(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 592: New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies

This week we’re joined by Sofia Navas and James Nix of the NGO Transport & Environment to talk about their recent report: Ever Bigger? Car Size at a Crossroads. We discuss the increasing size of vehicles and why they keep growing. The safety issues that are tied to vehicle size increases, and the amount of parking and public space that could be lost.

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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

We’ll start with Sophia, and then we’ll go with James.

During my childhood and young adulthood, we had more bike lanes, and so I saw suddenly that it could be quite different from what it is, what it was before. And I think also through my parents, who went a lot on bikes, and it was always quite important to the safety, and I was very much pro-bike because it was just as a child, you cannot drive a car, so all the freedom you get is through bikes or pedestrian, like walking.

So I think I got quite interested into that, and transport issues in general I think is quite important because it just shapes our lives fundamentally. So yeah, and climate issues in general was something that also interests me quite early on, so I decided to study transport and environment.

I was in Munich. I was working in landscaping, and I needed to be at a different location in the city almost every morning for my employer, and the Munich U-Bahn was just amazing. With one change, I could be almost anywhere in the city. That’s going back now to the year 2000. When I returned then to Dublin, I decided to do a, a master’s in transport planning and, yeah, I’ve worked in, in this space since then.

And then, yeah, picking up on Sophia’s point about child mobility, I cycled to school from the age of seven or eight, and I would hold my head in my hands now at the idea that I could let our eight-year-old or six-year-old cycle alone. Um, you know, something that was possible, eminently possible in the late 1980s, um, seeming almost crazy now.

And yeah, I mean, you’ll hear thousands of those stories across everywhere cars are found, but, uh, vehicles are found.

But it’s interesting because even in, I grew up in Bakersfield, when I was little, I walked to school. My mom let me walk to school, and I can’t even imagine allowing my daughter when she gets to third grade- Mm … uh, to walk by herself, even if we’re, we’re in San Francisco, and so it’s, it’s actually very walkable here, and you could probably take Muni most places.

But it’s interesting to think of, like, where we were in the, like you said, in the 1980s and where we are now in, in terms of what we allow children to do, but, you know, the free range aspect of it all is interesting. And I’m interested to hear that that’s the same way in Europe as it is here in the United States, too.

There’s no maximum width that’s appropriate to cars. Uh, there is a limit of all vehicles. I mean, it’s the truck and bus limit, two and a half meters wide or slightly wider for a refrigerated truck. Bonnet height or total vehicle height, no limits.

But, um, yeah, so that’s a huge regulatory gap, and it’s something we’ve focused attention on. In the 1990s, it was realized there was a need for truck and bus limits because what was happening with trucks and buses at that time was the vehicle makers just continually made ever wider models. This was impacting motorway use in particular.

It was impacting urban mobility. It was impacting stoppages and, and delays on street. So those, those limits have proven very useful, and in many ways we’re reasoning by analogy saying, “Okay, this worked for trucks and buses, and the man- manufacturers embraced it.” I mean, it, it was helpful to them because it stopped this, you know, ever wider chase, and that’s something since early 2024 we’ve, we’ve been calling for on, on cars, and then the other dimensions since then as well.

I began to notice it particularly on Brussels one-way streets. We have what, what are called bike contraflow, and an oncoming vehicle, a new oncoming vehicle leaves the cyclist very, very little room, let’s say two meters wide, rather than an older model, which would be 1.8. As a cyclist, you really miss that 20 centimeters, and of course, if the parked cars are also wider, you’re looking at a cumulative loss across the street width, and that really adds up.

In practice, it, it means as a cyclist, for your own safety, you need to stop or risk getting whacked on the fingers by the mirror of the oncoming vehicle. So yeah, we were, I suppose, deep in CO2 regulation here, climate regulation in the early 2020s. I think we were focused so heavily on that we didn’t start work on vehicle size and car size until 2023, 2024.

We knew about the issue, but then it was also right, once we start this, we need to be able to follow it up. We need to be able to bring forward evidence-based policy recommendations and so on. So we began tracking it. I think we were conscious of the rise of SUVs from 2017, 2018 onwards, and then that trend becomes heavily confirmed in the early 2020s, and then we begin policy-focused recommendations to counteract it from ’23, ’24 onwards.

