I was queuing to pay at a motorway service station. Violence was in the air. A
small, bald man, a lorry driver, was shouting at a young woman. He seemed to
be angry because she and her passenger had laughed at him. He had stopped
when she had stopped, specially to shout at her. But after a few tense
moments his real grievance became apparent. She was driving a 4x4, a BMW,
and, as his articulacy crumbled under the weight of his anger, it became
clear what was the real issue: he hated her for her car.
In Richmond owners of 4x4s will soon have to pay £300 a year to park their
cars. Ken Livingstone, who thinks drivers of 4x4s in London are "idiots",
plans to introduce a special £25 congestion charge. The Church says Jesus
wouldn't drive a 4x4. The Alliance against Urban 4x4s continues its campaign
of so-called "subvertising" — sticking fake parking tickets
headlined "Poor Vehicle Choice" on the cars they hate. The
alliance has also carried out "a daring protest" at Chelsea
football ground aimed at the players' big 4x4s. Mothers using a
"Chelsea tractor" to take their children to school are abused for
their crimes of congestion and emission. If Jade Goody were a car, she'd be
a 4x4.
"Basically," says Sian Berry, a Green party spokesperson and central
figure in the alliance, "they are a disaster for fuel economy."
Meanwhile, there is an academic campaign to establish that 4x4s are unsafe.
Students from Imperial College London have watched cars at key sites in the
city and discovered that drivers of 4x4s are more likely not to wear seat
belts, and to use mobile phones while driving. Other studies have shown that
4x4s are more dangerous to pedestrians. Car insurers have said that 4x4
drivers are 25% more likely to be involved in an accident and are also more
likely to be at fault. Each fragment of evidence is turned into a screaming
headline about the iniquity of 4x4s.
These cars have become emblems of all our environmental crimes. They represent
7.5% of the UK car market and 100% of British car loathing. The very idea
that in town, or even in the country, anybody should use a car in which all
four wheels are driven is regarded as a crime comparable to logging the
rainforests or clubbing seals. Across Europe, owners of 4x4s (or, as they
are also called, Sports Utility Vehicles, or SUVs) have become eco-pariahs,
malevolent planet-warmers. If you happen to be sitting in a Range Rover
Sport, a BMW X5 or, worst of all, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S in London, it is
best not to catch the eyes of any pedestrian.
The environment is the issue, but not the only one. Berry admits that, if they
made a 4x4 as green as a rainforest, she'd still go after them on grounds of
safety. But darker forces are also at work. Class hatred is plainly
expressed in much of the anti-4x4 rhetoric, as is envy. A City bonus boy
driving a Cayenne is, in the eyes of many, the distillation of social
injustice. The high driving position — significantly called the "command"
position — and the sheer bulk of the vehicles can, to people who can't
afford them, seem like the engineering of arrogance.
Sexism is also involved. It's largely women who do the school run and, if they
do it in a monster SUV, the resulting congestion is seen as a peculiarly
female failing. But there are two more twists of this particular knife. The
4x4 off-road tradition is, in essence, masculine. These new luxury SUVs,
however, are absurdly easy to drive. In some cases you can drive over a
mountain with no special skills or muscle tone. The electronics do all the
work. Women, infuriatingly for some, can do the tough stuff as easily as
men.
In fact, secondly, they can often do it better. As I was to learn while Land
Rover's experts were giving me an off-road lesson, women are better at this
surprisingly delicate art than men. They listen to their instructors and do
what they are told, which for men can be as difficult as stopping to ask for
directions. Off-roading often requires the driver to do exactly the opposite
of what he would do on-road — selecting higher gears, using less power to
preserve traction — and men find it harder to quell their instinct to go for
high revs and too much power. The real fear of that man in the service
station and, perhaps, of men in general when they see a woman in a powerful
machine, was that he was being outclassed as a driver.
And, on the subject of 4x4s, it's a case of left and right unite and fight.
Right-wing tabloids rage against 4x4s as eagerly as left-wing eco-warriors.
These are not cars; these are social history.
Is the loathing of 4x4s justified? This is complex: few people fully
understand the issues, the engineering or history. But the place to begin is
with a figure — the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by a car per
kilometre travelled.
