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SUVs like this one on the streets of Berlin are becoming increasingly popular - but who is driving the trend?
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Photo:
Stefan Zeitz / imago images
The SUV as a formative body variant of the past few years has meanwhile become the tinny archenemy for some road users.
For them, the pseudo-off-road vehicles are a symbol of extravagance in the already scarce road space and an affront to the effort to achieve a climate change.
But is the line in this debate really as clear as one might assume?
More and more cities are giving pedestrians and cyclists more space, mostly at the expense of car traffic.
This causes all sorts of conflicts, in the politically traditionally green Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Poller divided the people in the Samariterkiez so severely that self-proclaimed “native inhabitants” of the district accused a traffic turnaround activist of “transforming the district into a pre-industrial floodplain”.
If she doesn't like tin, she should go back to where she lived before.
A surprising positioning.
Greens with the second lowest willingness to buy an SUV
And a cliché that, given the high number of polls by the Greens, is also of national political relevance - and more explosive.
In social media, for example, the image of the Greens voter is spread over and over again, who is not so strict about his own principles and likes driving SUVs.
The accusation is clear: preaching bicycles and driving the Audi Q7 or BMW X5 yourself.
That shouldn't be more than: a cliché.
A representative Civey survey for SPIEGEL shows that only 24 percent of supporters of the Greens can basically imagine buying an SUV - the second lowest figure after supporters of the left.
In contrast, 48 percent of the CDU / CSU voters can basically imagine buying an SUV.
For the FDP this value is 52 percent, for the AfD it is even 54 percent.
(Read the background to the Civey method here.)
Overall, 37 percent of those surveyed can basically imagine buying an SUV. The actual purchasing behavior of people in Germany looks similar. According to »Auto Motor Sport«, almost every third new car was an SUV in the past year. The manufacturers are also reacting to this and are bringing back well-known models - just as SUVs. For example, the Ford Puma, which used to be a small coupé, celebrated a comeback as a compact SUV.
The trend towards the SUV is independent of the drive. Volkswagen's electric pioneer ID.3 was followed a little later by the ID.4 e-SUV. And Ford's electric hope, the Mustang Mach E, uses the name of the famous pony car, but is actually also a long-legged pseudo-off-road vehicle. In the discussion about the use of road space, however, the drive is irrelevant. From a spatial perspective, it makes no difference whether a car over four meters long has an electric drive or an internal combustion engine - but that also applies to the choices made by the person behind the wheel.
