If your parent doing the school run a suv does make sense, and don't for get that pickups are used a lot by farmers and I suspect the Dutch farming lobby is just as powerfull as it is in the other eu states and the USA.
You don't need a vehicle that size unless you have more than two children, a perfectly normal 4-door car will do. And all the usual externalities of SUVs are worse at school: the high ride height makes it harder to see small children, and the large amount of space taken up makes the parking and traffic jam round the school worse.
No, the Dutch solution to the school run is a Bakfiets cargo bicycle until the kids are old enough to ride their own.
Dutch farming is very .. intense? Quite a lot of it is done in greenhouses. Sure, if you're in agriculture you can justify a larger vehicle. That's at most 5% of the population?
Most SUVs on the road that I see in the UK look like they probably have less space than an equivalent car - and that's without abominations like 'sports' SUVs (which seem the most pointless vehicles every invented).
It is true that most SUVs have less interior space than station wagons. The high ground clearance wastes vertical space and the trunks are quite short.
I agree that it's not a large suv is not needed, but ford, fiat and some others don't. They are stopping making smaller cars and making more suvs because 1: they make more profit, 2: customers want them and 3: profit... the customer want part is kind of silly since if you wanted a mondaeo (medium family sedan) and now it's not for sale, only option is an suv. All these stupid cross overs are there for money making.
Yea. But ford are still killing the mondaeo in Europe and other countries. Their Kuga and the like make them more money... fiat are killing the 500, which is nearly the perfect city car. They make more from the punto cross over. I'm based in ireland. If you try go to some dealers, there are less small and medium cars and more larger suvs and cross overs...
School run can also be done by school walking bus, bike, or actual bus.
I doubt many of us would mind quite so much the tiny few SUVs actually used by workers and farmers because they absolutely need such a beast. Mind, saying that my friend with the absurdly big crew cab Toyota pickup, uses the wife's regular size car when it's just them and the kids... The pickup is for transporting 1 tonne of kit around fields -- he actually detests them to drive. :)
School runs are done by bike in the Netherlands. In addition there are much more practical vehicles that farmers/builders/<insert_mobile_heavy_work_profession> use.
Why are you shifting the discussion toward 'What vehicle is good for farmers' ?
Farmers represent 2% of the population, they're clearly not responsible for 30% of the sales
Yeah, I also preferred the discussion in which the participants expressed what car I need and how I'm supposed to use it. And what I don't need, of course. They live somewhere far from me and have no idea what my family does and why. But they know what I do and do not need for transport, because they have a walking bus in their Lithuanian village and I should learn something from that first before going out there and driving my SUV.
What look like ex-army Land Rovers are pretty common on UK farms and estates, at least here in this part of Scotland, pickups are pretty rare though.
Edit: I wonder if this is because of how much of Scotland is used for grouse shooting - a pickup isn't going to be much good for transporting your pampered customers!
I used to do 800 kilometers trips for vacations with my family (2 adults, 3 kids) in a 1994 fiat punto every few years and I'm still alive, I'm pretty sure you can drive your kids to school in any vehicle as long as it has enough seats.
Why you might need to transport kids to after school / sports events - for example I regularly used to see a small kid waiting for the same bus as me staggering along with a cello that was bigger than he was.
And there is the psychological safety aspect of a big SUV with a higher driving position.
Yes yes, but people used to be just fine with normal-sized cars. The large majority of car-owning people in the world still are. SUVs are a negative-sum game; a race to the bottom where people feel the need to get a bigger car just because their neighbors have ones as well.
I believe it's more common for smallholding farmers in EU to rely on a small car runabout and a tractor, with more specialized equipment (possibly rented) for other work.
I'd expect intensive farmers use exclusively on specialized equipment.
Yup, my parents are retired farmers and they used a station wagon + three different sized tractors, shared with another farmer. Friends of them who were foresters used a Subaru Forester. Subaru makes actual workhorses, not two-ton shopping vehicles.
I live in London and sometimes it feels like every second car is an SUV. UK has some weird class thing with Range Rovers: everyone has to have one,or you not really upper middle it's like an upper level of white van for working class.
To be fair, I think you are correct - Edinburgh is probably unusual in this regard (affluent, fairly small, incredibly high levels of private schools).
