Fuel prices just one reason to reconsider love of utes

By Rebekah White

The fuel crises of the 1970s changed the way New Zealand streets looked – and the way people got around.

It started with vehicles shrinking. “The cars of the early 70s had huge chrome fins and stretched from one side of the street to the other,” says Alistair Woodward, a public health professor at the University of Auckland. “And then by the late 70s, it was the Cortina and the Corolla that were selling.”

As a teenager, Woodward desperately wanted those giant chrome fins.

Today, he says the fuel crisis is an opportunity to resize our cars once again – and there’s more at stake than savings at the petrol pump.

Utes and SUVs contribute more to air pollution, pose greater danger to other road users, and make an outsized contribution to carbon emissions compared to smaller vehicles.

“We know heaps about the effects of large vehicles on climate, on safety, on congestion, on local air quality,” says Woodward. “They are an incredibly inefficient way of getting people around, particularly when most ute trips are made by drivers who live in urban areas.”

Traffic pollution in Auckland is responsible for 6100 cases of childhood asthma and more than 700 deaths annually, according to a March 2026 report.

Yet the average vehicle size in New Zealand has been trending upwards for the better part of two decades.

Until 2015, the top-selling car in the country was a Toyota Corolla.

For 10 years after that, the most popular vehicle was a double-cab ute, the Ford Ranger, but over the past year, the Ranger has been overtaken by an SUV, the Toyota RAV4.

Is it time for the average size of vehicles to take a dive, just like in the 1970s?

“We realised then that depending on big vehicles was a strategic liability when fuel supplies were uncertain. The same is true today,” says Woodward.

Why do we have so many utes?

Utes are frequently advertised, and discussed, as being essential rural vehicles.

However, a study by Woodward and senior research fellow Kirsty Wild found that most utes aren’t used on the farm – or rurally at all.

“Most trips occur in cities,” says Wild.

When Woodward and Wild examined data from the New Zealand Household Travel Survey, they found that about two thirds of ute trips took place in urban areas – that’s according to where drivers lived and the duration of the trips.

Most were short, which produce disproportionately higher rates of emissions than longer trips, and mostly not for work purposes. Usually, there’s only one occupant, the driver.

Around a third of trips were for the purpose of shopping, drop-offs, personal appointments, or socialising.

“They’re not being used that differently from cars,” says Wild.

Change incentives to prioritise healthier vehicles

The Clean Car Discount, which involved rebates for low-emissions vehicles funded by penalties on high-emissions vehicles, was cancelled by the Government in 2023, leading to concerns that New Zealand would become a dumping ground for high-emission vehicles as other nations increasingly regulate against them.

The Government is now considering slashing remaining penalties on high-emissions cars.

This would make New Zealand one of only two OECD countries without a vehicle-emissions standard (the other being Russia).

“We need some sensible compromise around what we’re incentivising,” says Wild.

Woodward and Wild advocate for associating a vehicle’s environmental and public-health costs with its running costs.

They suggest a higher sales tax for heavier vehicles, as France and Norway have implemented, or vehicle registration charges or parking charges that vary according to a vehicle’s size and emissions.

Don’t adapt cities to larger cars

Some cities have begun to increase parking-space sizes to accommodate what Woodward calls “car bloat”.

He and Wild recommend cities resist the pressure to give more space to larger vehicles, as urban travel will likely rebound towards smaller vehicles and other modes.

As cities develop, they usually evolve more modes of transport rather than fewer, says Wild, and New Zealand cities are on the cusp of this taking place.

“We’re just in this stressful middle at the moment where we’re like, ‘It’s not working to just focus on cars’, but we haven’t quite figured out how to do things differently.”

Part of this involves offering people options so they don’t rely on one vehicle for everything, says Wild.

“One of the things is shifting away from the idea that a vehicle is like a Swiss Army knife that you just keep adding more and more things to, which might be fine in a rural setting. But it’s a real disaster in the city.”

Instead, cities could make it easier for residents to switch modes of transport.

Car-share systems could allow people to access larger vehicles when they need them.

“So, you need to go up Ruapehu for work? Maybe that’s when you should be able to hire a Hilux for a day,” says Woodward.

Make vehicle safety ratings reflect reality

“The five-star rating that many utes are sold with is misunderstood,” says Woodward.

“It doesn’t mean that overall, these are safer for other people on the road. It means that they’re quite good at protecting people inside.”

Woodward and Wild want to see vehicle safety ratings change to reflect the fate of other road users, too.

“Some studies suggest there might be as much as a seven times greater chance of a really bad outcome if you’re hit by these heavy, high vehicles,” says Woodward. “And it’s not as big an effect, but it’s true also for people in cars who are struck by these vehicles.”

The result is an “arms race”, says Wild, “of people feeling less safe in their cars”.

Don’t advertise commodities with high social costs

Woodward and Wild want to see a ban on advertising high-polluting vehicles, just as there are restrictions on marketing commodities with high public-health costs such as vapes, alcohol, tobacco, and high-sugar foods targeted at children.

Each ute trip carries unintended costs, especially in an urban setting, says Wild.

“It creates more congestion, it makes your trip slower, it has quite a significant impact on our high rates of childhood asthma in Auckland – these things make other people’s lives a lot harder in meaningful ways.”

Not to mention reducing New Zealand’s efforts on the climate front. Increase in vehicle size internationally has been a significant global driver of emissions in recent years.

Continuing to incentivise heavy vehicle use is “not sensible in terms of climate and congestion and human health and safety”, says Woodward.

“It’s also just the wrong way to go in terms of resilience and security.”

The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Planetary Solutions, an initiative of the Sustainability Hub at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Newsroom, explores these issues – and the practical ways we can all be part of the solution.