More and more all-wheel drive vehicles are making their way on to city streets. PHOTO: ODT FILES

We've had a lot of chat about the Lime scooters. No-one thinks they ought to be banned; but the question is, where should they be operated? Are they powered vehicles which should be on the roads, or, like pedestrians and wheelchairs and mobility scooters, on the footpaths, or (my preferred option) in the under-utilised cycle lanes?

But let’s get our priorities right. There are already, on our urban streets, far too many vehicles that really shouldn’t be there. We’re only not outraged about them because they’re not bright green, not operated by young people and they’ve crept up on us, rather than having being dropped on the streets overnight. I refer to the increasing presence on our roads of off-road vehicles.

A decade or more ago my aged father visited me in Dunedin and observed that the car "fleet" (not his term) was pretty old: most of them were what are charmingly referred to "old bangers". This is not so today. Every third car is a huge sparkling four-wheel-drive vehicle, with tinted windows, as many accessories as a spacecraft and about 5 feet high at the bonnet.

Many are identified as "all-wheel-drives", which seems to imply a car with more than four wheels: perhaps the spare wheel (or possibly the steering wheel) provides extra traction for really steep speed humps.

They wear their inappropriateness on their sleeves, or at least, their rear panels. A survey of their model names is revealing.

There are those that are simply at the wrong address, and that ought to be in Iran (Qashqai), the Sahara (Touareg), Spain (Navara), the mysterious Tunland (capital city: Obecity?), or the bottom of the sea (Triton). The US West is, as always, the happy place for many urban cowboys, owners of a Rodeo or Cherokee, or whose petrol-guzzling steeds come from Arizona (Tucson and Santa Fe), or Colorado. There’s the Everest, for the guy who’s worried someone else’s might be bigger than his. Some are not quite as location-specific, just so long as it’s not the city or suburbs: they’re designed for the Outback, the Surf, or the Territory.

And in case you’re curious, the Pajero is a South American wildcat, Amarok is Inuit for wolf and the Tiguan is an implausible tiger-iguana cross.

Some are named for the well-heeled urban rebel behind the wheel: there’s the Outlander, and the Forester, for those with a Robin Hood complex. And speaking of identity issues, there’s the people who think they’re Columbus or Marco Polo, and who drive a Trailblazer, Explorer, Ranger or Pathfinder. Others want something more metaphysical from their cars: to Escape, to go on a Journey.

Interesting to note that those built by prestige car firms BMW and Mercedes-Benz seem not to have names, just codes, which suggests that the whole phenomenon is actually about status.

The wall-to-wall television advertisements for these monsters depict them traversing deserts, fording flooded rivers and conquering mountain ranges. It hardly needs saying that few people actually need such power. Their real power lies in the perceived ability to intimidate other drivers. They are frequently black in colour and dangerous looking. Their military-style appearance offers tank-like security — particularly for people whose actual driving skills are a bit below par — but also gives off a "don’t mess with me" message which entitles them to drive inattentively.

They only offer these advantages if they look more powerful than other cars. So, the more of them that are on the roads, the larger they need to be to achieve their purposes. They up the ante. The more there are on the roads, the more everyone else will think they need one, or a bigger one, for safety, visibility or self-respect.

At a time when the Dunedin City Council seems to being giving us less and less room for our cars with cycle lanes, "parklets" and "traffic-calming" intersections these domestic behemoths are staking their claim to as much of the remaining tarmac as they can get.

There are places around the city where they don’t actually fit into the parking spaces. You can find yourself squeezed between them. They are a foot taller than most cars and impossible to see past, around or over at intersections. Their predictably tinted windows ensure that you can’t make eye contact with their drivers (or identify them, which is no doubt helpful to people for whom privacy and irresponsibility are important).

Their size also means that they are harder to manoeuvre — I was backed into by one in the Octagon, because my own pathetic car was hidden by one of the truckette’s corners, and was apparently too small to register on its dashboard radar. Or perhaps the driver was playing a videogame.

By virtue of their weight and bulk, they must consume much more than other cars of the planet’s non-renewable resources, first to manufacture and then to keep running. Clearly, they must pump more pollutants than a normal car into the earth’s atmosphere. The message is not merely "don’t mess with me", but also, "stuff you". It’s as if the automotive and petroleum industries are saying: "The world’s getting hotter anyway, so let’s get with the game and go out with a bang."

This sounds like a rant for the simple reason that it’s hard to squeeze into one short article all the problems with the urban proliferation of off-road vehicles. And it’s hard to give a balanced view because, for all but 5% of their owners, there are no morally defensible reasons that aren’t about power, status and selfishness.

What can be done? There could be a prohibitive tax on four-wheel-drive vehicles for non-rural-based owners. They could be banned from central city roads. We could make car parking spaces smaller.

Those decisions are for legislators.

But for a zillion good reasons, we should get off-road vehicles off the roads, and back to the farms, the forests, the prairies and pampas, and the bottom of the sea.

Glenn Hardesty is a Dunedin writer and retired teacher.



