The promise of adventure, attention, muscle and safety is driving consumers towards large vehicles – even as they fuel congestion and outstrip the size of car parks
By Tory Shepherd
A “rugged, woodsy dude” is slaying dragons, fighting bears, wielding a chainsaw and jumping a volcano in the latest Ram commercial, released for the Super Bowl last month.
At about six metres long and more than two metres wide, Rams are one of a range of supersized machines coming to dominate Australian roads. The marketing of these cars tends towards macho, with images of powerful vehicles conquering rugged terrain and towing enormous loads.
In 2024, Ford’s enormous Ranger was, again, the most popular car sold in Australia. Most of the new cars sold were sports utility vehicles (SUVs), followed by light commercial vehicles including utes. Just one passenger car – the Toyota Corolla – made the top 10.
While tax breaks such as the instant asset write-off scheme and luxury car tax exemptions have added to the desire for SUVs, dual-cab utes and American-style pickup trucks, studies show there are deeper processes driving people towards big cars despite the climate and cost-of-living crises.
Personality traits – including narcissism – and psychological needs drive certain people towards certain cars, including those that promise adventure, attention and muscle, experts say.
The perceived safety of a bigger car, with its elevated seating position, also plays a role – though they make the world less safe for those around them.
The maker of the Ram commercial, Deadpool 2 director David Leitch, seems to have been aware of these duelling desires for adventure and safety.
In that Super Bowl ad, actor Glen Powell’s action hero journey turns out to be a figment of his imagination, a daydream he has while reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to his niece and nephew. They end up in the back seat of a Ram. With a bear.
Consumer psychologist Nathan Moore is studying for a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney on the psychology of how people buy cars, with an eye towards encouraging more sustainable purchases.
He identifies four areas that impact those decisions: status and identity – how people want to be seen; control, autonomy and freedom to go off-road or long distances; safety and security; and excitement or pleasure.
He says emotions play a big role when purchasing a vehicle.
“The predominant motive for buying the car is to fill certain psychological needs,” Moore says. “We choose them to fulfil things in our lives, aspirations we have.”
The increasing number of advertisements for bigger cars helps create that need, Moore says. “They try to tell you that your life is missing something, and that this product will fill that hole.
“You have unmet needs, in this case a big car … these ads typically involve adventure, going off-road, camping, taking surfboards.
“It can tackle this rough terrain, it feels powerful, it fits with Australian cultural identity.”
From 2022 to 2023 there was a 29% leap in ad spending for SUVs in Australia, the climate advocacy group Comms Declare found, even as the government planned to introduce new fuel-efficiency standards to encourage cleaner and greener cars.
“A cynic would say makers of the most polluting cars are trying to offload their cars before the [standards] come in,” Comms Declare’s founder, Belinda Noble, says.
And it’s not just tradies trading up in size.
For example, Mitsubishi expects 42% of its newest model Triton sales will come from families, 34% from tradies, 15% fleet buyers and 9% double income/no kids buyers.
These big cars are fuelling congestion, blocking up streets and outstripping the size of car parks, leading to calls to build bigger ones – dismaying safety and environment advocates.
Earlier this year, the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, announced that new home builds would have to have bigger garages, a plan the Greens called “absurd”.
Charles, a professional with three children who lives in Sydney’s inner west, says he purchased a big ute in late 2024 because he plans to move to the country when he retires.
“We’ll be moving out of Sydney and there’s going to be dirt roads,” the dual-cab owner says.
He’s taken off the towbar for now “to turn it into an urban vehicle” but admits it’s still too long for his driveway and juts into the footpath when parked. It’s too wide for people to get in and out of the passenger side when parked at home, too.
Charles uses the ute, which still has massive off-road tyres, for school runs and the “usual trips to Bunnings for sacks of soil etc – it’s fantastic, you just throw it in the back”. He says it is great for picking up people with luggage from the airport or moving furniture.
Charles thinks more people are buying utes because of the ads that suggest “you can change your lifestyle”.
