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Australia resisted America's gun culture — but couldn't help importing its obsession with oversized cars - ABC Religion & Ethics
Australia is rightly proud of having stood firm against one of America's deadliest exports — gun culture. After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, our leaders acted with moral clarity and urgency. It was a bipartisan moment that has saved countless lives. While the United States doubled down on its right to bear arms, we said no.
But there's another American export which we couldn't resist. In fact, we embraced it. It didn't come with bullets. It came with torque. Today, the vehicles dominating Australian roads are those dreamed up in Detroit and built to American scale.
America has long held individual freedom as its highest virtue — often, it's placed above collective safety and social cohesion. Their idea of freedom is shaped less by care for others, and more by the logic of competition: survival of the fittest, the richest, and now, the biggest.
Why Australia?
The rise of oversized SUVs and utes in Australia is no accident. It's the result of a decades-long campaign by American car manufacturers to sell not just vehicles, but a story and a culture: that bigger is better; that personal dominance matters more than collective comfort; and that power is something to display.
American car makers have exported more than vehicles — they've exported a value system. They've invested heavily in the Australian market and spent billions on advertising over the past decade to reshape what it means to 'drive'. They're turning it from an act of mobility into an assertion of identity. Their ads drip with masculinity, entitlement and conquest. Cars are no longer tools; they're statements.
This American culture is embedded in the physical form of these cars: long, unapologetically flat hoods; lifted bodies; oversized ground clearance. And we bought it — not just the vehicles, but the idea behind them too. Australia resisted the guns; but we bought the trucks.
When resistance to US-style excess emerged in Europe or Japan where space is tight and fuel expensive, car makers adapted. In Australia, with its car-loving culture and softer emissions rules, the American model found fertile ground. The marketing blitz followed — touting their 'utility' or 'sport' appeal (whatever that means), even though most people never tow a trailer or leave the suburbs.
Ford spends over USD $2.5 billion annually on global advertising. RAM has flooded YouTube and sports broadcasts with testosterone-drenched imagery. Their campaigns lean heavily on rural imagery, regardless of whether the vehicle is driven by a tradie or an urban dad doing the school drop-off.
Who bears the cost?
The rise of massive vehicles on Australian roads is often framed as consumer preference. But that framing ignores the external costs borne not by the driver, but by everyone else, especially vulnerable road users: pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists.
The evidence is unambiguous: large SUVs and utes are more likely to kill vulnerable road users. The pedestrian fatality crisis in the United States is the biggest testament to this. Pedestrian deaths were steadily declining for over two decades until 2009, when large vehicles began to dominate US roads. By 2022, annual pedestrian deaths had surged from around 4,100 to over 7,500 — a jump of nearly 80 per cent.
This surge in pedestrian deaths has been directly linked to the growing popularity of these giant cars. And Australia is now on a similar path. We're trailing this trend. Pedestrians and motorcyclists are the only road users in Australia showing a consistent rise in fatalities for four years straight. No such pattern exists for drivers or passengers.
And most vulnerable of all are children. In the United States, around 110 children are hit by vehicles each week in parking lots and driveways. The numbers have been climbing for years.
Car hoods were once designed to slope downwards, giving drivers a clearer field of view. But today's boxy SUVs jut straight out before dropping off, creating large blind zones where small children simply disappear. You could line up a dozen children sitting in front of some of these vehicles, and the driver wouldn't see the first eight or nine. With certain models, you'd need more than twelve children in a row before one even appears in your view.
Why car size is a moral issue
We barely talk about car size as a moral issue. But maybe we should.
The thing is, for many of us this is a subconscious choice. Nobody walks into a dealership and says, 'I'd like to endanger others.' But when you see enough of the same vehicle on the road it stops feeling like a choice. It starts feeling like self-defence. Especially when you're told that you need one of these to protect your family from all the other giant cars already out there.
This imposes real — if marginal — risk on those who can't, or choose not to, participate in the vehicle size race: children walking to school or pedestrians crossing the road. And let's not forget all of us are pedestrians, at least some of the time.
Driving tank-sized vehicles through residential streets, with bonnets at eye-level for most adults and towering above children, is a cultural export. And it's unmistakably American in posture — in-your-face, unapologetic, and indifferent to who gets left out.
And this means, we're caught in a cycle of reactive consumerism: we buy big because others are big. We tell ourselves it's a personal choice, but how much of it was ever really ours to begin with?
Milad Haghani is an Associate Professor of Urban Mobility at the University of Melbourne.
