Yeah, but this article is about Europe, and SUVs make up over 40% of new registrations. Mind you, the typical "European" SUVs, while bigger than other European cars, are midgets compared to what someone from the States would call an SUV.

That's very true, there's a shop on the outskirts of Paris that specializes in selling import American cars (a booming business apparently) and never having been to the USA I was genuinely amazed at the scale of the vehicles. It's the first time I saw a "car" that was basically as tall as I am, and I'm not small. Everything truly is bigger in America. Since then started paying attention to the size of the vehicles in American-produced media and I realized how absolutely huge cars can be over there.

I was also remembered of an HN thread years ago where people were commenting on the failure of Smart cars in the US. Many Americans were basically arguing that the car was too small to feel safe in traffic, which sounded a bit silly to me, but now that I know that every other car in the US is closer in size to a tank it makes a lot of sense.

I don't think many people in Europe really prefer SUVs, perhaps it's just the best type of electric car that is on offer or maybe the one with the biggest subsidies.

Of course I speak from my point of view as someone who was raised in The Netherlands. In The Netherlands I never saw many SUVs on the road.

Elon Musk is actually contemplating [0] to produce smaller EVs for the European market and I think those could become very popular indeed. Smaller cars are generally just nicer to use in compact crowded cities.

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[0] https://electrek.co/2020/11/24/elon-musk-tesla-hatchback-ele...

>I don't think many people in Europe really prefer SUV

Oh I think you're wrong, there's definitely a significant market for people who prefer SUVs, electric or not. This is not new. After all most of these European urban SUV are really neither S or U, they're just SUV shaped.

I remember watching a French TV show about cars maybe 15 years ago where they were talking about the growing popularity of SUVs, and back then diesel was the norm.

There's 10s of small EV's you can already buy for nearly half price of Model 3 in EU.

They probably can make it cheap enough, especially if it's made in EU to skirt tariffs, but by then there will 100s of competitors.

Right now you can already buy 35k euro SUV when Model Y is something like 60k.