting stricter auto-safety and environmental rules. Authorized by a Clean Air Act amendment to set federal tailpipe rules for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency required automakers to more than double their average fuel efficiency over the following decade. But vans, pickup trucks and other off-road vehicles escaped with fewer restrictions than traditional passenger cars.
Detroit’s riposte: Turn the truck into America’s new family car.
The Jeep Cherokee became an early runaway hit ? a “versatile family fun machine that has the ruggedness, reliability and go-anywhere heritage Jeep vehicles are known for,” declares the brochure for its 1974 model ? leading the way for others to turn working vehicles into family rides. Cherokees and Ford Explores soon began replacing smaller cars on driveways across America. In North America, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks outsell all other car categories combined.
The vehicles are now particularly popular in China, where the big cars have offered a sense of status, stability on bumpy roads, and room for larger families emerging with the phasing out of the one-child policy. McKinsey, the global consulting firm, predicts that by 2022, one in every two cars in China will be an S.U.V. That could make it tougher for China to tame its urban air-pollution crisis.
Even western Europe ? where in 2004, Ken Livingstone, who was mayor of London at the time, declared S.U.V. drivers “complete idiots” and threatened to charge them 25 pounds, or about $35 at current exchange rates, to enter the city ? has fallen for these vehicles. Sales of S.U.Vs in that region have more than doubled over the last five years, a clip four times as fast as the overall market, according to JATO data.
Automakers have a strong financial incentive to build and try to sell more S.U.V.s, which tend to be higher-end offerings with luxury trimmings that command premiums over the basic vehicles they based on. A $60,000 truck, for example, can generate tens of thousands of dollars in operating profit.
On the other hand, most automakers still lose money on each electric vehicle they sell. The credit rating firm Moody’s recently warned that electric vehicles will likely generate low returns for automakers through the early 2020s.
Automakers point out that the bulk of the global growth has been in crossovers, which are based on car underbodies (not trucks) and achieve better fuel economy than larger S.U.Vs. Current E.P.A. rules remain ambiguous on whether crossovers are cars or trucks, allowing manufacturers to still classify many models as trucks, evading tougher fuel economy rules.
Crossovers have also been harmful to overall emissions goals because goals because market research shows that many first-time buyers of crossovers had previously driven cleaner, smaller sedans.
More recent regulations have not helped. Fuel economy standards around the world tend to become more lenient as car weight and size increase. That means S.U.V.s typically do not have to meet as strict a fuel-efficiency standard as smaller cars do.
In the United States, automakers have now come full circle. They point to the shift toward larger cars as a reason to push back tougher fuel regulations that they agreed to, under the Obama administration, in return for a federal bailout of billions of dollars at General Motors and Chrysler.
One question that worries experts: Will the world embrace the S.U.V.’s even-more-polluting cousin, the all-American pickup truck?
There are signs this is already happening. Last year, Ford sold more than one million F-series pickup trucks ? a fifth of them outside the United States ? putting it within striking distance of unseating Toyota’s Corolla as the world’s best-selling vehicle, according to tallies from JATO and Toyota.
A Ford spokeswoman, Dawn McKenzie, said that trucks had “moved from being seen as only relevant for work” to “being much more versatile,” and that recent models had made strides in fuel economy. The most fuel-efficient F-series model gets about 25 miles per gallon on the highway, though a new model this year could get closer to 30 miles a gallon.
The trucks, which cater to drivers looking for power and hauling might, are unlikely to go electric soon. One of the few hybrid choices right now is the Workhorse, a hybrid pickup made by an Ohio company that specialized in fleet vehicles. Workhorse says it has received about 5,000 orders so far for the truck, which goes about 80 miles on a full battery charge.
“It seems to be an American male thing to think: ‘I may want to haul things,’” said Lewis Fulton, who co-directs the sustainable transportation program at the University of California, Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies. “If that caught on in other countries, it really wouldn’t help.”
