Feeling less lonely as Standard columnist blasts SUVs

At last, an opinion piece in the Evening Standard that pins down everything that is vile about the vehicles known as SUVs ("sports utility vehicles", that is big four-wheel drive farmer's trucks tarted up to appeal to rich and insecure urbanites).

When I read Anna van Praagh's short piece in Wednesday's edition (May 23, Comment: My boy's obsession with 4x4s will not do, page 19) I almost did one of those embarrassing "YES!" gestures loved by footballers who've just scored the winning goal.

So, yes! There is someone else out there who finds these bully-boy autos totally repugnant. She hits the phenomenon right on its chrome-plated, sneering grille: "Childcrushers are so vulgar, so selfish, so crass, surely people driving them can sense how much they are disliked?"

Exactly. She distils most of my reasons for loathing these vehicles in a few very well turned sentences. But are they actually so widely disliked? There's a conundrum here.

It's odd, because there has always been a good deal of mockery and distaste for the urban use of vehicles which might be appropriate on a ranch in Arizona, or in a war zone - but are simply an unattractive nuisance in a city like London with so many congested, narrow streets. I can remember people commenting harshly on the drivers of  "Chelsea tractors" way back in the early 1990s, and possibly before that.

Yet none of the jokes, none of the disapproval, has made even the slightest dent in their popularity: in fact they have burgeoned, and conquered the car market, getting bigger, fatter and much, much uglier year after year.

The original 1970s Range Rovers look positively slimline compared with a 2018 Land Rover Discovery - which, at over 2 metres wide, surely should become one of the first to be banned from confined routes like the Rotherhithe tunnel.

Cycling through the back streets of my own unmentionable suburb (the postcode is SW4), the ratio of these vehicles to normal is about half and half. If two of the fatter SUVs are parked on opposite sides of a road, there's barely room for one of their plump brethren to pass - without forcing everyone else to head for the pavement.

There's also an irony. One of the widest, tallest and  longest SUVs encountered today was a Tesla - an electric-powered vehicle. Many of the top-of-range SUVs around today are more fuel efficient than some of the sweet little cars you love so much, you hypocrite author!

OK - maybe that's true. But that does not make up for the sheer physical provocation these massive chunks of metal and and plastic represent; the way they flash their stupid LED fair-lights at you, blast you out of your saddle with their high-powered air-horns, swish past you on their great fat tyres, looking down their noses at you from their elevated, kid-leather-seated comfort.

Grrrr: this isn't SUV envy, you know, it really isn't.