Atmospheric carbon is the substance most likely to end human life or, at
least, our reign over the planet. We toss 27 billion tons of carbon dioxide
(over 7 billion tons of pure carbon) into the air every year. This traps
heat and causes global warming. The UK emits just under 2% — about 550m
tons. Of this, about one fifth — 110m tons of CO2 — comes from vehicles. The
critical figure for judging the green credentials of a car is, therefore,
the weight of CO2 it emits.
So, for example, the Toyota Prius, with a hybrid electric-petrol drive, emits
104 grams per kilometre. The latest Land Rover Discovery diesel emits 244g.
The Porsche Cayenne Turbo S emits 378g. Even this, however, does not look
too bad next to the Bugatti Veyron, which emits 547g, or the Ferrari
Scaglietti, which manages 475g. For perspective, a Ford Mondeo diesel emits
159g, and the European Union target for average emissions across each
manufacturer's entire fleet is 130g. What these figures show is that 4x4s
are, indeed, higher-than-average emitters, but they are not the highest.
Fast cars are much worse. And people carriers can be pretty bad. The
Chrysler Grand Voyager, for example, emits 303g. Luxury cars are just as
bad. The Mercedes S600 Pullman emits 355g and the BMW 7 series rises to
337g. Why, then, are 4x4s singled out? "Because," say the weary
executives at Land Rover who have heard it all before, "4x4 fits neatly
into a headline."
This is fair enough. The Richmond parking scheme, for example, was universally
reported as an attack on 4x4s, but in fact applied to all high-emission
vehicles. The term 4x4 has supplanted "gas guzzler" as the supreme
automotive shorthand of hate. It's better than mere words — it's a term that
catches the eye before it engages the mind.
The rational answer is that the SUV sector has boomed. In the UK in 1996,
78,000 were sold; last year it was 176,000. This is slightly down on the
year before, but, for a number of reasons, it is not clear yet whether it
represents a real change.
Sian Berry points out that this growth represents a reversal of the general
trend towards lower-emitting cars that has persisted since the oil shocks of
the 1970s. Individually, 4x4s may not be the worst offenders, but they are
in danger of becoming the most numerous.
Attacking 4x4s, therefore, is a way of reinstating the trend towards lower
emissions and of drawing attention to the issue. The fact that 4x4 does fit
neatly into a headline is a definite plus.
But there is a serious problem with this argument. At the Westminster offices
of the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, a body that advises the government on
emissions, a self-confessed "tree-hugger", Alex Veitch, hands me a
chart. It tracks market share against CO2 emissions. The big peak — between
6 and 18% market share — accounts for vehicles emitting between 130
and 200g. The line drops very steeply indeed above 200, where almost all
4x4s live. In other words, if all 4x4s were taken off the road tomorrow, the
effect on emissions would be minimal. The real task, as Veitch sees it, is
to drive down emissions of the middle market — the Mondeos and Vectras. "If
you focus on 4x4s, you miss the more important point that this is all about
low-carbon cars. You might persuade people not to buy a 4x4, but they may
just buy a high-emitting saloon."
But for green campaigners the demonisation of the 4x4 is the perfect strategic
tool. "We've kept the debate up," says Berry. "Our school-run
event really drew it to people's attention. Every time the evidence comes
out, like the stuff in the BMJ [British Medical Journal], it backs up our
case. Then groups like the Church of England say: what would Jesus drive?
Every time it gets into the media, we've got spokesmen ready all around the
country to make our case. We're not ranty eco-warriors wanting to wipe out
the cars; we say, here's something silly and something can be done about it.
Local radio stations feel safe having us on a phone. It's a touchstone issue."
Almost nobody, campaigners say, actually needs four-wheel drive because almost
nobody uses them to go off-road. "It's for middle-class people in
boring city jobs," says Berry, "who need some way of believing
they could get back to nature at any time."
This fantasy element would have startled the originators of four-wheel-drive
cars. In spite of the current research, the truth is, four-wheel-drive cars
are intrinsically safer because of their ability to cope with poor road
conditions ? if they're currently less safe, then it is the drivers who are
at fault. For this reason, engineers in the 1950s thought that four-wheel
drive was the technology of the future.
Yet, almost from the beginning, glamour was attached to this obscure
engineering device. The American wartime Jeep was just so damned sexy. "The
British were used to small, round cars like the Austin 7," says John
Carroll, the editor of 4x4 Magazine, "then this stark, angular thing
comes along driven by guys who look like film stars. No wonder there were so
many war babies."
