Sir Sadiq Khan has admitted that he could be directly impacted by his own plans to impose fresh taxes on larger vehicles in a bid to boost road safety across the capital.
The London Mayor unveiled his Vision Zero Action Plan last week in a bid to eliminate deaths and serious injuries from the capital's roads by 2041.
The new plan includes 43 new actions to further reduce dangers on roads, including AI cameras to detect vehicle offences, lower speed limits and 1,000 new pedestrian crossings.
One of the most controversial measures included in the Vision Zero plan is how Transport for London can monitor safety issues posed by larger vehicles, especially SUVs.
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TfL outlined that these larger vehicles have grown in popularity dramatically in recent years, and are much more likely to cause deaths or serious injuries in the event of an accident.
Potential measures to crack down on SUVs include a specific tax on larger vehicles over a certain size or weight, or more expensive parking charges.
Sir Khan said he did not own an SUV, but is often transported around the capital in a large, armoured SUV by protection officers, the Guardian reported.
He said: "Yes, of course, I have an armoured vehicle. But if that's the evidence, I think it’s a message I'll be sending to the police as well, saying, actually, you do realise, God forbid, if you hit a child in an SUV, you're more likely to kill that child.
Sir Sadiq Khan's SUV tax may impact the armoured car he is often transported in
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"It's worth everyone thinking about that. And not just, you know, ordinary Londoners, but the police as well."
He also pointed to data which shows that a child is 77 per cent more likely to be killed if they are struck by a large SUV.
The concentration of SUVs in London is believed to have increased tenfold over the last decade, with larger vehicles making up the majority of new car sales across the country.
Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shows that pedestrians or cyclists struck by an SUV suffered more severe injuries than those hit by a passenger car.
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Research shows that being hit by an SUV, compared to a smaller car, will increase the likelihood of serious injuries or death
| GETTYBased on data from 680,000 collisions over the last 35 years, LSHTM and Imperial College London revealed that if all SUVs were replaced with passenger cars, the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed in accidents would fall by eight per cent in Europe.
Sir Khan also highlighted how the large vehicles present chaos in areas with narrow roads, which can be found across the capital.
Parking can also become an issue for these vehicles, with data showing that some SUVs on the market are already too wide or long for standard on-street and off-street parking spaces.
The London Mayor said some side roads are not big enough for two vehicles to pass down, especially if one of them is a large SUV.
Paris voted to increase parking charges for SUVs in 2024 | REUTERSParis has been one of the largest cities in the world to take action against SUVs, with a referendum in 2024 showing support for parking prices to be tripled for larger vehicles.
Under the new measures, six hours of parking in the city centre costs SUV owners €225 or £194, instead of the previous level of €75 (£64).
City Hall Conservatives accused the London Mayor of being anti-motorist, with its transport spokesperson Thomas Turrell AM saying a "family car tax would be a disaster for Londoners trying to get around and would fall on the backs of poorer Londoners".
In response to the accusations, Sir Khan explained that he was not "anti-motorist", but rather "anti-death".