THEY SAY THAT FOR people making the agonising decision about which SUV to buy, the deciding factor is often . . . cupholders.
Picture the scene. You’re trying to choose between a £43,000 Volvo Splatwagon and a £44,000 Toyota Landmuncher and rather than worrying about whether a tank of petrol is going to cost £150 or £200, or whether the boot is the size of a barn or merely a medium-sized mausoleum, you’re sizing up the moulded rubberised moonscape between the two front seats to make sure there’s going to be enough room for your latte.
Well, get this. The £9,000 all-electric Mega Multitruck has cupholders too, thoughtfully positioned so that no one gets splashed as it barrels along. The Mega also has room in the back for a small forest of Christmas trees, but in the context of the Great Big Enormous Transport Question (how are we going to go on getting from A to B without destroying A and B?), it’s the cupholders that matter.
Even the better-known G-Wiz has a cupholder. It only has one per car, admittedly, which may mean a bit of sharing, but that would at least be in the spirit of sharing what remains of the natural environment with our grandchildren. This is one of the things that these babies and their rivals stand for, but they stand for other things too.
They are zero-emission, minimum running-cost, minimum maintenance, 21st-century battery-powered gargleblasters that also have perky performance, quirky looks (Smart Car meets big-ass Renault Scenic) and cupholders. They’re affordable. They’re available. And we should be buying a lot more of them than we are.
Let’s be clear on a few basics. I have nothing irrational or religious against petrol. Anything you can suck out of the ground and pour into a car at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure that will make that car go 300 miles without stopping is remarkable in its way. The trouble is, petrol is also carcinogenic, dirty, chock full of carbon, ruinously expensive and running out.
We have to switch to something else at some point. We keep thinking that point has come. Whenever we do, we wonder idly about batteries, and then we wonder idly about something else, and nothing actually changes. But the longer we do nothing, the worse the shock will be when co-ordinated rebellions in Riyadh and the Niger Delta, or a couple of simultaneous Buncefield fires, push petrol to £10 a litre and finally snap us out of our stupor.
The last big push to popularise a zero-emission car came, oddly, from General Motors. In 1996, at a cost of about $1 billion, GM launched the battery-powered EV1 to considerable fanfare in Los Angeles. It drove like a dream but looked like a suppository, and flopped (and the debate as to whether or not this was actually GM’s intended outcome rages on). The hopes of internal combustion-haters then switched to fuel cells, but prototype fuel-cell cars cost about as much as 200mph Bugattis and still no one has solved the tricky question of how to produce and store all the hydrogen they need.
For a while, SUVs reigned supreme. In the US, manufacturers loved them because they were cheap to build and hugely profitable to sell. Buyers loved them because they were big and fashionable and — so the ads implied — helped to save the environment by enabling you to drive straight up craggy mountains and rescue pandas from their natural habitat. In Chelsea, SUVs caught on because they give the best view in traffic jams.
Their apotheosis was the canary yellow Hummer H2, derived from the US Army’s Humvee, notching up eight miles to the gallon in cities and appropriating the chemical symbol for hydrogen with all the subtlety of a ram raider. It was as if petrol was Perrier and 1973 never happened.Then three things happened all at once. SUVs turned out to be almost as dangerous for their occupants as for anyone unlucky enough to be hit by them; oil prices shot up with the Gulf War; and Toyota produced the Prius.
The genie in the Prius was not new hardware, but new software, switching between an old-fashioned electric motor and an old-fashioned petrol engine, according to how hard you are pressing on the accelerator.
It was enough to give double the mileage of a typical family saloon and make Priuses the limo of choice for thinking luvvies at the 2003 Oscars. The rest is eco-history. Waiting lists for new Priuses are now so long that second-hand ones can actually appreciate like houses.
Toyota has proved what optimistic environmentalists have been arguing for yonks, namely that going green can be a highly commercial proposition. Every one of its rivals is throwing money at “hybrid” and battery technology in the race to catch up. A brave new dawn for e-transport is upon us, and The Times has celebrated by sending me off to test drive the sprightly heirs to the milk float. The experience has convinced me that while they do all suffer from limited range between charges, they benefit from so many of what the Hummer brigade would call no-brainers that it can only be herd cowardice and blinkered avarice that prevents us from switching to them en masse. ()
