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UK could raise nearly £2bn by taxing SUVs in line with European countries, study shows
(www.theguardian.com)
Do it
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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SUVs the jack of no trades and master of fewer. They're such a strange concept, forgo the ease of a hatchback, the space of an estate, the performance of a sports car, the utility of a 4x4 and in return you get to kill more kids when you hit them.
I'm clearly not the target market with my '05 Civic that, because I live fairly rural, I put winter tires on. But, I don't understand what I'm missing. The wealthier around me are all in them, the rest of us are in hatchbacks and estates.
I'd been bullied into renting a small SUV as we were 4 friends travelling abroad for a wedding. Thankfully the rental car lady had more sense and seeing all our bags threw a Fiat Tipo estate at us. That thing swallowed bags, very impressed.
We're sweating our 10yr old SUV and then moving to an estate.... as long as my wife agrees :)
A lot of them are basically estates these days. The names have all become mixed up to the point of being effectively meaningless.
More sloppy reporting from the guardian, at least proof read the work. Tax £66,610 on an £85,000 vehicle? 3 times as much as the cost in the uk of £3200? I think someone put another 0 on that, and they still managed to publish it.
I don't think a small typo counts as sloppy reporting
I'm not sure what the mistake is? France charge a £50k premium, so £66k tax doesn't sound unreasonable.
It doesn't say that that £66k is 3 times the cost, it says there are 13 countries which have a greater acquisition tax than 3x the UK rate. As far as I can see, it doesn't mention the relative costs between the UK and France.
If it’s mean to be a single digit multiple of the uk tax, at 3k, then it can’t be 66k
It's not meant to be a single digit multiple of the UK tax, I don't know where you're getting that from. The things which the article mentions as being single digit multiples are:
In 13 countries, acquisition taxes for such an SUV are more than three times higher than the UK’s
£3,200 in the UK, but the sale would incur taxes of £66,600 in France – driving UK SUV sales to four times the level in France.
And the headline figure is "up to 20 times", which roughly matches the £66k.
The Grauniad making typos? Never!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#References_in_popular_culture
What's an SUV though because the industry has a lot of cars they call SUVs and quite a lot and don't look remotely like each other.
I have an SUV from 2015 and the Volvo XC90 dwarfs it despite it apparently not been an SUV, so how does that work?
Volvo XC90
I searched this and Volvo's page for it calls it a "Large mild hybrid SUV". Here's a Volvo XC90 compared to a BMW X1 from 2011-2015. It would seem that SUVs have been increasing in size ...
Yeah essentially at this point what I own easy effectively a large car and not an SUV. The term effectively being rendered irrelevant by car manufacturer. At this point it means any vehicle that is not a hatchback.
I doubt it'd raise that much (the article states £1.72bn), as there seems to be an assumption increasing the tax wouldn't lead to a reduction in SUVs, and that everyone would just absorb the cost.
However, I still say go ahead! Even if it only raises a quarter of that, that's still money coming in, and it means fewer SUVs on our roads. That's a win-win.