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Monsters of the road: what should the UK do about SUVs? [The Observer] (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 8 months ago by hellothere@sh.itjust.works to c/fuck_cars@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] Eq0@literature.cafe 22 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] Player2@sopuli.xyz 16 points 8 months ago

Tax them all the way to hell

[-] regul@lemm.ee 8 points 8 months ago

inb4 the Tories offer tax credits for SUVs

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 8 months ago

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.

The original article contains 3,623 words, the summary contains 272 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] uthredii@programming.dev 4 points 8 months ago

Link to the tyre extinguishers website: https://www.tyreextinguishers.com/

[+] doublejay1999@lemmy.world -8 points 8 months ago

Attacking SUV drivers is precisely the wrong way to go about reversing the surrender of the public realm to the automobile and it is exactly the right way to start another immature culture war , alienating a lot of potential allies in the fight to reclaim out streets .

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 37 points 8 months ago

To be honest, I'm sick of trying to politely persuade people to stop killing other people with their idiotic cars. All cars are bad, yes. SUVs are the worst. It's perfectly reasonable to try to solve a wicked problem by going for the worst offenders first.

[-] hellothere@sh.itjust.works 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

As is covered in the article, explaining the environmental impact of SUVs to SUV owners does not change their mind or encourage them to get a different car; it is effectively ignored.

So that is where ideas like the deflators come in, you make it more inconvenient, maybe that will work where polite discussion did not.

[-] biddy@feddit.nl 7 points 8 months ago

Perhaps, but polite persuasion hasn't worked either

[+] Tvkan@feddit.de -19 points 8 months ago

Fully agree. SUVs aren't bad because they're a few percent bigger/heavier/safer/less efficient/... than other cars, they're bad because they are cars.

Many discussions on SUVs in particular give the impression that a "normal" car is somehow the sane, efficient alternative, which just isn't the case.

[-] PlexSheep@feddit.de 36 points 8 months ago

They are bad because they are cars, but in the realms of car usage, they are ultra bad because they are even bigger steel death machines.

[-] doublejay1999@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

A street filled with VW Golfs instead of Land rovers, still afforded the vast majority of space in town, still given priority at every turn and still transporting one or two people at a time, doesn’t move us much further forwards .

[-] papabobolious@feddit.nu 19 points 8 months ago

a normal car is a much more sane and efficient alternative, that might be where you are getting that idea.

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 14 points 8 months ago

Exactly this. There are some clear use cases for cars and even for SUVs (possibly only if you literally live or work on a large farm). There's no case for driving an SUV in a city. It's antisocial behaviour at best and actively threatening at worst!

[-] doublejay1999@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago

Swapping land rovers for golf’s gets us practically nowhere

[-] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It makes the roads safer and that saves lives. It reduces pollution, saving more lives. It also saves space. That doesn't save lives, granted, but it's still a good thing.

If we accept any use cases for cars (and I do, personally), even if it's primarily in the short to medium term while we build better urban infrastructure, then we should also advocate for those cars to be as small, as safe and as clean as possible.

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023

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