World’s embrace of SUVs bad news for climate

It’s the car of the future. It’s taking off in markets all over the world. The electric vehicle? Hardly. It’s the SUV, the rugged, off-road gas-guzzler that America invented and the world increasingly loves to drive.

Spurred by rising incomes and lower gas prices, drivers in China, Australia and other countries are ditching their smaller sedans for bigger rides at a rapid pace.

For the first time, SUVs and their lighter, more carlike cousins known as “crossovers” made up more than one in three cars sold globally last year, almost tripling their share from just a decade ago, according to new figures from the auto research firm JATO Dynamics.

“Everyone is jumping on SUVs,” said Matthew Weiss, JATO Dynamics’ president for North America.

The ascent of SUVs and crossovers is already slowing progress in reining in emissions from the world’s cars and trucks, major emitters of the gases that are warming the planet. Transportation accounts for an estimated 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with cars and trucks making up the biggest share.

Between 2005 and 2008, the average fuel economy of new cars worldwide improved by about 1.8 percent a year, according to the United Nations’ Global Fuel Economy Initiative. But since then, that pace has slowed to 1.1 percent in 2015, the latest data available, far below the near three-percent clip needed to simply stabilize emissions from the world’s car fleet.

There are no signs that trend has improved since then, said Anup Bandivadekar of the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit think tank affiliated with the UN initiative. “It’s making progress in fuel economy increasingly difficult,” he said.

The global SUV boom is a roadblock in the march toward cleaner cars that has been aided by advances in fuel-saving technology and hybrid or electric vehicles. Compared to smaller cars, SUVs are less efficient, generally by about 30 percent.

SUVs are also less likely to go electric soon. There are technological hurdles to powering a larger car with batteries, and the perception among many automakers remains that drivers of SUVs value power and performance, and don’t want to be constrained by the range anxiety of battery-powered cars.

The SUV-building bonanza contrasts with promises made by automakers of big investments in electric vehicles and other lowemitting vehicles. At the same time, they are pouring resources into far more polluting SUVs.