Jan 13, 2023

January 13, 2023 According to Citroen CEO Vincent Cobee, the demise of the SUV is already underway due to the incompatibility of the vehicle type with the electric future. The demise of the SUV is inevitable, insists Citroen CEO Vincent Cobee. “The world of SUVs is over,” he claims, although he admits that right now “the numbers don’t say he’s right.” Such vehicles have accounted for 50 per cent of all new car registrations in Europe in recent years, but speaking to Auto Express, Cobee points to the emergence of vehicles “called SUVs just because they’re a bit taller” as proof of his point. One of the main reasons the industry is turning away from SUVs to cars like the new C4 X is aerodynamics, he says. “On an EV, if your aerodynamics are wrong, the penalty in terms of range is huge. You can lose 50 kilometers between good and bad aerodynamics, and between an SUV and a sedan you are very easily talking about 60/70/80 kilometers.” The current solution is to increase the size of the battery, something we already see in the range of various manufacturers – for example, the BMW iX has a much larger package than the smaller i4 model. But that won’t always be possible, Cobee believes. “People are going to start limiting the weight and size of batteries, whether it’s through taxes, through incentives, through regulations,” he said. France will go down the road of taxing vehicles by weight. “D[SUV] the segment will be destroyed due to aerodynamics and weight,” he concluded. Ultimately, it’s a simple case of shifting perceptions, with SUVs likely to be seen as increasingly problematic in the coming years as the climate crisis deepens. “If you live in a big city, five years ago, if you transported your children in a big SUV, you were a man. Now, if you do this, you are a ‘terrorist’…” Weight gain is simply not acceptable, says Cobee. “In the 1970s, a car weighed 700 kg. Today, the average weight of a car is 1300 kg. Tomorrow the average car will weigh two tons. So we use three times more resources to provide the same service, just to be “green”. He compares buying a car with a large battery that is only used occasionally to carrying a huge backpack intended for a multi-day walk to the office. “Are you going to the office with that backpack? The answer is no. So why would you go to the office with a car with a one-ton battery?” Instead, there should be more emphasis on a better charging experience, he says, something Citroen aims to facilitate with a route planning tool. Citroen generally moves in a different direction from other manufacturers with its electric vehicles by tending to stick to smaller 50kWh batteries, while the radical 2022 Oli Concept shows the French company’s commitment to lighter weight even as it moves into an all-electric future. . Cobee doesn’t deny there’s a risk in moving away from the kinds of cars buyers want now, but suggests it could be a bigger problem if he doesn’t change tactics early. “If we stick with ‘SUV boxes’ until 2030 and find there are no customers, it’s going to be a hard landing… you don’t want to be the last one off the dance floor,” Cobee concluded in an interview with Auto Express. Prepared by: Ivan Mitić – Autoblog.rs