Monsters of the Road: What Should the UK Do About SUVs?
Monsters of the Road: What Should the UK Do About SUVs?
They have higher emissions, hog roadspace and are more dangerous for other road users. Yet SUVs are selling better than ever. As calls for curbs increase, some people are taking matters into their own hands
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
That is the cardinal conceit of SUVs: although the overwhelming majority of them are city-based and only a tiny fraction will ever encounter an obstacle more onerous than a speed bump, they trade on a familiarity with safaris and game shooting.
They claim to have a presence in a number of countries but it’s in the UK where they have gained most attention, following a protest event in August this year when activists operating under the group’s banner used power tools to puncture the tyres of 60 SUV vehicles at a car dealership in Exeter.
As the celebrated German critical theorist Theodor Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: “Which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passers-by, children, bicyclists?”
According to Andrew Simms and Leo Murray, in their forthcoming book Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos, between 1990 and 2001, $9bn (£7.4bn) was spent on advertising off-road-themed cars to an audience that hadn’t before shown much interest in driving down that path.
In the US there were various factors that contributed to the SUV’s appeal, not least an exemption from fuel economy regulations for off-road vehicles, and the fact that large cars were part of an American tradition that had already produced five-lane freeways, sprawling suburbs and almost limitless parking spaces.
Sold as a means of escape from the concrete realities of the modern world, a symbol of individualism and the pioneer spirit, the SUV represents instead a uniform kind of selfishness, a collective indifference to community to which, alas, we are all more or less prone.
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