Energy minister Malcolm Wicks recently said: 'There is crass irresponsibility in some of the larger monstrosities people drive around suburbia and in London. We have to move against this kind of thing.' This isn't some left-wing greenie think-tanker: this is a government minister with the power and authority to make things happen.
More evidence that the SUV brigade is having to fight for hearts and minds emerged at the recent Geneva Motor Show. Land Rover showed a concept called the Land_e, a showcase of technologies the company is working on for future models. Every last one of them is designed to show how environmentally aware it has become. It showed hybrid power, a propshaft that could be decoupled and bio-diesel fuel technology to name but three. Matthew Taylor, Land Rover's enigmatic boss told me it was a specific reply to the anti-SUV lobby, which has inevitably focused its attack on the company that virtually invented the SUV genre. He will still be smarting from the day last May when 35 Greenpeace volunteers chained themselves to his production line.
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| Will future Range Rovers be made from aluminium? |
While refusing to say that any one of the technologies has received a green light, he said that 'all could be in production before the end of the decade' while its creator, Paul Newsome, added that, when combined in a Freelander-style car, they could drop fuel consumption by 30%, which would result in a Land Rover capable of 50mpg.
Too good to be true? Maybe. Until Taylor and his colleagues actually confirm some of these goodies for production, they will remain exposed to accusations that the Land_e is nothing more than a publicity stunt designed to deflect attention from the fact that a Discovery 3 weighs more than a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Even so, there is no doubt that these large SUVs will survive because, as we have seen, they are better suited than anything else to certain environments. But if they are to do so with even a fraction of their current popularity intact, they have to put their house in order - which means, first and foremost, going on a diet. Taylor told me that 'weight reduction is top of our list of commitments, so long at it is not at the expense of compromising what makes a Land Rover a Land Rover'. To that end he is looking very closely at the aluminium technology used by its sister company, Jaguar.
Others had better follow suit. In the US, sales of that hitherto rampantly successful and profoundly profligate SUV, the Porsche Cayenne, have started falling fast and, with the likes of Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio now extolling the virtues of small, efficient hybrids, who knows how long it will be before the fickle finger of fashion turns away from the SUV.
All that can be said with certainty is that, for at least one little old lady in a Nissan Micra, it will be not one moment too soon.
