The SUV has won. When did we decide every car had to look like one?

In August 2026, around 64 out of every 100 new cars registered in Italy belonged to an SUV category. B-SUVs alone accounted for 27.9% of the market, C-SUVs for 24.1%. D-segment saloons stood at 0.5%; estates at 2.3%. These are figures that change how the road looks before they even change the statistics.

The Italian figure is part of a broader transformation we have already described in looking at the automotive sector in 2026. In Europe’s five largest markets, JATO measures growth in the SUV share from 39.51% in 2020 to 58.25% in 2025. In 2010, according to European data collected by the ICCT, around one in ten new cars was an SUV; by 2023 the share had reached 48%.

In fifteen years, the SUV has gone from being a type of car to becoming almost the shape of the car itself. The transformation happened one model at a time, until city cars, family cars, electric cars and sports cars began to share increasingly similar proportions.

The interesting question is how a preference managed to rewrite the offering of an entire industry, and what happens to brands when millions of people learn to desire more or less the same silhouette.

The SUV used to be for getting somewhere

The name preserves its origins: Sport Utility Vehicle. Ground clearance, space, the ability to tackle conditions a saloon handles less easily. A vast share of Europe’s SUVs, however, spend most of their lives in cities, on ring roads, in car parks and on motorways.

Its contemporary success depends on what the format promises in daily life. A raised driving position, comfort, ease of access, space, a sense of safety and status have broadened the audience well beyond the use for which the category was created.

The off-roader has conquered the city and, in the process, lost many of the traits that made it a specialist object. It has become a product language able to span almost every price bracket.

The SUV has conquered superminis too

When we say SUV, the imagination readily turns to the Range Rover, BMW X5 or Mercedes GLE. European growth, however, has another decisive driver: compact crossovers.

In 2023, according to the ICCT’s European Vehicle Market Statistics, subcompact crossovers accounted for 31.7% of European SUV registrations. Models such as the Renault Captur, Jeep Avenger, Toyota Yaris Cross and Peugeot 2008 absorb many needs once met by small and compact cars, adding a few centimetres of height and a different image.

The category thus expanded until its boundary became less evident. SUV codes entered ordinary cars, making that stance familiar to an ever wider audience without requiring extreme dimensions.

Electric cars have inherited the same shape

The electric transition has widened the scope for redesigning the vehicle, thanks to more compact motors and different architectures. A significant share of what is on offer has nonetheless kept proportions familiar to the public.

In 2025, around half of the electric models available worldwide were SUVs, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2026. Widening the scope to all large vehicles, the share reached almost 70% of the offering, compared with around 55% in 2020.

The SUV shape also lends itself to battery packaging and meets a desire that is already well established. The new technology thus arrives in a silhouette the market already knows, closing part of the perceptual gap between the future of propulsion and the present of the purchase.

This is a typical dynamic of industrial transformations: a technology can change much faster than taste. Electrification has altered what makes the car move; customers often still recognise as desirable a shape they have already learnt.

When a trend becomes portfolio strategy

If customers consistently reward a type of product, a manufacturer expands its offer. When almost every manufacturer takes the same decision, reducing the commercial risk of each individual launch produces a different risk: sameness.

Small, medium, large, coupé, premium, electric, sporty SUVs. The more dominant the format becomes, the less the bodywork can distinguish the brand. Identity work migrates towards proportions, front end, lighting signature, interiors, software, performance, service, name and heritage.

It is a Brand Governance problem: when the market imposes certain shared codes, the brand must know which elements to protect so that the product still looks like its own. A Porsche SUV must remain instantly Porsche. A Ferrari entering this territory faces the same tension in an even more evident form, as the transformation journey we analysed when discussing Ferrari Luce also shows.

When the format wins, identity has to work harder. Competitive advantage shifts from the category to the ability to occupy that category with proprietary codes.

Getting bigger comes at a physical price

The SUV’s success brings more mass and more space taken up. The IEA estimates that an average SUV can weigh 200-300 kg more than an average conventional car and occupy almost 0.3 square metres of additional surface area. In combustion-engine models, the greater mass also goes hand in hand with higher average fuel consumption and emissions.

The tension is particularly visible in European cities. The industry must cut emissions and consumption while a growing share of demand favours taller, heavier vehicles. Electrification reduces the problem of tailpipe emissions. Weight, space occupied, material use and size remain part of the design brief.

The SUV’s very success could therefore generate the pressures that will change its next form: urban regulation, efficiency, battery costs, aerodynamics and the need to keep weight down are already pushing designers to look for new compromises.

What did we lose while it was winning?

The MPV has all but disappeared. Estates and saloons hold on in specific, often premium, segments, but they no longer define the automotive landscape as they once did. In exchange we gained accessibility, versatility and a shape many customers find reassuring.

The most interesting loss is perhaps formal variety. For decades, the silhouette let you grasp the function at a glance: estate, sports car, city car, saloon, MPV, off-roader. Today many answers start with the same visual vocabulary: a higher roof, large wheels, prominent wheel arches, a stance that suggests readiness for adventure even when actual use remains urban.

This is how a taste becomes landscape. By dint of winning, the dominant shape stops being perceived as a choice and begins to seem simply natural.

The SUV has won. Now comes the hard part

For manufacturers, the category has delivered volumes and margins. For brands, the next phase calls for greater precision: what sets you apart when it is rare becomes an entry requirement once everyone adopts it.

The next advantage could come from the ability to break out of sameness while staying within a market that keeps rewarding height, comfort and versatility. Proportions we had shelved could return, new body-style hybrids could emerge, or manufacturers could shift differentiation even further towards software, experience, service and visual signature.

Meanwhile, the SUV is in front of us at the traffic lights, behind us in the mirror and parked on both sides of the street. Perhaps its most complete victory lies precisely in this: it has become so common as to be almost invisible.