It’s midnight on the edge of Clapham Common in early September. The streets are eerily quiet as a shadowy figure in black shirt, shorts and baseball cap emerges from the common. He is wearing a red face mask, his features, except for some blond locks, hidden from view.
I’m glad to see this discussion starting gathering attention. In general, I think we should start looking more and more at car sharing over car owning: nobody needs an SUV every day, but you might enjoy a longer trip driving one. So short term rental should be incentivized to decrease the overall number of cars on the road and parking lots.
Tax them all the way to hell
Time to buy SUVs :)
inb4 the Tories offer tax credits for SUVs
Link to the tyre extinguishers website: https://www.tyreextinguishers.com/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That is the cardinal conceit of SUVs: although the overwhelming majority of them are city-based and only a tiny fraction will ever encounter an obstacle more onerous than a speed bump, they trade on a familiarity with safaris and game shooting.
They claim to have a presence in a number of countries but it’s in the UK where they have gained most attention, following a protest event in August this year when activists operating under the group’s banner used power tools to puncture the tyres of 60 SUV vehicles at a car dealership in Exeter.
As the celebrated German critical theorist Theodor Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: “Which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passers-by, children, bicyclists?”
According to Andrew Simms and Leo Murray, in their forthcoming book Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos, between 1990 and 2001, $9bn (£7.4bn) was spent on advertising off-road-themed cars to an audience that hadn’t before shown much interest in driving down that path.
In the US there were various factors that contributed to the SUV’s appeal, not least an exemption from fuel economy regulations for off-road vehicles, and the fact that large cars were part of an American tradition that had already produced five-lane freeways, sprawling suburbs and almost limitless parking spaces.
Sold as a means of escape from the concrete realities of the modern world, a symbol of individualism and the pioneer spirit, the SUV represents instead a uniform kind of selfishness, a collective indifference to community to which, alas, we are all more or less prone.
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