Importantly, that the United States’ fleet of personal vehicles is getting bigger and heavier is not without significant and deadly consequences. Because heavier cars require more energy to get from A to B, larger vehicles tend to produce more emissions than their lighter counterparts. This holds true even for some electric vehicles – in February, the New York Times looked at data from the MIT Trancik Lab’s Carbon Counter and found that some of the largest new electric vehicles (such as the Ford F-150 Lightning, which weighs a whopping three tons) produce more lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than smaller, gas-powered vehicles.

But big cars aren’t just bad for the climate, they’re bad for people. While drivers of large and heavy vehicles may have a lower risk of injury or death during a crash, a 2011 study found that, in car-on-car collisions, the likelihood of fatality in one vehicle increases by 47 percent for every 1,000 additional pounds that the other vehicle weighs. The consequences for vehicle crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists are similarly as clear; a 2021 analysis of vehicle size and crash outcomes found that larger vehicles were involved in only 26.1% of crashes but were responsible for 44.1% of resulting pedestrian or cyclist deaths. Another researcher found that for every 100 kg increase in the average weight of vehicles involved in crashes in a metro area, the area experiences an additional 0.03 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 residents.

Thus, as the American preference for larger cars shows no signs of faltering, and as the number of heavy electric vehicles on the road sis poised to increase, the time has come to urgently pass legislation which regulates the size of unnecessarily harmful and dangerous vehicles. The safety of our climate and our streets depend on it.