I’m curious what it was like in, in Europe specifically.

And we saw that particularly as we emerged from the, the last economic crash. And the car makers, I think they knew that they would sell fewer vehicles due to income constraints, and they, they wanted to make the average size larger. So they put the marketing money behind that with colleagues in France who did some very good work on this.

And each SUV sold was accompanied by 2,300 or 2,400 euros worth of advertising per vehicle. So this astonishing amount of money invested effectively in convincing the consumer that they needed this very large vehicle. And then, yeah, we’ve a colleague in Paris who’s, who’s written a book on this, and, uh, we don’t have a good word in English, but in French it’s like imaginaire.

So it’s, uh, bringing the consumer into this imaginary world where they are convinced that actually sitting in this large SUV will give them the freedom that they see on the ads. You know, they’re on a mountaintop, they’re in this, uh, you know- … they’ve, they’ve just climbed, yeah, they’ve completed this great outdoor pursuit.

They are in the, in the wild countryside, open air. So it’s, yeah, it’s harking back to these, I suppose, deeply ingrained desires for, for open spaces and, and nature and wildlife and conquer and… And then if you Europeanize that figure, you end up somewhere in the region of 18 or 20 billion on SUV advertising across the E- across the EU and UK.

Yeah, if you multiply it up of today’s SUV sales. So astonishing figures. And then, you know, you never see an SUV ad, an SUV in traffic. It’s an SUV in, accompanied by all the characteristics that we link to freedom. So I think, yeah, the advertising. And then of course then when you sit into a car with much more elbow room and, you know, I contrast the cars of the ’80s were in the passenger seat, you had to tuck your elbow down so t- to give the driver more freedom.

And we do that every time we take a flight. You know, if you’re in the middle seat, if you’re, if you’re in any seat of an airplane, you must be respectful of your neighboring passenger and generally tuck one elbow down. But what you see i- in the central console of most cars now is, is a 20 or 30 centimeter wide double armrest, and this, you know, we’ve allowed car makers to put the elbow comfort of car passengers above the public good, ’cause that’s effectively the key difference in width terms when you look into a small car versus looking into a luxury SUV.

It’s that elbow room and that central elbow room. And as I say, we, as a society, we don’t expect it on flights, but we are at risk of coming to expect it in cars. So yeah, there’s also, once there were a number of models here in, in Europe, the Nissan Qashqai is often credited as one of them, which become somewhat game changers where other vehicle makers then decide, “Okay, that’s selling so well, we need a model that responds to that.”

And yeah, there are many other examples since. But then SUV-ization becomes something that car makers embrace as a whole. They all chase it. They then want to out-compete and offer slightly more than the other vehicle maker has just offered with its new model and, and on it goes.

I know here in the United States, for example, Volkswagen basically got rid of their standard Golf. Some companies have gotten rid of their sedans altogether and just went straight SUV. So they’ve actually, like, limited their offerings so people can’t even buy a smaller car anymore. It’s not possible.

BMW has no compliant models. So yeah, it’s the same, and both of those companies would probably argue that there’s been some US market influence there, because they want to sell… You know, take the BMW X Series SUVs, they make the 1 and the 2, the X1 and X2 in Europe. All the larger ones, X3 to X7 inclusive, they make in the US.

They want to sell on both sides of the Atlantic, and they will say that that gives them greater volumes, et cetera, et cetera. And Mercedes is probably in quite a similar situation with the GL SUVs, and then they’re leaving the smaller cars behind.

It’s a bit fuzzy at the edges, but… So segment A cars are small, and segment E cars are very luxurious, and also typically larger. And so what we see is that, okay, some car makers, they simply don’t have cars. They market under segment A and B, so they just have large premium cars or big cars. But then what we also see over the past 25 years is that within segment A and B, the dimensions also increased over the past 25 years.

So also just the typically small cars are not the same small what we saw 25 years ago.

