It’s a busy Saturday morning and in the supermarket car parks of Britain we are forced to indulge in a cartoonish game of automotive Tetris, performing 15-point turns to coax our modern SUVs, EVs and people-carriers into parking spaces painted in 1971 for a Morris Minor. Alloy wheels scrape kerbs and mirrors bang bollards as children are extracted through two-inch gaps in doors that can now barely open.  

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The monstrous inflation of modern car sizes crashed into the headlines last week with the latest transport crisis dubbed ‘carspreading’ or ‘autobesity’. It was sparked by a study from Transport & Environment, a multi-million-pound green-leaning Brussels quasi-quango, heavily backed by the EU, telling us our cars are too big.  

It would be easy to dismiss these technocratic elite boffins who want to ban your family hatchback while they glide between climate summits in chauffeur-driven limousines, but this time their data is more compelling: the average car has been expanding in width and length by more than a centimetre a year. The modern ‘Mini’ now matches the footprint of a seventies Jaguar. 

Cars have undergone the vehicular equivalent of the Wayne Rooney trajectory. We started the century with something lean, agile and stripped-back for speedy action. 20-odd years later, a considerable amount........

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