Death of the small car

As well as the Twingos in Paris and Fiats in Florence, you’ll see countless Minis, Toyota Aygos and its PSA cousins the Peugeot 108 and Citroën C1, Volkswagen’s Up and its Škoda and Seat counterparts, Kia Picantos, Hyundai i10s and endless Fords, Fiats, Opels and Smarts.

They don’t go very far and their tiny engines don’t emit much CO2, but they are much cherished and not just by celebs and hip city dwellers. These little cars appeal to those least able to afford a car; folk at the beginning and towards the end of their lives, students, the young, the low paid and pensioners. They represent a modern, reliable, clean and safe transport option for the folk normally ignored by the motoring press, people who work unsocial hours, nurses and hospital staff, cleaners and carers, particularly women unwilling to risk public transport, or the streets. A-segment sales represent a steady eight per cent of the annual European new car market of about 15 million. In Italy, such cars account for about 15 per cent of the market. So they’re popular too.

But for how much longer? In the last few years they’ve started to disappear. Like a mossy litany of the fallen on a village war memorial, Ford’s Ka and Ka+ are no more, Vauxhall’s Adam and Viva have gone and so has Renault’s Twingo. Volkswagen’s Up and the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii will not be replaced, nor will Peugeot’s 108 and Citroën’s C1. Even the Ford Fiesta, Britain’s most popular car, received only a faint commitment from Stuart Rowley, president of Ford of Europe, at the announcement of the company’s electrification strategy a couple of months ago.

True, Kia and Hyundai retain a commitment to the small car and recently Toyota raised eyebrows by announcing an Aygo replacement, which will arrive next year with a small petrol engine, but they are bucking the trend. So what’s going on?

‘Small car, small profits,’ moaned Henry ‘the deuce’ Ford II when his engineers came up with the Fiesta, and certainly it takes ingenuity to engineer a little car which turns a profit and is also safe, commodious, fun and economical.

To succeed, everything has to work together with microscopic margins and tolerances; from the factory cleaner to the office cat, from the door handles to the dealer margins. Small changes can have a big effect and recent changes have been anything but small.

The perfect storm of corporate CO2 emissions requirements with big fines, the near enforcement of battery electrification and punitive safety legislation has put paid to fragile margins. And messianic mission statements such as the UK Government’s plan to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030 have nailed down the coffin lid.

As in the natural world, big is the enemy of small here. Take crash safety for example. In the Nineties we were subject to a series of videos showing little cars such as Mercedes-Benz’s Smart and Honda’s Jazz crashing head on into much larger cars, yet having as good if not better crash survival protection. Impressive it most certainly was, but few of us stopped to ask just how expensive it was to have a tiny car survive such an impact. Turns out it was rather a lot.

In 2001, Bernd Pischetsrieder, then head of VW, wistfully pointed out that if you took the safety and environmental equipment out of a standard VW small family car and laid it out on a workshop floor, you’d be looking at the cost of a complete VW small family car in Brazil. Since then, the situation has become more acute, as little cars have gained heavy and pricey impact protection, airbags and electronic safety aids. Does a Smart need to survive an impact with a Scania? Our legislators think it does.

Then there was the battle against global-warming causing CO2 emissions. The latest EU and UK requirements for average CO2 emissions of 95g/km from car makers have been accompanied by fines of €95 (£82) for each gram per kilometre over the limit for each car produced. You might be able to make a little car with a tiny petrol engine that would just about get under 95g, but it would be very expensive.

Those penalties have put the economics of car-making into the tumble drier, where the avoidance of fines has become at least as important as the profit from any particular model. To avoid fines, for example, VW has to sell one ID.4 EV for every two Tiguans it produces.

Two years ago, European research specialist Jato Dynamics estimated that this year’s industry fines could total €34 billion and small cars, along with popular high-performance models have been the victims.

Then there are the battery-electric cars, current darlings of a mass-media love affair with electric traction, which confuses tailpipe emissions with lifecycle impact. Despite recent improvements, lithium-ion cells are still heavy, bulky and expensive; too expensive to economically put into a small car. Carlos Tavares, the chief executive of Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest car maker comprising the Fiat Chrysler and PSA Peugeot Citroën groups, hasn’t pulled his punches, pointing out that on a small, cheap car a lithium-ion battery can represent up to 70 per cent of a small car’s cost.

‘So, you are going to see a segment of cars [A-sector] disappear,’ he said at the last Geneva Show two years ago, ‘because if you put a price on them to make them sustainable, that’s a price that young people can’t afford.’

The Stellantis boss has also pointed out the paucity of thinking at Government level on this subject, with regulations that favour large cars and fall most heavily on small car.

‘If you only look at tailpipe emissions and not the vehicle’s life cycle,’ he said, ‘then you are never going to see the true cost to the environment.’

But how real are the fuel and CO2 savings from ditching A-segment cars? Small cars have much lower annual mileages than bigger models – typically less than 6000 miles – so they simply don’t use as much fuel as larger cars, which makes them inherently cleaner. And although the nominal CO2 contribution of an A-sector car might seem relatively high on paper, it’s hard to believe that a 2.5-tonne plug-in hybrid SUV with its WLTP test emissions of less than 50g/km is half as polluting as a 900kg city car producing CO2 emissions of around 100g/km.

It’s difficult not to draw sharp comparisons between well-paid and privileged politicians and regulators in their expensive hybrid and battery-electric cars and the lower-paid members of society for whom public transport simply isn’t an option.

So, as they pull away in their chauffeur-driven limousines from Glasgow’s COP26 this autumn, preening themselves at their latest environmental transport initiatives, don’t expect our politicians to give much thought to the small army of forgotten folk who move in to clear up after them, or the demise of the fleet of little cars which once got them to work.