It’s crazy how the difference in size-

And we’ve not had a significant change in those side impact rules since then. So, you know, any of the width increases after that are not safety related. And the vehicle makers, it’s the first go-to response. They say, “Oh, it’s linked to safety after 2012, 2013.” No, it isn’t. And that’s also shown by if we take the Fiat 500, which continues to sell in reasonably good volumes across Europe, looking at maybe 1.7, 1.65, 1.7 meters wide, it complies with all the applicable safety standards, but it doesn’t need to be two meters wide or more.

So I think that’s an important point to bring home that it’s these luxury changes, these very generous elbow rests and wider seating, more comfortable, luxurious seating that’s driving certainly the width increases.

Certainly all of the cities with Victorian streetscapes b- built in the, the late 1800s, early 1900s. And it was a very, one of the street widths we took, a 7.3 meters wide, that’s 24 feet if you’re working in i- Imperial measurements. And you know that, that’s a common street width used in the 1800s here in Europe, and now it just about works as a one-way street with two lanes of parallel or end-to-end parking, one vehicle lane.

But the contraflow cycle lane is, is now in jeopardy due to ever wider cars. And some of our infographics explore that issue where the cyclist is effectively forced to stop for their own safety.

But the fact that you guys came up with the numbers that show that larger cars mean less parking, and even though we wanna move that direction where you have less parking, we don’t want it to be because the cars get bigger so there’s less space for every other use that you would wanna have on a street, including bike lanes, public space, whatever else it might be.

And so we extrapolated this trend to 2040 and asked ourselves what happens with our public space in the scenario where we just continue with this linear trend in all of these dimensions? And what we saw is that compared to the parking situation today, that is already freaking out some car drivers, uh, we European cities are set to lose 8.5 to 14% of car parking space.

So this is interesting because we are also, like city planners, they are constantly fighting if they are, if they want to, as Paris, make a city more livable with planting more greenery or making just more space for pedestrians and the people that live in the city. It’s always a huge fight. But then if we look at the loss of public space that we’re currently seeing, the car fleet is quietly eating our public space away, and this is not decided in a city hall, but just in the showrooms, and we are buying this, and this we believe should stop by going back to dimensions that we call reasonable, and this is our right sizing scenario which we advocate for.

So when we look to the trends, the length increase, it’s running at about 1.2 centimeters every year. So each new year, each year of new car sales is 1.2 centimeters longer than the previous year of sales. And again, the average width also increasing, and that’s increasing by half a centimeter, so each new year of sales is on average half a centimeter wider than the previous year of sales.

And then it’s the same dimensions, so a half centimeter increase for bonnet height and total vehicle height, both increasing by half a centimeter a year. And when we look at individual models, and sometimes they’re reviewed or renewed every three, four years, sometimes it’s seven or eight years, and sometimes they make no change to the dimensions.

Other times, the next generation model is six or seven centimeters wider than the previous generation. But what’s really curious is that when we average all that out, we keep coming back to these same numbers. Within manufacturers, across manufacturers, it’s half a centimeter with the width, and it’s, it’s 1.2 centimeters with the length.

But yeah, this privatization of public space goes almost undiscussed. And, uh, yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that point because we, we would never allow — We haven’t calculated globally, you know, how many millions of football pitches this is or how many, you know, however you want to express it, but, uh, it will run to millions, and we never talk about it.

So here in my neighborhood in San Francisco, you can’t go a street without seeing a Zoox or a Waymo or, you know, one of those vehicles driving around without a driver. And so they’re taking up space too because they’re existing without drivers and existing without passengers for, you know, half of their trips or half of their time that they’re on the road.

So we’re seeing this kind of reorganization or at least re, like, colonization of space- Mm-hmm … uh, by these vehicles, and even the size of vehicles themselves, and they, they continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so there are so many different angles at which we’re seeing the amount of public space deteriorate.

In the US, it would certainly be categorized as a small car. It’s selling particularly well and, and Renault had to, here in Europe, and Renault had to increase the factory output just to keep pace with, with demand. It’s a cute car, and it’s kind of caught the imagination here, and I think its, its popularity is pushing other manufacturers, particularly Stellantis, which owns Fiat and, and Peugeot, and a handful of other marques here in Europe, to, um, to consider the small car again.

