YOU NOTICE IT most in the car park. Not on the dealer’s forecourt. Not when you’re scrolling through photos online. But when you’re trying to swing into a space under St. Stephen’s Green or at Jervis Street. Mirrors folded in. Hip twisted sideways to squeeze out. Yes in my case it is not helped by a touch of middle age spread, but you are left doing your best to avoid a door ding or the crunch of an expensive alloy wheel. 

Despite the addition of an arsenal of cameras and parking sensors to many new models, it feels like parking has gotten harder. It hasn’t. The cars have gotten bigger. And they keep getting bigger because that it seems, is what we want. 

The average family car in Ireland today isn’t a compact hatchback anymore. It’s a crossover SUV. The Hyundai Tucson, the most popular new car in the country for the past five years or so, is about 4.5 metres long and 1.86 metres wide. It weighs between 1.6 and 1.75 tonnes. That is now the default Irish family car. And it weighs about the same as the original Land Rover Defender. 

When I was growing up things were a little different. Compare that to the Ford Escort, Volkswagen Golf or Toyota Corolla of the 1980s and 1990s. Those were around four metres long, roughly 1.6 metres wide, and weighed just under or just over a tonne. They were small because the world they moved through was small. They fit our roads, our estates, our school gates and our multi-storeys.

The Golf, the car that once defined “average”, has grown from 3.7 metres to more than 4.2 metres over its lifetime. You only have to go back a mere ten years to 2015 and the top-selling model in Ireland was the Volkswagen Golf and the Ford Focus was in second place. Ten years later, the Golf lies in 10th place and Ford will cease production of the Focus this month. They’ve already binned the much-loved Fiesta in favour of, you’ve guessed it, an SUV. 

This shift didn’t feel dramatic because it didn’t happen at once. It came gradually, generation by generation. The cars grew, but the spaces around them didn’t. You can notice when you go into Dublin Airport T1. Built in the early 1970s, when cars like the Mark 1 Ford Escort, Mini and Morris Minor were plentiful, they perhaps didn’t imagine that 50 years later they’d be taking cars that are in some........

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