Despite the climate crisis! SUV boom in Austria stronger than ever
In times of climate change and rising prices, new car registrations are declining sharply: despite everything, SUVs are enjoying unbroken popularity.
New car registrations in Austria fell by almost 10 percent last year – a record low for new registrations since 1979. Compared to the pre-crisis year 2019, it was even a decline of more than a third. But paradoxically, in times of increasing climate awareness, the biggest consumers are the exception to the rule: The boom at city SUVs stopped meanwhile.
According to the Verkehrsclub Österreich (VCÖ), the proportion of SUVs in new car registrations will be at a record high in 2022. If you look back at 2005, the proportion of registrations has even quintupled. According to VCÖ, 43 percent of all new cars in 2022 were SUVs. After all, every third SUV was one plug-in hybrid or e-cars – but these also consume significantly more energy than conventional models.
Link “subsidies more strongly to energy consumption”.
The VCÖ is committed to an ecologically compatible, economically efficient and socially just transport system. It is therefore important for its actors to refer to the higher energy consumption of SUVs. The booming plug-in hybrids are particularly deceptive: with reference to one studies The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) and the Fraunhofer Institute warn the VCÖ that these models consume five times more fuel than the manufacturer’s data.
“Subsidies for plug-in hybrids contradict the goal of reducing CO2 emissions and energy consumption in the car fleet,” criticizes VCÖ expert Lina Mosshammer. the traffic club wants to initiate a reform here: “In view of the worsening climate crisis and subsidies for vehicles, the energy consumption of cars should be taken into account much more than before”.
SUV love in Hermagor
Last year, 92,387 SUVs and off-road vehicles were newly registered in Austria, 17,163 of them in Vienna alone. This is suggested by data from Statistics Austria. The proportion of total registrations has thus increased since 2015. Although Vienna is an SUV hotspot, the district with the lowest percentage of SUVs in new registrations is in the capital: in the urban one Leopoldstadt it is only 30.2 percent.
If you are looking for the most extreme outlier upwards, you will find it in Carinthia: 56.2 percent of new cars in Upper Carinthia hermagor were SUVs last year. In view of the terrain there, four-wheel drive pays off much more than in the flat country. At the moment there is up to 30 centimeters of snow in Hermagor – mind you in the valley.