After the war this sexiness survived mostly on film and among off-road
hobbyists and collectors. Carroll himself has "about 12" old 4x4s
he uses for off-roading, or what petrol heads call "mud plugging".
And it was for mud-plugging that in 1947, on his farm in Anglesey, Maurice
Wilks, the chief designer of Rover, built the Land Rover. He had taken one
look at the Jeep and was convinced he could do better.
And he did. Down at the Land Rover Experience Centre at Eastnor in Ledbury, I
drove HUE166. Built at Solihull, this was the first of a pre-production
batch of 48 Wilks-designed Land Rovers. It is a joy. Its drive train makes
it shimmy weirdly on the road, it is noisy and slow. But there is an almost
tangible rightness about it. And, when I later drove a Freelander and a
Defender — the current iteration of the original "Landy" —
on Eastnor's off-road circuit, I endured a blinding revelation. Serious
off-roading, like sex, is about as much fun as you can have without
laughing. And — a deep, dark fear, this — it may be even more like sex in
that women do it better.
Four-wheel drive cars intended for road use did not take off in Britain until
the Range Rover appeared in 1970. Pricey and luxurious, this was a car for
the lord of the manor, to distinguish him from his gamekeeper in his
original Landy. Yet it was just as capable off-road, and it had plastic
seats, bungholes and a floor that was level with its sills, so that its
interior could be hosed down after a day of mud-plugging.
The move to on-road four-wheel drive was accelerated by rallying technology
and, crucially, by the Audi Quattro, a high-performance car that made
four-wheel-drive sexy for urban hot shots with no love of mud. But it wasn't
until the late 1990s that the modern 4x4 was truly born. Manufacturers like
Toyota, BMW, Audi and even Porsche invaded the market with four-wheel-drive
machines. Meanwhile, the Range Rover had lost its bung holes and become a
stately cruiser and, in Sport form, a fast two-ton supercar.
Their main market was America, where the love of big cars endures. In fact,
over there these cars weren't even seen as big. In the 1970s the US
government had reacted to oil shocks by imposing fuel-consumption targets on
manufacturers. These never worked. Many big cars were simply classified as
trucks to escape the controls, fuel consumption did not fall, and
interstates became infested by monstrous vehicles like the Cadillac
Escalade, the Chevrolet Suburban or, a favourite with British footballers,
the Lincoln Navigator. These scarcely came to Britain, where big 4x4s were
to remain a niche, though growing, market.
The new wave of luxury SUVs didn't impress mud-pluggers such as Carroll. "Apart
from Land Rovers," he says, "the more expensive these cars became,
the less capable they were off-road."
But for urbanites and occasional country dwellers, they were the answer to a
prayer. They might never go seriously off-road, but they could. In any case,
insists Roger Crathorne, one of the executives behind the Range Rover, it's
not a matter of driving over mountains. Wet grass — the sort encountered at
gymkhanas and village fetes — is almost frictionless; it is, in fact, the
most lethal driving surface. "It's like driving on water-covered ice,"
says Crathorne, upon whose heart the Land Rover logo is plainly engraved.
Such logic was lost on the greens. These cars were, to them, simply insane.
These are vehicles of excess, an affront to modesty and good sense. "Drug
dealers' cars" is now the most common term of abuse. And so, with the
fake-parking-ticket campaign — an idea copied from America — they became the
prime target of environmental campaigners, Ken Livingstone, Richmond
council, the Church of England and anybody who felt the need for an object
on which to vent their anger at the vanities of the modern world.
The situation is now edgy in the extreme.
The companies are unquestionably rattled. In January the Society of Motor
Manufacturers and Traders issued 4x4s/SUVs: The Facts, a document that
successfully crushes some of the more extreme claims of the campaigners, but
does not really overcome the objection about emissions. Meanwhile, last
year's slight fall in sales remains an uncertain indicator. It could mean
nothing, a slight blip in an otherwise upward trend, or it could mean that
the craze for big, fat, 4x4 luxo-barges is coming to an end.
For Toyota or BMW, this would be bad news but not catastrophic. They make lots
of other cars. But for Jeep in America and Land Rover here, it could be a
disaster. Land Rover is now owned by Ford, but its entire being is
predicated on four-wheel-drive technology. When you ask anybody there why
they don't just switch to two-wheel-drive vehicles, they look at you as if
you are having some kind of seizure. If there were no 4x4s, there would be
no Land Rover.