So that may be the beginning of a pushback, but the proposals are going through the European Parliament right now And the member states are also going to come to their conclusion, and then negotiations follow. So it’s gonna take some time before the exact definition is finalized and before we see the, the cities be able to, to incentivize them and countries be able to support them through, through tax reform.

I mean, Sophia touched on it earlier, cities like, like Paris, and there’s about a dozen European cities at the moment that have some form of parking regulation, which is intended to support smaller cars and discourage the larger ones. And it’s typically done by, by weight or size. If the car weighs more than 1.6 or more than 1.6 ton for a petrol model, two tons for an electric model, for example, then they’re charged a higher parking fee.

And then sometimes it’s done by dimensions. And in Germany, for example, the width and the length of the vehicle are put on the vehicle registration certs, so the city authorities can get the footprint of the car and say, “Okay, if your footprint is more than X meters, then you, you need to pay more for your annual residential parking permit.”

We would encourage more and more cities to do that. A number of boroughs in London are looking at it, and that could be a game changer because we’ve yet to see real action in, in the UK. It’s been good action, I think, in France and to a lesser extent in Germany. Zurich has also come on board in Switzerland.

So there’s certainly some momentum there, and I think these discussions and people’s own experiences on the street, that, that feeling of erosion, feeling elbowed out, out of the street, that’s certainly supporting those conversations in cities. But it’s slow. I mean, there’s also some action in North America on this, and Montreal has a weight-based parking tariff.

And I know there have been attempts in, in Washington and New York State to introduce some variation based on vehicle weight. And I think they, both of those states have, or certainly the counties within those states have been able to implement measures which make some difference. But yeah, the price level is often quite modest, so it’s the imp- the overall impact can be low.

But those conversations are starting, and that’s helpful.

And so it seems like that would be, you know, advantageous to move along that route towards trying to regulate vehicles and keep them smaller. It seems like also that electric vehicles are a perfect opportunity to make these changes because you don’t have the same design kind of limits that an internal combustion vehicle has, where you have to have an engine in the front or in the back of a vehicle.

It’s just, it acts as a range penalty. At the same time, there is also an attempt by the European vehicle makers, and I think it’s probably global, to capture the largest vehicle sizes, which means the largest SUVs. So we see a disproportionate amount of attention on larger vehicles when it comes to EVs.

But the attempt I mentioned earlier, what’s called the M1E initiative in the EU, that’s an attempt to rebalance that and try and get more of the smaller electrics. But yeah, I mean, the advantages are, you know, they, they run across the board and they touch particularly on resource efficiency because one of the issues there is is that if you have a very big car, you need a bigger battery.

We have very, very little battery making in Europe at the moment. There are attempts to change that, but the European vehicle makers aren’t gaining margin on the battery. So it’s an advantage to them if they can produce competitive smaller cars because the batteries generally here in Europe are coming from Asia.

Yeah, and aerodynamics and vehicle safety go hand in hand. You know, if there’s a low vehicle front, 70, 75 centimeters, that’s both aerodynamic and ideal for safety. Whereas if that vehicle front goes up to, you know, 85, uh, 90, 100 centimeters, very dangerous for pedestrians and a big no-no for aerodynamics.

So I think Renault is probably leading the way here and, and showing what can be done, and the other vehicle makers, particularly Stellantis, is kind of slowly waking up to what it could and should do to make small cars popular again and regain market share

Can you share a little bit about what you found in that respect?

So if it hits you at vital organs, so above your belly button, for example, then you will get knocked under the vehicle, and this is way more dangerous than if you get hit at the legs so that you fall onto the bonnet and get deflected to the side. So to put a couple of numbers on it, we found a study, um, Belgian study that found that a 10-centimeter increase in bonnet height is linked to a 27% increase in fatality risk for vulnerable road users.

And this is worse for children specifically. So there we found US data, um, that suggests that we have an 80% higher fatality risk per 10 centimeter of added bonnet height for child pedestrians. So with the trend that we’re seeing right now, we’re just making cars ever deadlier, and this is true for children and small adults as well.

And now we extrapolated this trend again, so we saw a 0.5 centimeter increase per year for new registrations over the past 25 years. So annually, 0.5 centimeter higher. And we extrapolated this to 2040 and wanted to see the difference in, or the added excess deaths that we see in this case, and we found that we see nearly 80 excess child deaths until 2040, and nearly 2,600 excess deaths for all vulnerable road users comparing this to a reasonable sizing scenario where we kind of bend the curve and go back to safer vehicle dimensions.

