Car Vs SUV Vs UTE

Exactly what are the real-world dynamic drawbacks of choosing an suv or dual-cab ute over a small car? We grab six vehicles, a bunch of scared-looking witches’ hats and book an entire proving ground to find out

- Scott Newman

The CURRENT Australian motoring landscape is radically different to the one you and I grew up with. This statement is verging on painfully obvious, but it might surprise you just how quickly and how radically change has occurred.

Twenty years ago, buyers made very simple choices. Small families bought small cars and large families bought large cars, the two categories accounting for 21 percent and 24.6 percent of the Australian market respectively in 2001. SUVs were in their infancy – so much so that they didn’t even have their own section in the VFACTS sales data, instead being lumped in with ‘Light Trucks’. ‘All Terrain Wagons’, as they were then known, incorporated everything from a Honda HR-V to a Range Rover and accounted for just 15 percent of sales – and to be honest a lot of those were the Toyota Landcruiser and Nissan Patrol. Dual-cab utes were of limited appeal, finding favour with just 4.5 percent of buyers, mostly primary producers or off-road enthusiasts.

Today’s figures illustrate just how far the market has shifted. SUVs of various shapes and sizes accounted for 49.6 percent of sales in 2020 – or basically one in every two vehicles – while dual-cab demand has almost quadrupled to 16.7 percent.

Small-car sales have dried up to just 13.2 percent of the market, but what of large cars, the dominant player of 20 years ago? In 2020 they accounted for just 0.6 percent of sales. Actually, the news is worse than that, as today’s large-car figures include prestige offerings like the BMW 5 Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class. Limit it to the traditional $70K cut-off and the figure is just 0.3 percent.

If all those figures are making your head spin, look at it like this: in 2001 for every 1000 cars sold, 246 were large sedans; in 2020, that number is three.