Suburbans in Suburbia

There's a new war being fought, one that will cause more casualties than George Bush or Osama Bin Laden could ever hope to inflict. It is a war fought with heavy machinery and the political backing of the G8. It is a war that will spare nothing in its cause; not the young, the small, the rich, the poor, nor your grandmother and her Ford Tempo.

It is the war of the SUVs, and no one is safe.

For the precious few who have never seen, heard, or been tailgated by something resembling the Queen Mary with attitude, let me tell you that SUV does not stand for "Stop Urban Violence," though you'd go a long way in doing so if you banned them from the downtown core. No, it stands for "Sport Utility Vehicle," which is about as innocuous sounding as "collateral damage" and as deceptively lethal in more ways than one.

The first is rather obvious and has been documented time and again while sales figures for these two-ton brutes climb year after year. They're unsafe. They roll over easier than Tony Blair on the White House lawn. They can, with some faith, hope, and judicious use of parachutes, stop not so much on a dime but on a reasonably long stretch of unoccupied highway, and only if you let those parachutes unfurl when you leave the last Service Centre. They have about as much agility as a supertanker stuck in the Panama Canal, and make accident avoidance more a point of conversation than an actual possibility.

Yet these beasts are being gobbled up as fast as almost every auto maker on the planet can build them. Not only are the traditional manufacturers of big, overweight, unsafe, gas guzzling expressions of the American dream in on this feeding frenzy, but also the likes of BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, and now even Volkswagen. There is more iron being smelted, mixed and molded to feed this fanatical need for four-wheeled drive supremacy than was ever employed in the Battle of Britain, yet Land Rover is still hoping you remember "Born Free" and want to take a drive through an African Lion Safari in a brand-new Range Rover for old-time's sake.

The land is being over run by oversized, inefficient, top-heavy mechanical monstrosities that make a Double-Decker bus seem like a prudent way of traveling down to the corner store to get some pickles, which brings us to the other lethal aspect of these metallic pachyderms: pollution.

In the rush of every suburban dweller to get their kids to a soccer game, head to the cottage, or take a trip to the museum in the comfort of a small air-conditioned apartment on four wheels, we're using fuel we don't have, polluting air we can't spare, and killing wildlife we'd generally like to see frolicking on the Discovery Channel. The idea that this onslaught of sulfur-spewing, all-wheel-drive suburban cruisers is being driven both figuratively and literally by the generation of Flower Power, Mother Nature, and communal love that once wanted to sing in perfect harmony with the rest of the world is so deliciously ironic that one can only laugh in despair at the fact that this generation also wants its children to eat right, not to smoke, and be like the Charles Atlas of their comic book youth.

Their kids apparently have to accomplish this in air thicker than Jell-O pudding. Instead, what their kids are doing is buying SUVs of their own, with all the trimmings, including video displays to entertain their kids. Then there's the A/C, ten-speaker stereo, genuine simulated leather seating (Mom would never tolerate you having killed a real cow), custom simulated wood paneling (there are very few trees left to hug, after all), and enough air-bags to float the Titanic for when the whole lot tips over the exit ramp on the way to see Old Faithful.

In the meantime, the auto industry is hoping that no one clues into this lunacy, because there are some big profits to be made here, market share to be won, and these boys are not playing a game of tiddlywinks. Engines are getting ever bigger (20 litre V24s can't be far off), names are getting ever more impressive and intimidating (the "Patton Mk5 Land Cruiser" must be on someone's drawing board by now), features ever more complicated, and all the more useless ("yes, now you can teleconference from the left rear wheel well while frying your morning eggs on the back bumper, all at highway speed!"), and always bigger, heavier, and all the more terrifying to Honda Civic owners (well officer, I guess I felt...I wouldn't really call it a bump).

With the precedent setting Hummer and its scaled down cousin the H2, it is only a matter of time before we get a street version of an Abrams M1A battle tank and the smaller, family-friendly, cottage-ready Bradley M2.

Think how handy that 120mm auto-loading cannon will be in rush hour traffic.