So this is really fundamental how we shape vehicles, and I think that’s a very important point of stress and also for policy makers to stop this trend.

It’s not necessarily like trying to get back down to where you’re like this super tiny vehicle anymore. But it seemed like something that policy makers would be more likely to a- adopt rather than, you know, kind of pushing it off as something that was impossible to do or the car makers lobbied against.

So we have now 2026, so we have 14 years to achieve dimensions we had 10 to 15 years ago, so it’s not unachievable, and not just not unachievable, I think quite possible if we act or if policy, if regulations act accordingly.

But effectively now, auto, you know, technologies in cars are avoiding a greater cohort of collisions than before. But when the hits do occur, when those impacts occur, they’re more severe, and the consequences for pedestrians are highly aggravated. And I think people instinctively realize that, and it is coming across in, in North American vehicle safety or pedestrian death data, and also in Australian pedestrian fatality data.

It’s not coming across so much in European data because we do have… That trend is being somewhat offset by mandatory rules which require more collision avoidance technology to be deployed on the car. But effectively, we’re kind of creating this giant lottery, and it’s that if the technology works, you’re saved.

But if it’s a wet day and, you know, there’s, there’s Swiss and, and Austrian research that shows that the automatic emergency braking often doesn’t deploy in any form of precipitation, so a snowy day, a wet day. It also doesn’t deploy in, in situations of poor light, like an underground car park often. So yeah, you- back to this giant lottery.

If the automatic emergency braking doesn’t work and you’re that poor child or, or poor adult in front of that car, your chances of survival are actually much reduced as compared to a much older and, and lower vehicle with a sloping front, for example

We’ve been talking about this specific stuff with collisions with vulnerable road users, with traffic deaths. Here in the United States, we kill 40,000 people a year with collisions. It’s frustrating, and, you know, on social media I see it all the time ’cause most of the folks I follow are all transportation planners that are urbanists, and so they post pictures of their kids standing in front of a huge truck where they don’t even come up to the grill.

And I live in a pretty safe city with very slow speeds and stuff like that, but it always just, like, that’s my biggest fear is just my daughter getting run over. And I have to tell her all the time, I was like, “These cars, you have to be careful.” And I hate having that conversation. I hate it ’cause I don’t wanna have to have it.

I don’t wanna have to tell her about stuff she should be afraid of.

It’s all about, you know, preserving the person that’s in the car, not necessarily outside the car, even though we have had rises in fatalities because of that here in the US for a whole bunch of reasons.

Mm-hmm. So it’s this double effect that if they do hit somebody, they’re more likely to kill them, but they’re more likely to come into a collision situation because the vision is impaired. And the only way is, you know, getting back to the conversation about incentivizing smaller vehicles and trying to reduce the flow onto the market of the huge vehicles.

And part of the car size program we, we run here is directed to trying to keep- Some of the biggest US pickup trucks out. I mean, we have this rule in Europe called individual vehicle approval. I mean, it goes back, it predates the formation of, of the EU or the EEC as it was

Or you might have a, a returning immigrant who lived in the US and they want to, for some reason, bring in their own car, or somebody who needs a specially adapted vehicle that is only made in California, for example. And, uh, that’s a great system in principle. But individual vehicle approval then, again, from the same period, since sort of 2015, 2016 onwards, Stellantis, which owns Ram Trucks, it spotted this and they thought, “Ah, this is interesting.”

And, uh, they, they teamed up with, uh, European importers and, and now they put more than 5,000 new Ram pickup trucks on European roads, even though they don’t comply with the European rules. So under individual vehicle approval, a lot of those rules are, are waived. So the pedestrian crash protection rules, even the climate rules.

