Urban 4x4s
Charlie Blair

In the last few months Greenpeace campaigners have stopped chanting slogans outside Esso petrol stations and have begun chaining themselves to Landrover production lines. But what have Landrover, and other SUV (Sports Utility Vehicles) manufacturers, done to raise the hackles of the Greenies?

SUVs, or 4x4 vehicles ostensibly designed for off-road driving, are Landrover’s bread and butter, and they’ve been building them long before they became SUVs. Everyone’s heard that 80% of Series A Landrovers are still on the move. Note that's on the move, not on the road. They’re not on the road, they’re off it. And they’re doing a very good job of driving reliably and safely off it.

The same will certainly not be said about the new Range Rover in fifty years time . For a start it’s not designed to still be running in twenty years, let alone fifty - no cars are these days. But it is also quite simply not designed to be driven as extensively off-road. There is a consensus amongst the people who actually drive 4x4s off-road - farmers, gamekeepers, vets - that since the Defender was replaced as Landrover’s main model new Landies have got progressively worse off road. A glance at the pages of Autotrader will confirm this neatly: 20 year-old Series A Landrovers (everyone’s mental picture of a classic Landrover) regularly sell for more than 5 year old Discoveries and Range Rovers.

The new Range Rover has been built not to maximise off-road performance, but to maximise on-road prestige. That basically means that it’s bigger, and heavier. A lot bigger and a lot heavier. And big and heavy vehicles are not, contrary to what you might imagine, good at driving off road. In fact if the new giant SUVs didn’t have all sorts of fancy electronics then they simply wouldn’t be able to drive across a wet field. As it is an experienced driver in a Defender or Series A will out perform a Range Rover or Discovery on just about every terrain except tarmac.

But of course, because they never go off-road, the off-road performance isn’t very important to the majority of people who buy these vehicles. Most buyers of big Landrovers, and the other SUVs that are now on the market from virtually every car manufacturer, choose them for three reaasons:

a) they’re quite pleasant to drive;
b) they’re marketed as being safe for the occupant; and
c) they’re prestigious.

I’ve put prestigious last but it’s almost certainly the most important.

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