Matt Rudd (Renault Grand Scenic driver)
Every morning in term time there is a traffic jam on the country lane that leads to the school just up from our house — the SUVs coming in can’t get past the SUVs coming out. Chaos ensues.
A few weeks ago, I noticed an anomaly. As the leather-upholstered tanks edged and squeezed from one narrow passing spot to the next, a very small, very purple car just weaved happily through the mess.
“She’s an opera singer,” said one of the mums, as if that explained it. Clearly, the opera singer had decided her two kids could cope with life in a Cinqapantapento or whatever it was called and here was physical proof that small is beautifully efficient on the school run.
To say that the opera singer is in the minority would be an understatement. Last week, the campaign group Clean Cities revealed that more than one million cars are now being sold each year that are longer and wider than the typical urban parking space. In the past four years, 4.6 million of these outsize vehicles have been driven off the forecourt. Calling for Paris-style higher parking charges for larger cars, Oliver Lord, UK head of Clean Cities, said: “Cars are getting bigger every year while our streets are not. We need carmakers to prioritise normal-sized cars that can be parked more easily and are less dangerous to people walking around.”
Out here in the Kentish sticks, we have a Renault Grand Scenic because we also have three sons and a dog. An average on-street parking space is 1.8 metres wide and 4.8 metres long. My Renault is 6cm wider but 35cm shorter than that but it’s still big.
Inspired by the opera singer, I swapped it last week for the narrowest five-seater on the market. The Kia Picanto arrived on Wednesday and if it hadn’t been bright blue, I might not have noticed. It looks very, very small. Twenty years ago, it wouldn’t have felt small at all — at 1.59 metres wide, it would have been averagely compact, bigger than my old Vauxhall Nova, much bigger than the classic Mini. Now though?
To describe it as Tardis-like would be an exaggeration but it certainly isn’t cramped inside. Cosy, perhaps, and we’d need to lose one of the children — the back middle seat is fine for a small dog or a short child but I don’t have short children any more and this is not the car to go camping with in Devon. For school drop-offs though? Amazing.
Out on the country lanes, it takes a while to realise I don’t have to drive into a hedge at every oncoming Range Rover. They can take up the middle of the road and there’s still room for me to sail by.
At Sainsbury’s, the Picanto is a revelation. I can park between a very large Volvo and a very large BMW, both of them bloating over the white lines, and I still have room to open my door and step out. No Dukes of Hazzard clambering. No pipetting.
By the end of the week, I’ve just stopped slowing down for oncoming traffic at narrow passing points. Other drivers think I’m being rude until they realise we can both fit. Imagine if they were in Picantos as well.
But aren’t I risking the lives of my precious offspring?
Well, yes. There’s no question that if you’re going to have a crash, you’d rather do it in a hulking great SUV than one of these. But that’s only because the person you’re crashing into is likely to be in their own hulking great SUV. Several studies have shown that bonnet height is directly related to pedestrian fatalities — the higher the bonnet, the more likely you are to kill someone.
It shouldn’t take 2.5 tonnes of pothole-carving, wing mirror-bashing metal to get your kids to school, not in Chelsea and not in the home counties either. If your kids go to school in the Lake District or South Dakota, then maybe but on our small and poorly maintained streets in our clogged and congested towns, surely there are more appropriate options than a Chieftain tank with Bluetooth? But the potholes in Kent are just as bad as the potholes in South Dakota, you say. Well, what do you think is causing the potholes? Not a Picanto.
But maybe that’s just me — enchanted, relieved even, by the novelty of small. So let’s try to make this test fair. Let’s see how my colleague — a proud, long-standing driver of a titchy car — fares in one of the most popular school-drop-off SUVs. I give way to Stephen in his monster truck …
Stephen Bleach (Honda Jazz driver)
My street has an obesity crisis. Most of the people are a reasonable size, but the cars are too fat.
It’s a standard urban street, like tens of thousands across the country: terraced houses giving onto narrowish roads designed for the pre-car age, but now lined with parked vehicles either side. The remaining carriageway is just about driveable, as long as those vehicles stay within the residents’ parking bays.
But about a quarter of them are SUVs, and they no longer fit. Like a 25-stoner in an economy-class airline seat, their bulging flab spills out into everyone else’s space. London Councils, the collective body for the capital’s boroughs, sternly warns that: “You must park your vehicle entirely within the white bay markings.” But the SUVs simply can’t. Get one of them either side, and the road is 2ft narrower than it should be. Neighbours grumble, the council turns a blind eye.
Irritation aside, it’s also baffling. I get why Matt might have one out in Kent, just: but why does anyone who lives in London need a car that’s designed to go up Ben Nevis (something the sparkling Land Rover Discoveries darkening our front rooms have clearly never done)? But SUVs are coming to dominate our roads, so perhaps I’m on the wrong side of motoring history. To find out what I was missing, I left my little Honda Jazz parked (inside the lines) and hired a Volvo XC90 B5.
It was huge: more than two metres wide and nearly five metres long. At 2.1 tonnes, it weighs almost twice as much as the Jazz. When I got in and tried to drive it, it issued a volley of beeps, all of which presumably meant something important, none of which I understood. I’ll be honest: it scared me.
The hire shop was near the M4, so I got straight onto some easy motorway driving — and for that, I get the appeal, sort of. The ride is quiet, and there’s a reassuring sense of solidity. It’s, maybe, 10 per cent nicer than cruising in a small car. For that, you pay almost three times the price: a new XC90 B5 can cost more than £80,000 depending on the trim, while a new Jazz starts about £28,000. Matt’s Picanto starts at £16,000.
Yes, the height is nice and gives a better view. And yes, it’s roomy inside, but is it roomier than most of us really need? Our family of four has done the run to Cornwall in Corsas and Jazzes for 20 years, boogie boards and all, and it’s fine. (Unlike Matt and family, we don’t camp. A tip for them: you can avoid having to cram the tent in by staying in something made of bricks. It’s drier too.)
Having pootled down to Kent, I headed back to town up the A3, and that marginal appeal evaporated. The lanes were tight, and passing a lorry at a sane margin meant slipping over white lines — at which the Volvo twitched the steering wheel to tell me I’d been bad. I was being bullied by my big fat car.
Back in town, the full uselessness of SUVs in cities became painfully apparent. Gaps I’d normally glide through became a sweaty, nerve-racking ordeal. And the SUV-related road rage was quite something. It turns out that even in Chelsea, they hate Chelsea tractors.
Between the stuccoed Georgian villas in the shadow of Stamford Bridge, on side streets lined with Range Rovers and Porsche Cayennes, I thought they’d welcome my new motor as one of their own, but all was well-heeled fury. OK, I was slow getting through a tight space past the Ocado van, but did that woman have to beep so long and gesticulate so wildly? And I hesitated for a moment at the box junction, unsure my behemoth had enough space the other side, but I’m not what that man called me. I think. It was in Russian.
This was during the middle of the day, in the Easter holidays, when the most entitled and irritable millionaires are off having their anger massaged out of them at resorts in Mauritius. What it’s like at school run in term time, I dread to think.
Frazzled, I drove home to park. Tucked in to the kerb, I was still nearly a foot outside the lines. If I blocked the road for a delivery van, I apologise. If I blocked it for another SUV — that’s karma. They should have taken it for a spin up to the Highlands instead. And stayed there.