The climate rules are waived, so the Ram pickup trucks emissions, about 320 grams per kilometer, they’re not counted. We’ve no clue if Ram trucks meet European air quality norms, ’cause they’re also largely waived. And then Stellantis or Ram blew their own cover actually quite recently because they started lobbying the White House-

to prevent… Yeah. Yeah. Here it goes. I mean, it’s- I know … stupid. But why they blew their own cover, that wasn’t a great- Because before that they were saying, “Oh, no, this is, this is European individuals. This is European individuals demanding these, uh, huge American pickup trucks.” But then, yeah, they blew their own cover.

They went into the White House, and they then got the White House to lobby the EU against tightening the individual vehicle approval rules so that they can continue to send the Rams to Europe. So yeah, watch this space. The saga is ongoing. Obviously the, uh, US-Canada trade war, um-

Thanks for that. That is- That’s where this is going. That’s where

It’s, like, these even larger vehicles.

And Rams, I think the margin on them is probably… Well, let’s, let’s just take the total sales cost, which I think is about 80,000 euro or above that. So that’s 400 million in total sales for Ram trucks in Europe, at least. So, you know, Ford will be then looking at this, and they’ll be thinking, “All right, well, why don’t we get a piece of this action under individual vehicle approval,” even though IVA was, was never intended for, for mass market vehicles.

So yeah, in that way too, US imports into Europe are also influencing the sales of what we call fully type or whole vehicle type approval. So you’ll probably be aware of the Land Rover models. So first they were intended as military vehicles. Land Rover Defender was a World War II model. Now it’s a very aggressive one-meter-tall vehicle built in the UK being sold into Europe and, um, is also, I imagine, influencing other vehicle makers to, to consider very large models.

So the truck effect, which, you know, you’ve seen very clearly in the US-

So 8.5 to 14% reduction is really huge, and I think a lot of cities don’t want this. And I think it’s an important figure because maybe this is a figure where some cities wake up and start doing something against it because we, we need top-down regulation, as we are also saying in our recommendations in the end, like widths cap or bonnet height cap regarding security, but I think we also need bottom-up pressure, and this is coming from cities.

And James already mentioned a couple of cities that are doing something against it, but I think we need more, and this is maybe a, a number where policy makers in cities could, uh, start thinking about that more.

I don’t think… We weren’t expecting 1.2 centimeters of an annual length increase in, in new car sales. Family size is shrinking in Europe, you know, so there’s no justification for that length increase. And when we take that data, it’s, it’s, it’s very hard to reconcile with need. If, uh, car size trends were to, were to mirror household formation trends, they would be slightly shrinking.

So it’s… Yeah, I mean, it’s competition over boot space, I guess. It’s, um, yeah, manufacturers wanna be able to score very highly on those reviews, but, you know, the, the city is paying the consequence for something that’s probably used, you know, that, that large boot space probably used, what, two, three times a year?

The response is really only coming through slowly because the cities have to sit up and say, “Okay, we take that on board, and now, okay, what’s, what’s the policy response to that at the city level?” And that’s, yeah, unfortunately many of them are, are leaving that too late.

Like, the consumer will spend, you know, $10,000 more even though the same amount of materials went into that vehicle because it’s a little bit bigger. And so I would be curious, like, how much the size increases, those centimeter increases in terms of the bonnet, the hood, and basically, like, over time, how much the small increases actually increase the amount of money that they got from the consumer.

And maybe that’s a way in of taxation or something along those lines. Um, ’cause you can do by vehicle height or weight, those types of things that you guys will recommend. But I’m interested, you know, maybe it’s something where you kind of hit them in the, in the profit center in some way to make it prohibitive in the future.

So these are full electric models. They are securing higher profit margins on the small electrics than on their big electrics. And, you know, Stellantis that owns Fiat and Peugeot and a, a handful of others, for months they had been telling European policymakers and journalists that, you know, they had to go big to make profits, it was the only way, and, you know, nobody wants to buy small electrics and all this stuff.

And then they’ve kind of been caught with their pants down now, and they are, you know, scrambling to, to put together an attractive offer of, of smaller electric cars. So the myth that you need to go big to get profits has been exploded- Mm-hmm … with Renault, at least here in Europe. Mm. They’ve also made very attractive vehicles in both of those two cars, which kind of, you know, very sexy French design, basically.

