SUV Heaven

For a couple of days a couple of weeks ago I drove Porsche’s monstrous SUV – the Cayenne – and enjoyed the experience immensely. I liked the way it handled like a saloon, even though it is the size of a World War II landing craft. I liked the way it went from 0-60 in just 6.8 seconds, even though it weighs the same as a World War II landing craft. I even liked the way it looked like a World War II landing craft.

If I had £44,900 lying around, I would buy one straightaway, which, apparently, makes me stupid, dangerous, selfish, vain, sexually inadequate and evil. Ever since the publication of Keith Bradsher’s High and Mighty: The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, saying you like urban 4×4s is a little like admitting you enjoy canvassing for the BNP – utterly taboo. Some people hate the vehicles so much that they have taken to dousing them in acid, putting nails and screws under the wheels, painting the outline of dead bodies on owners’ driveways, slashing tyres, and even setting them alight.

But I do like SUVs and believe that many of the arguments that have led to them becoming a byword for Western excess and selfishness are flawed. Let’s tackle them in turn:

1.“SUVs are dangerous to pedestrians.” This fear recently lead the British Medical Journal to suggest that SUVs should be sold with health warnings. I struggle to imagine how such a warning might be worded – “Running over a human being in this sports utility vehicle at 43mph will hurt a human being much more than running them over them at 43mph in a saloon like a Ford Mondeo”. And I struggle to see how such a warning could possibly deter buyers – choosing a car on the basis of how much damage it might do to a pedestrian would be like choosing a house on the basis of how safe it would be in the event of a fire. One hardly expects to run over someone or for a home to burn down. Besides, the statistics are far from clear on the issue: according to Department for Transport figures, pedestrian deaths in the UK fell from 1038 in 1995, to 671 in the UK last year, a drop of 35 per cent; in the same period sales of 4×4s/SUVs more than doubled from 80,427 to 179,439.

2.“SUVs are several times more polluting than normal cars”. This simply isn’t true. Compare, for example, a BMW X3 2.0d, a SUV that many campaigners would liked to douse in acid, slash, set alight etc, to the Mini Cooper S, a vehicle widely viewed as small and environmentally friendly. The Mini does around 33mpg on the combined cycle of city and open road driving. The X3 2.0d will give you around 39 mpg.

3.“SUV drivers have poor visibility from their cabins, making them more dangerous.” I have never understood this criticism – all the SUVs I have used have a high driving position, proffering a much better view of the road than conventional cars, and most come jam-packed with safety devices such as reverse parking sensors and large wing mirrors.

4.“SUVs take up more space on the roads”. Another untruth – there are many 4×4s that have a smaller footprints than family and executive saloons such as the Mercedes S class, the Audi A8, and the BMW 7 series.

5.“SUVs intimidate cyclists and pedestrians”. Surely, cyclists and pedestrians would be even more intimidated by electric cars, which are harder to see and almost impossible to hear?

Indeed, it seems to me that SUV drivers are subject to the kind of blind prejudice that BMW drivers were subject to a decade ago and women drivers were subject to a couple of decades before that. It’s so bad that urban 4×4s are now even being seen as intrinsically evil. Here are some headlines from recent weeks, as they have appeared in newspapers around the world: “SUV Crash kills one, backs up morning commute”; “Student, 9, hurt when hit by SUV near school”; “Mom killed, son survives SUV rollover”; “Teen ejected in crash is run over by SUV he hot”; “Woman dies, Two critical after SUV Flips on Turnpike”. It is ridiculous to have to point it out, but it is irresponsible drivers and passengers who are usually to blame for accidents, not inanimate chunks of metal.

Which brings me to another argument that the anti-sports utility vehicle lobby likes to trot out: utility. They can’t see why anyone needs a four-wheel drive vehicle with a set of bull bars, tinted windows, anti-bovine devices, snow shovels, bumpers the size of pillar boxes, several feet of road clearance, and so on, just to drop off a six year-old at school. They struggle to understand why anyone requires a two and half ton Porsche that can do 165mph flat-out, that will burn a gallon of unleaded in less than 10 miles if driven with enthusiasm, just to fetch a tin of duck fat from Tesco’s.

And of course no SUV is really necessary. But is any car necessary? Do you need a 2-litre Vauxhall Vectra to go shopping? Do you require a 1.2 litre Nissan Micra to get to the golf course? No. You could probably do the job in something much smaller. But there’s a reason we’re not all travelling on lawnmowers: because motoring is about something more than utility. It is about dreams. And mankind, as a species, is designed to chase dreams.

Furthermore, I suspect that for many SUV critics, their loathing stems from reverse snobbery. Driving the Cayenne through the streets of the Brixton, where I live, I got nothing but positive reactions: two hooded teenagers who live on my road insisted on having their picture taken behind the wheel, while a street cleaner congratulated me on having such a “wicked” set of wheels. But as soon as I got into posher, more wealthy north London, I got nothing but frowns – the kind of frowns the middle classes reserve for anything big and brash and and, frankly, fun.

While parked-up in snooty Hampstead someone even put an anti-SUV leaflet under my windscreen wiper. Designed to look like a parking ticket, it declared: “POOR VEHICLE CHOICE: A Dirt and Dangerous Car (as you should know)”. Among the criticisms cited under the heading “IMPORTANT” were: “only 5 per cent of 4×4s are taken off road”; and “a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK come from road vehicles”.

If the person who left this was trying to make me feel bad, it didn’t work. For a start, I was chuffed to bits that I didn’t have a parking ticket after all. Also, as I had recently taken the Cayenne off-road, on a pre-historic public footpath called the Ridgeway, I felt that the first statistic didn’t apply to me. Meanwhile, the knowledge that three quarters of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK come from things other than road vehicles, made me think that, relatively, my high fuel consumption didn’t matter. I continued my journey, to fetch a tin of duck fat from Tesco’s, with a conscience clearer than the petrol pumping through the thick veins of my land tractor.