Arecent report from Transport and Environment (T&E), a campaign group based in Brussels, tells us something we already know: cars are getting bigger. Anyone who takes an interest in classic cars knows this is true: if you’re the kind of person who stops in the street because there’s a Renault Fuego parked kerbside, then you’ll appreciate how dimensions have changed over the last 40 years. Older cars seem impossibly teeny now, with spindly A-pillars, low bonnets and toy wheels.
So we know that cars are getting bigger, now let’s fold the report into the circular file under my desk… But wait! I see one surprising claim in the work that catches my eye. T&E reckons that cars have been growing 5mm every year, and the average width of new cars broke the 180cm mark for the first time in 2023 (up from 177.8 cm in 2018). But they also claim that if we don’t legislate now, cars will keep growing until they’re as big as trucks and buses.
Wow, that’s quite a mental picture, isn’t is – the school drop-off looking like a truck festival, with kids climbing out of their articulated lorries. T&E points out that ‘the current EU maximum width applied to all vehicles, 255cm, was enacted to limit the expansion of buses and trucks in the mid 1990s – and was never truly intended for cars.’ In other words, no one foresaw that cars would keep growing and so no car-specific limit was applied.
‘Currently, the law allows new cars to be as wide as trucks,’ explains James Nix, vehicles policy manager at T&E. ‘Cars have been getting wider for decades and that trend will continue, until we set a stricter limit.’ And if we don’t? ‘Large SUVs and pick-ups will continue to expand to the cap meant for trucks,’ the report says.
Now, normally I would be sceptical about this. First, because the growth in car size hasn’t been linear over the years. In 1979, a Porsche 911 was about 1.65 metres wide, almost exactly the same width as a Model T Ford from 1912. Cars have bloated over the last 40 years but that doesn’t mean the weight gains will continue.
And second, while the T&E report was big on scaremongering (‘Unless we act now, more and more of our precious public space will be taken away from people’) it was a little light on mathematics. At 5mm a year, it’ll take over 100 years for cars to grow to that 2.5-metre maximum wide. So not exactly an imminent apocalypse, then.
However, you could say my normal scepticism became ‘Specticism’ last week (ha ha), because I drove the absolutely humongous Rolls