The company's predicament is made even more ticklish by environmental
politics. America is finally showing signs of coming to grips with its
thirst for oil. The European Union, meanwhile, is about to get tough. Its
voluntary agreement with manufacturers to reduce average emissions across
their fleets to 140g by 2008 has failed to make enough of an impact. So the
EU has now announced a legal target of 130g of CO2 per kilometre for new
cars by 2012.
With the Freelander, Land Rover's lowest emitter, pushing about 200g of CO2 per
kilometre through its tail pipe, the company is plainly facing a looming
crisis, a crisis made worse by the fact that Ford, its parent, has just
announced a record £6.5 billion loss. There is plainly little room for
manoeuvre.
If this were a novel, the blonde, hippie-ish, Tufnell Park-dwelling Sian Berry
would be contrasted with tall (6ft 3in), dark, corporate Phil Popham, the
managing director of Land Rover. In fact, if this were a novel, they'd
probably have an inter-ideological romance. Popham joined the company in
1988, straight from a university course in business studies, and became MD
last year. Laid-back and, unlike many of his type, relaxed about time,
Popham has all his strategy ducks in a neat row. He has big points to make
and he makes them coolly and without digression.
The first is that 4x4s are justified by their "breadth of capability"
— the wet-grass gymkhana argument — and their general ability to get around.
The second is the "dust-to-dust" cost argument, the true
environmental cost of a vehicle from build to scrap. Large amounts of carbon
are emitted when a car is built, so, with over 70% of all Land Rovers still
on the road, the company can claim its green credentials are much better
than emission figures suggest. The credibility of the Prius has been eroded
by figures showing its dust-to-dust may be damagingly high.
The third big point is that, because of their ticklish position, 4x4-makers
are reducing emissions faster than any other sector. Land Rovers are now
mostly diesel. The fleet used to be 75% petrol; this year it will be 80%
diesel. Diesel can cut consumption, and thus emissions, dramatically. A
petrol Range Rover Sport emits 352g, a diesel 271g. Land Rover is also
launching a carbon-offset scheme to offset the carbon production of new cars
from build through the first 45,000 miles. Money from sales will go to
Climate Care (www.climatecare.org), which will invest in carbon reduction
around the world.
Mild impatience crosses the Popham features when I point out this is clear
evidence that the company is rattled by the campaigners. "We are doing
this in addition to substantive improvements in fuel efficiency. There must
be a recognition that we're on a long path of continuous improvement."
The problem with offsetting is that it is open to an obvious criticism: why
not do all the beneficial offsetting things and stop emitting as well? At
this point we enter the only possible future for Land Rover and, ultimately,
for all car makers: new drive-train technology.
Lexus already makes a petrol hybrid SUV — the RX400h — which emits 192g, low
for a big 4x4 but not that low for cars in general, and almost twice as high
as the Prius. At Land Rover, Mike Richardson, a tweedy individual who reeks
of old-school British engineering, is in charge of the low-emission future.
Nobody will say when the company will produce its first diesel hybrid, but I
suspect it will be sooner rather than later. The cost will be high.
Richardson says it currently looks like £3,000 per car. But it has to
happen, as all the other low- or zero-emission technologies (fuel cell,
all-electric) are a long way off.
The company has already unveiled a concept car, the Land_e, which uses hybrid
as well as other technologies that would cut emissions of a fully capable
4x4 to less than 150g. In fact, as you enter the firm's headquarters in
Gaydon, Warwickshire, you see an illuminated, animated model of the Land_e.
The company knows there is only one way out of the predicament of its
heritage.
There can be no doubt that the days of the high-emitting car are numbered. If
you are convinced by the arguments for human-caused global warming, this is
an unconditionally good thing. But the anti-4x4 frenzy has all too often
been misguided, sectarian and even — as I saw in that service station —
potentially violent. It is riddled with irrationality and prejudice. Yet it
has succeeded in putting pressure on the car makers — and that, I suppose,
was always the point.