“I wonder if it’s a post-Covid hangover in that we were trapped and cooped up and then all of a sudden you get a flood of advertisements on the television promoting lifestyle … and all of a sudden we wanted the driving on the back roads, driving along beaches, throwing things in the back, sitting on the tailgate looking at the stars.
“Now, how many people actually do that I would question. But you’ve got that option.”
Asked about the potential environmental impact, Charles says: “I did have an environmental consideration but it was the opposite … the weather is going to be worse, there are going to be greater floods and greater threats, therefore I need to have a more powerful car.”
Prof Peter O’Connor from Queensland University of Technology’s business school looked at the big five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – to see whether they were associated with car choice.
“We also looked at an extra trait we thought might be relevant,” he says. “Narcissism. The desire to be admired by others, the need to be thought of as special, to stand out.”
For that study, published in 2022, his team broke down a range of car features into two overarching categories. The first was “style and performance” – which included large, fashionable, attention-seeking, loud, high-performance and recreational cars. The second was “safety and practicality” – for safe, reliable and economically suitable cars.
“Most people look for one or both,” O’Connor says. “And we found that, yes, you can predict someone’s car preferences based on their traits.”
The study, published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal, summarised previous research that found people who drive “high-status cars” tend to “have a disregard for safe driving practices and traffic laws”.
The team’s own research found women, older people and those high in conscientiousness and agreeableness were more likely to look for safety and practicality. Being male was a strong predictor of going for style and performance, as were the traits of extroversion and low compassion.
Another study, published in Transportation Research in 2022, looked at the trends towards “larger cars with greater mass and horsepower” in Germany. It incorporated research that found young drivers of SUVs or pickup trucks were more prone to aggressive driving and that SUV drivers were more likely to have traffic violations and to cause more injuries.
“Both sense of safety and elevated seating positions, along with feelings of superiority, may be determinants for risky behaviours,” it found.
A third 2022 study published in the Journal of Consumer Policy found people chose bigger cars because they saw them as safer, but that drivers of bigger cars were more likely to have accidents and were “a threat to all other road users”.
The Monash University Accident Research Centre has also found that larger cars are much more likely to cause deaths and serious injuries to other people when they’re in an accident.
Mia, 22, lives in Sydney’s inner west and drives a ute.
“We have always had utes in my family,” she says. “My dad’s old ute – that was the one he first took me out on and taught me how to drive. My grandfather has one as well. So I’ve kind of always had a connection to bigger cars.”
Mia works in construction management and spends half of her time on site. She drives a company ute – a single cab with a long tray.
“If we need timbers … I would pick it up from the timber yard,” she explains. “A lot of the things we order come in big deliveries. And if we need something, like a grate, drain, pipe, I can go to the supplier to pick up what we need and bring it to the site.”
Outside of work, Mia drives her father’s ute on long-distance trips out of the city or in town when he’s not using it.
“I enjoy driving the [ute],” Mia says. “I think it is a different experience in general. Small cars are very zippy. The ute … is kind of like an off-roading experience, but you’re not off-road. Going over humps, it feels sturdy.”
The 22-year-old acknowledges in the city “we can’t take it into a lot of car parking” because it’s too high but, she says, there are other benefits.
“Before they see who is behind the wheel, they [other drivers] are more likely to let me merge in, because you kind of assume it’s a scary male behind the wheel … I assume that’s why,” she says.
Moore says while emotions may have led to Australians’ love affair with monster cars, they could also help end it. The consumer psychologist points to one emotion in particular – guilt.
He says to shift people towards lower-emissions cars, there should be a focus on climate change and the personal impact of emissions, which can cause respiratory distress.
“We’re breathing emissions, our children are breathing emissions,” he says. “You’re polluting the air.”
Highlighting the danger and congestion bigger cars cause could also shift purchasing decisions. “You’ll start feeling guilty, then you’ve got a psychological need to reduce that guilt,” Moore says.
– Additional reporting Rafqa Touma