Unless you're living under a rock, SUVs and utes (extremely large utes for that matter) are everywhere. Car manufacturers are opting to produce only large vehicles, some cutting their small sedans and hatches.
VOX did a video on this a while back for the US and I can kind of see it being similar in Australia. It is just sad that it has become this way, not just from an environmental POV but from a normal citizen and car enthusiast's POV as well.
Utes are considered work vehicles and receive some benefits which make them a popular choice for business owners who use them for "work purposes". Similarly, everything is so expensive these days, it is understandable that families want to have the most versatile/practical vehicle if they can only have one. That is where my level of reasoning ends.
However, Australians seem to have the American ideals where bigger is better, and what is worse is that half of these SUVs (cross overs and more?) have worse space than some hatchbacks and wagons… like what is with that? The bigger and heavier they are the less fuel efficient they are, the more damage they do to the roads and the more dangerous they are to other cars around them etc.
I wish our roads were filled with cars like in Japan and we had much better public transport like most major cities but I don't think that'll happen any time soon.
Head-to-Head Crash Statistics
When the SUV has a higher safety rating than the sedan, sedan occupants are nearly 10 times more likely to die than the SUV occupants (odds ratio 9.8).
Even if the sedan is heavier than the SUV, the sedan’s occupants are still more likely to die (40.1% mortality rate in the sedan vs. 24.4% in the SUV).
Overall, the chance of death to the sedan driver in a collision with an SUV is 66%, compared to just 14% for the SUV driver in the same scenario (based on a dataset of over 1,200 paired crashes).
Perplexity