There is another point made not by green politics nor emission figures. It is
made instead by the gleam in the engineers' eyes and by the weird rapture
that overcame me while driving HUE166, or while, at the wheel of a modern
Defender, I peered down a vertiginous, rock-strewn slope into an icy pool of
incalculable depth at Eastnor. The original Land Rover in all its iterations
is possessed of something supremely pure; it provides, to make better use of
BMW’s slogan, the ultimate driving experience. Even Sian Berry says she
never puts a fake parking ticket on a Defender. She says it’s because they
genuinely go off-road and they last a long time.
I suspect it’s also because the frank, handsome looks dispel anger with their
evident authenticity. Fat 4x4 luxo-barges may have to die, emissions must
fall, but the Landy must go on for ever.
"Every journalist that comes in this room," says Gerry McGovern,
Land Rover’s sharp-suited design director, "asks me when we are
going to modernise the Defender."
"I won't."
"I know."
What do you think of gas-guzzlers?
Join the discussion by adding your comments in the box below
HOW WE MEASURE UP
The EU wants the cars we drive to emit no more than 130g of CO2 per
kilometre by 2012. But many of our cars are already ahead of the game. To
assess whether British drivers really are self-centred gas-guzzlers, we
compared the emissions of the UK's top 20 bestselling cars.
If there is a villain in this piece, it is the company-car culture, which
still accounts for most large-car purchases in the UK. That and our desire
for prestige through the cars we drive. Company-car taxes have risen in
recent years, but not enough to stop us choosing models we may otherwise not
be able to afford. If we look at the cars individuals buy, a different
picture emerges. The bestsellers are not people carriers or 4x4s, but
compact cars such as the Ford Focus and VW Polo. These "superminis"
account for nearly three-quarters of the models in the UK top 20. At present
only two, the Vauxhall Corsa and Honda Jazz, would meet the new EU target of
130g of CO2 per kilometre, but manufacturers have five years to improve
emissions. More importantly, we consumers already have a choice: it's now a
question of making the right one.
1 FORD FOCUS
Number sold in 2006: 137,694
CO2 g/km: Petrol 157, Diesel 127
2 VAUXHALL ASTRA
Number sold in 2006: 105,296
CO2 g/km: Petrol 151, Diesel 130
3 FORD FIESTA
Number sold in 2006: 103,856
CO2 g/km: Petrol 152, Diesel 119
4 VAUXHALL CORSA
Number sold in 2006: 73,923
CO2 g/km: Petrol 125, Diesel 115
5 RENAULT MEGANE
Number sold in 2006: 62,069
CO2 g/km: Petrol 165, Diesel 120
6 VW GOLF
Number sold in 2006: 62,011
CO2 g/km: Petrol 166, Diesel 140
7 RENAULT CLIO
Number sold in 2006: 57,192
CO2 g/km: Petrol 139, Diesel 123
8 BMW 3 SERIES
Number sold in 2006: 50,248
CO2 g/km: Petrol 175, Diesel 150
9 FORD MONDEO
Number sold in 2006: 48,021
CO2 g/km: Petrol 173, Diesel 159
10 VAUXHALL ZAFIRA
Number sold in 2006: 47,527
CO2 g/km: Petrol 175, Diesel 165
11 VAUXHALL VECTRA
Number sold in 2006: 44,389
CO2 g/km: Petrol 175, Diesel 157
12 PEUGEOT 307
Number sold in 2006: 41,939
CO2 g/km: Petrol 155, Diesel 129
13 VW POLO
Number sold in 2006: 38,152
CO2 g/km: Petrol 144, Diesel 127
14 VW PASSAT
Number sold in 2006: 38,104
CO2 g/km: Petrol 199, Diesel 151
15 MINI
Number sold in 2006: 38,018
CO2 g/km: Petrol 138, Diesel 118
16 HONDA CIVIC
Number sold in 2006: 37,485
CO2 g/km: Petrol 139, Diesel 135
17 AUDI A4 GRANDE
Number sold in 2006: 35,436
CO2 g/km: Petrol 184, Diesel 149
18 FIAT PUNTO
Number sold in 2006: 34,112
CO2 g/km: Petrol 140, Diesel 119
19 PEUGEOT 206
Number sold in 2006: 33,644
CO2 g/km: Petrol 152, Diesel 112
20 HONDA JAZZ
Number sold in 2006: 30,795
CO2 g/km: Petrol 129, Diesel n/a
All carbon calculations are based on the most recent and basic models in each
range. Sales data provided by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders
(SMMT) Data Services. To check your car's carbon-emission figure, visit www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/search/search.asp
