Where are we? Signals bouncing between space and the bright little map in a borrowed VW Touareg confirm that an expedition between school and the local supermarket is nearing completion. One by one, another screen checks off street locations. We have reached the car park. Flashing lights and beeping ultrasonic sensors ensure that touchdown is accomplished without injury to vehicle or passenger. It remains only to check that no parts of small children or animals adhere to the rear bumper.
Concerning these smaller forms of life, the Touareg’s manual warns that the ultra-sensors, so brilliant at protecting your own vehicle from harm, ”may not always be able to detect them”. And if you do have the misfortune to hit one, they are sadly unlikely to thrive. Although sports utility vehicles (SUVs) can offer drivers unrivalled sensations of importance and impregnability, their makers have yet to correct their tendency to write off pedestrians more effectively than normal cars — without, of course, making their vehicles any smaller. Does this make SUV owners very bad people?
Perhaps we should try to understand a little more and condemn a little less? Maybe those of us who make a point of darting scornful, venomous looks at 4×4 drivers, should learn to live and let live.
Plainly, considering the sales, 4x4s are not without attractions. They are big. Or as Volkswagen puts it, ”dominant from the outside”. If, like me, you are so not-dominant from the outside as — like small children and animals — not to register on the parking ultra-sensors, the promise of instant stature may be irresistible. And much simpler than the conventional short person’s compensatory stratagem of becoming an insane military dictator.
But tall people also like 4x4s because of the headroom and the potential to drive through ditches. The Touareg, which I was allowed to drive for a day, has a manual full of tips on how to drive in snow, up steep slopes and through fast-flowing water. Nomads, though, are advised to stick with their camels. Despite its exotic name, and some lovely promotional shots taken in the desert, the standard issue Touareg can’t be doing with dunes.
The leg-up, however, cannot be faulted. Unless you are on the shy side: aloft in what its makers call the ”cockpit”, you are oddly exposed to view, and forced into unexpected, possibly unwelcome eye contact with fellow occupants of the driving stratosphere: van men, the Post Office’s sociopaths and, of course, other SUV drivers.
Our normal school runs are undertaken, not far above the gutter, in a 12-year-old Citroen. Although this is apt to be an object of derision, particularly on the days when humidity intensifies a faint smell of mould, it can be trusted not to announce its driver as anything more specific than the owner of a virtually worthless car.
Up in her airy cockpit, the city-bound driver of a 4×4 is painfully exposed as a type: an affluent exhibitionist, who must be aware, but too selfish to care, that her car takes up too much space and uses too much fuel.
But — let’s not be judgemental — perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps some genuinely altruistic, sensitive and green-minded people also drive 4x4s. They just haven’t heard that, in a collision, pedestrians are 75% more likely to be killed by an SUV than by a conventional vehicle.
The first time we lurch to school, a passing driver gives us the basilisk treatment. So would I, if I were him. Once we have mounted the kerb — to avoid another school-run 4×4 — and descended from the lovely, softly padded ”sunny beige” interior, I am congratulated on my new motor by one awestruck mother and gaped at, I think in horror, by a few others. However, not everyone thinks I’m an idiot. In a narrow street, three smaller cars pull over, deferentially, almost in formation, to let our huge, silvery barque glide past. ”Now you know what it feels like to be a bus driver,” my daughter says.
Up to a point. In the Touareg you don’t feel the speed bumps. It is like driving over a pile of mattresses. And how many bus drivers have satellite tracking, a footwell light, and electronic differential lock allowing 100% of torque on any one wheel?
But as SUV explorers are aware, there can be no adventure without risk. The instructions for the Touareg begin with a prominent warning and an exclamation mark: ”The design of the Touareg gives it a relatively high centre of gravity. This means that in certain, exceptional situations, the Touareg is more likely to roll over than a normal car … ” Those certain exceptional circumstances include going too fast round a bend.
Since we never, during our test drive, left a certain part of the satellite map, nor exceeded the brisk pace of a bolting camel, the Touareg’s inherent instability was less of a preoccupation than squeezing its great carcass through the unaccommodating city streets. Like owners of absurdly supersized baby buggies, for whom every car boot or shop doorway is a challenge, the 4×4 driver must atone, in every narrow street, for her self-importance. To the SUV driver, every one-way street has the aura of benediction; wide arterial roads, not hills and valleys, are the promised land.
Before shunning SUVs and their owners on the strength of just one difficult relationship with a Touareg, it seemed only fair to experiment with another model: a rented Mercedes ML270. Although slightly smaller than the Touareg, it is more pugnacious to look at: snub-faced and lined, in virile fashion, in black, puckered leather. Having driven one, I can now spot an ML from quite a long way off: they are the big mean ones, driven, often as not, by men with square heads.
On the way to school, I was able to be rather more environmentally sensitive, filling it to capacity with three passengers and all the food and drink for a party for 40 seven-year-olds. The 50 jellies arrived without a mark on them. On the other hand, it would all have fitted, quite easily, in the Citroen.
For such a vast amount of car, the Mercedes offers curiously little beyond the usual SUV attributes of height, aggression, showing-off opportunities, cupholders, impossibility of parking, massive consumption of fossil fuel and so on. All its padding could not muffle the routine battering of speed bumps. Nor would it accommodate more people than a normal car. Perhaps it would appear to more advantage on a motorway? By way of teaching it a lesson, we took it on an outing.
Even before we had passed all the 80kph speed cameras, my younger passenger described the experience as ”terrifying”. To me, a fast-moving ML felt more on the boingy, spongy side. In front of us a swankier, costlier version of the ML blundered along, being driven, I speculated, by someone who owns a microscopic cellphone, a miniature digital camera, and possibly a handheld computer — and favours a car the size of an elephant. Why?
For the same reason, I think, that mothers want car-sized buggies, and cyclists ride down pavements, and young men spread their legs on buses to occupy three quarters of the seat: because being squashed up in the city is tedious, and because they can. And they will carry on until everyone else protests, instead of scattering humbly out of the way.
Perhaps our test drives were unrepresentative, but the way other drivers behaved around the borrowed SUVs more often suggested interest, or respect. Quite possibly, SUVs are like capital punishment: one of those inexcusable and immoral things that the majority of people actually support. They both require an acceptance that, sometimes, innocent people will get killed. It’s just that, with SUVs, a number of these innocent people are likely to be children and cyclists.
Unless the government is brave enough to ban them from cities, the legions of urban-based SUVs can only multiply, expanding not just horizontally but vertically, as existing SUV owners upgrade, in order to enjoy continued physical dominance. There may, perhaps, be some natural wastage from the daredevils who want to emulate the promotional shots of SUVs vanquishing vertical slopes, icy rivers, bottomless pits and all other unlikely obstacles offroaders were designed to overcome.
Which leaves us with the other 95% who never leave the tarmac. SUV drivers may be idiots, but they’re not stupid enough to think these vehicles are either sporting or useful. They’re just big. — Â