Um, but yeah, th- that’s thrown down a gauntlet to the others on, on small cars. And I imagine it’s also making their shareholders ask questions, because for years the narrative they’ve pumped out has been exposed, and it now remains to be seen if they can come back and, and compete with Renault on small EVs.

And the people that, you know, want those vehicles generally are not gonna want an electric car. It’s actually the folks in cities who want the small vehicle to get around. And I mean, in here in, in San Francisco, and around the US, I mean, you see a massive influx of e-bikes. People want a vehicle to get around the city.

That’s beneficial from a space perspective. Obviously, it’s even better than a small electric car. But I feel like they just missed the target market for the vehicles. Like, ’cause I mean, here in San Francisco I see Honda Fits and I see Volkswagen Golfs and I see, like, the smaller vehicles all over the place which don’t sell in the rest of the country, so they discontinue them.

But here in the dense city, this is where they thrive. And so I think they just missed the market, and they’re kicking themselves, and then they’re seeing the specter of China as well, which is another discussion. But it’s all very fascinating, and I, I was very fascinated by this when I read the report and, and reached out to you all.

Do you remember clean diesel?” “We’ve got clean diesel. We’re gonna keep going with clean diesel.” Right. Volkswagens. This mess of… Yeah, this continued until 2015, and then China, all this time, China continues to race ahead with highly efficient lithium batteries, and then we had Dieselgate September 2015, and then its aftermath and, uh, yeah, I mean, so European vehicle makers were dragged kicking and screaming into the electric market and then, you know, some of them have got there now to an extent, but China’s so, you know, it’s very hard to compete with a vehicle maker that is vertically integrated into the power supply, like the battery of the vehicle, and that’s the challenge they face, and that continues to be the debate, by the way, dominating Europe rather than, you know, a focus on car size.

But, uh, yeah, going back to the, the Ford point and the North American point, I mean, it’s almost tediously inefficient to propel a three-tonne vehicle to carry on average 1.1, 1.2 people. You know, and as well as family size decreasing, we also have vehicle occupancy trending slightly downward, so fewer people per vehicle.

So whatever powertrain you use, that’s very inefficient. I think Farley and Ford realize that. And then I think they probably face that same dilemma, but Renault bit this bullet some years ago. They, they basically held faith with the small car, knowing that there is that target market out there. So Renault have sold more than 100,000 E-Tech Renault 5s, and I think, like Ford buried the Fiesta, which was the top seller in Europe for years.

And I imagine if you went to Farley now and you said, “Here’s an E-Fiesta, fully designed, and I can roll this out for you 10,000 units a week tomorrow,” he would, you know, he’d bite your hand off- Mm … because they just don’t have the E-Fiesta to offer across global markets, and they need it. So I think there’s a realization on those vehicle makers’ parts that electric, electric pickup trucks- Yeah.

I mean- … limited, pretty limited target market. And also, like, to make it a sensible proposition, the, the homeowner will need a very large roof, will definitely need driveway parking, will need to be putting, you know, most, a lot of the power off those panels into that pickup truck to push it around. And yeah, the whole equation becomes much more, uh, involved and, I mean, it would work for some.

And I, I’m not somebody who says there’s no use case for pickup trucks. I, there is a, a limited use case- Yeah, of course … in some regions, and I don’t, uh… I saw a picture, uh, of a, a tiger release from the back of a pickup truck. I thought, “Okay, there’s a, there’s a reasonable use-” “… for pickup truck,” the tiger being released into- Right

the African safari. Um, so we’re not doctrinaire about this, but for people who, as you say, are energy conscious, resource conscious, electric pickup truck is not their vehicle, and Ford has missed something, and whether it can recover its position, I think remains to be seen.

Uh, so, like, Ever Wider was 2024, and if you put that in, it should, T&E, the letters T&E, that should come up. Bonnet Height was 2025, and then Car Spreading 2026. So yeah, they’ve been the kind of three main reports where if you wanna dig into the, you know, the centimeter by centimeter data, the trend lines, we’ve looked from 2010 onwards.

That’s generally our baseline. So if you wanna dig deeper and access those original reports, Ever Wider 2024, Bonnet Height 2025, and Car Spreading 2026.

So yeah, work through to Navas and Nix, and then, yeah. Or if- Or through LinkedIn. Or through