Articles

How Are We Dealing with Cars Getting Bigger?

by James P. Outreach & PR Executive

Welcome to the 21st century, where bigger is better. Shallow, but true. Besides the sneaky shrinkflation epidemic that is plaguing our food shops, with increasing consumerism we’re wanting bigger houses, bigger televisions, and bigger cars.

Cars are getting bigger, which admittedly is safer in comparison to older models. When you compare the original 1974 Volkswagen Golf with the modern Polo, you’ll notice that the old model is significantly less safe as it is essentially a metal box on wheels. With stringent safety regulations to reduce fatalities in crashes, enlarged crushable bodywork is necessary for crumple zones to absorb the impact to save lives, for safety cells, and airbags. That…or we just like big things.

City-centre parking appears to get more complex every time we do it. Understandably, safety requires space and we expect a lot of our cars, and if they are small it doesn’t necessarily do the trick. As we head towards the third decade of the millennium, what are we doing to cater for the increase in larger cars on our roads?

Too Big for Your Boots

The standard parking bay size in the UK is 16 feet by eight feet, yet over 100 cars sold over the last ten years are longer than these dimensions — even in width.

Becoming increasingly difficult to park, the BBC reported that the amount of accidents happening whilst parking costs British insurers around £1.4 billion each year, with 30 per cent of incidents being parking-related. The Mercedes GL-Class, Audi Q7, BMW X5, and Land Rover Discovery are all over 16 feet, making them hang over the bay.

So, what’s been done to facilitate these huge vehicles?

National Car Parks have resized bays where they can accompany the growing sizes of 4x4s, like the Skoda Karoq, and family cars in London, Manchester, and Bournemouth. But these are only three cities, what about the rest of the UK? More needs to be done to reduce these incidents, however it has been argued that resisting the enlargement of spaces will encourage environmentally friendly, smaller vehicles.

In America, parking spots are set out diagonally, utilising space efficiently. Would a complete redesign of UK parking make for a more efficient system too?

Wider Roads

It may seem odd to have such large cars which physically can’t pass each other on windy country roads, so why are they manufactured?

A Range Rover might look huge in the UK, but across the pond to the U.S., these beasts fit on highways and urban roads quite fine. With the UK being a smaller country with winding roads purposefully being built to fit on our little island, these enlarged cars are too big for some of our roads — motorways make up a measly 2300 miles whereas A-roads, B-roads, and unclassified roads make up 29,200 miles, 18,800 miles and 196,400, respectively.

In 2018, it was reported that ‘smart pavements’ could be the answer to narrow roads, which can be changed depending on traffic. Using coloured lights to signal which sections of the road can be used by who. Will this be the future of our roads?

A Mind of Its Own

With autonomous cars on the horizon, perhaps we won’t need to worry about attempting to squeeze them in a narrow multi-storey car park. Self-driving cars will have the capacity to either park itself with high accuracy or can drive itself home until we need it later. However, with brands admitting they overestimated the introduction of autonomous vehicles to the general public, this isn’t a time sensitive solution.

 

With cars getting bigger, we need solutions to reduce the amount of accidents occurring as well as the stress that parking can cause many of us. What would you like to happen?

 

 

Sources

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/investigation-why-are-cars-becoming-so-wide


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About James P. Freshman   Outreach & PR Executive

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Joined APSense since, September 17th, 2019, From Newcastle, United Kingdom.

Created on May 7th 2020 11:13. Viewed 273 times.

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