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A UK driver buying a big polluting SUV like the BMW X5, costing around £85,000, pays just £3,200 in VED compared to a driver in France paying £66,600. The majority of countries in Europe charge drivers more taxes for these cars than the UK. Low taxes on big cars explains why 4 times more large D and E segment polluting SUVs are sold to private buyers in the UK than in France [1]. Due to their bigger size, the privately sold petrol and diesel car is also more polluting on average [2] [3].
The Clean Cities recent campaign on carspreading highlights the impact that the ever growing size of cars is having. Around 4.6 million cars have been sold in the UK that are bigger than a typical urban car parking space since 2021 - more than 1.2 million a year, with numbers growing.
Supersized SUVs, which are either more than 1.8m wide or 4.8m long, have been growing in popularity despite them crowding out space in towns and cities, causing more road wear and being more likely to cause fatal injuries for children, cyclists and those driving smaller cars.
As well as low taxes on the biggest polluters, the UK offers one of the smallest tax benefits for buying a private electric car. Four out of ten UK car sales go to the private market but unlike company car drivers which benefit from generous EV tax breaks, private EV buyers currently see little tax benefit from going electric. Drivers buying a compactEV pay just £520 less over four years compared to buying a petrol car, ranking 27th lowest out of 30 European countries. In the majority of European countries the benefit is at least ten times higher, new T&E analysis shows. The Prime Minister recently acknowledged that price was one of the major barriers to EV adoption, yet the ability to help drivers switch is and support UK manufacturing is within his own hands.
T&E said fixing car tax is essential to curbing the trend towards big SUVs in the UK and encouraging the shift to smaller, electric cars. As well as sharply increasing VED rates on the highest polluters, the government needs to increase the tax benefit for private drivers of shifting to compact EVs by increasing the difference in tax between compact electric and petrol cars. France, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway have much greener fiscal systems, taxing private cars heavily based on their CO2 emissions and weight, leading to more private electric car sales and less SUVs.
Anna Krajinska, T&E’s UK director, said: “The UK’s continued failure to adequately tax big, polluting cars is continuing to fuel an SUV surge that’s clogging our cities and making cars ever more expensive. It’s time for the government to take action against car spreading and increase taxes on the most polluting cars”.
[1] Source: Dataforce.
[2] The emissions combustion private cars have on average in the UK are 140.3 gram per carbon dioxide, compared to only 119.8 gram per carbon dioxide in France.
[3] The UK is the second largest automotive market in Europe after Germany and ahead of France, Italy, Spain and Poland. When it comes to the private market, it is the fourth ahead of Italy, Germany and France and ahead of Spain and Poland.
