Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on July 1, 2025. Click here for that audio.
Four in five cars sold in the United States last year were either SUVs or pickup trucks. That’s a far cry from even the 1990s when that number was closer to 25% of all sales.
Many Americans say they are buying these larger cars for convenience, comfort and safety. But while these large cars may be good for those on the inside, they are more dangerous for other drivers in smaller cars, cyclists and pedestrians. And SUVs and pickup trucks are only getting bigger.
David Zipper, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mobility Initiative researcher studying the dangers of our growing car size, refers to the phenomenon as “car bloat.”
Gigantic SUVs and pickup trucks are a public health threat, Zipper says.
“We’re talking about cars that are bigger and heavier, so they’re going to exert more force in a crash with smaller vehicles. Those inside smaller vehicles are at risk, and people are even at more risk outside of the vehicle,” Zipper says. “So we’re talking about pedestrians and cyclists, and both of those groups recently hit a 40-year high in deaths in the U.S.”
SUVs and pickups are taller and therefore more likely to hit a pedestrian or cyclist’s head or torso than their legs, he says. These vehicles have bigger blinds spot because the driver sits so high up, which makes shorter people — including children or wheelchair users — harder to see.
The A-pillar — the piece of metal between the windshield and the side window on both the left and right — is thicker on SUVs and pickups because the vehicles are heavier, Zipper says. A study by car research group Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows thicker A-pillars can conceal pedestrians at intersections.
Car bloat has exploded over the last 50 years. In the 1970s, SUVs and pickups accounted for fewer than one out of every four new cars sold, Zipper says. These vehicles appealed to people working on construction sites or who wanted to go offroading.
Then in 1975, fuel economy rules, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), established standards for new passenger cars. Zipper says the policy was “badly designed,” arguing it didn’t set a blanket rate for miles per gallon targets. Instead, as a result of lobbying by automakers, CAFE included a loophole for what’s called light trucks.
“Light trucks are SUVs and pickups,” Zipper says. “So that created an incentive for the automakers to shift away from sedans and station wagons and toward the SUVs and pickups that they didn’t have to spend so much time and effort trying to make more fuel efficient.”
Plus, automakers can sell SUVs and pickups for more money and make a bigger profit.
“I’ve looked at these like the ads from the ‘80s and ‘90s, which is really when you see this shift take hold, you see ads of the Ford Ranger being driven by the cool young guy who’s impressing his boss and his girlfriend. He’s not hauling anything. He’s not using it for work at all. That’s really where you see that shift take root,” Zipper says. “Automakers will say, ‘Oh, people like the bigger cars.’ And there’s some truth to that, I’m sure. But I think it’s really sort of a self-serving excuse a bit because they spent billions of dollars marketing them to us.”
Zipper doesn’t fault Americans who buy SUVs because they want to keep loved ones safe. These consumers find themselves in a “prisoner’s dilemma,” he says; they might prefer a sedan, but seeing everyone around them driving SUVs and pickups makes them feel unsafe driving a small car.
For Zipper, this problem is a government failure. The U.S. government has ignored the fact that an individual’s decision to buy a huge vehicle impacts everyone around them, he says.
“There’s been no accounting through regulations or taxes to basically push people who are buying a car to consider the societal impact of their choice,” Zipper says. “When you don’t price those sorts of negative externalities, that’s what economists call them, you end up with people buying more of those big cars than is societally appropriate or optimal.”
In 2024, the Biden administration proposed a new rule through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that would require automakers to minimize harms from ‘head-hood collisions’ — crashes where there’s a danger of the car hood striking a pedestrian’s head. The legislation would most impact massive SUVs and pickups. Now it’s up to the Trump administration to finalize the law.
Zipper also argues for a grassroots movement to take action in a similar vein to the way the public responded in the 1980s to the health effects of secondhand smoke.
“It was really secondhand smoke that sort of galvanized that movement against cigarettes,” he says. “This idea that somebody’s decision to smoke doesn’t just affect their own health, it affects the health of everybody around them. That’s really the same thing that’s going on, I would argue, with really big SUVs and pickups.”
With cigarettes, local groups in the ‘70s and ‘80s pressed cities and states to enact anti-smoking rules without the help of the federal government.
Local legislative bodies could change parking rules to charge more for really big vehicles or put compact car spots in front of convenient locations to enter buildings, Zipper suggests.
“I personally believe that car bloat is a major public health issue, it’s a major policy issue, but I’ll be candid, I don’t think the average American does right now. We need people to understand it and appreciate it,” he says. “And in my view, that’s going to need to happen at the grassroots level before we can expect really anybody in Washington to address this problem in the way that it deserves to be addressed.”
Thomas Danielian produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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