Aggressive marketing has pushed the increase of utes on New Zealand streets — time to hit the brakes?

“Investigate your internal beast.” That was the slogan made use of last yr to sell the Ford Ranger. At 2.4 tonnes, that is a large amount of “light” truck, but the stakes are climbing. This calendar year, the 3.5 tonne Ram 1500 “eats utes for breakfast”.

Super-sized light-weight vans have landed in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eight out of the ten prime-marketing passenger automobiles are now utes (bakkies) or SUVs, with two-thirds registered for personalized use.

According to the House Travel Survey, several journeys beforehand built using much smaller cars and trucks (this sort of as shopping excursions) are now produced in these autos.

And even with the current protests from farmers and tradies about the so-named “ute tax”, the double-cab mild truck has become incredibly substantially an city motor vehicle.

When we looked at the promoting movies for these autos in New Zealand, utes or pickups (bakkies) relished the most “masculine” marketing strategies. Themes of dominance and violence are strong: autos have names like “Raptor” and “Gladiator”, and are referred to as “muscular” and “beasts”.

Considerably of the marketing entails images of intense driving — skidding and leaping, with the vehicle typically shot from under, travelling fast at the digital camera. SUV promoting is marginally far more unisex and emphasises protection, luxury and envy.

Trucks as opposed to automobiles

But this is the issue: local weather transform is also super-sizing, as the the latest extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada and serious floods in Europe and elsewhere have reminded us.

Light trucks on city streets are terrible for the climate in two strategies. Because of to their fat and sizing, they emit a lot more CO2 than other cars: in a year’s usual driving, 100 Ford Rangers would emit 90 tonnes extra CO2 than the similar variety of Toyota Corollas.

And significant cars have an effect on the urgent change to low-carbon modes of transportation, by obstructing footpaths mainly because they’ve outgrown motor vehicle parking, building cycling and strolling much more complicated and dangerous.

Cyclists and pedestrians struck by one of these cars are approximately two times as very likely to die or be seriously hurt in comparison with a crash involving a smaller car or truck.

Mother nature as marketing tool

Ironically…