SAN FRANCISCO (dpa) – Californians Charles Dines and Robert Lind regularly go out “hunting” of an evening armed with a fistful of bumper stickers.
Shopping centre car parks and the wide streets in the suburbs of San Francisco are their territory. Their prey – beefy-looking Sports Utility Vehicles or SUVs. The offroad cars are easy to spot. They are huge vehicles which ride high on knobbly tyres and usually have eight cylinder engines under the bonnet with 200 or more horsepower on tap.For Lind and Dines the SUVs are “inflated, obscene” inventions whose owners need to be told a thing or two about “gas guzzling environment ruiners”. A good start in this direction, they believe is to slap a sticker on the windshield or bumper of the next SUV. Of course they don’t ask for permission beforehand.“I’m Changing The Climate! Ask Me How!” reads the slogan.“By taking a lighthearted approach we hope to get the SUV drivers thinking,” said 49-year-old Lind whose daytime job is selling pest control substances.For 40-year-old carpenter Charles Dines the sticker campaign is a modern form of “pillory”. He believes people should be ashamed to drive such monsters. There’s no shortage of prey for the SUV hunters.For years the Detroit carmakers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have been turning out loads of minivans, small trucks and SUV offroaders. Last year almost half of all the cars registered in the United States fell into this category.A legal loophole which dates back to the 1970s means that SUVs which share a chassis with small commercial vehicles are not subject to the same stringent emissions and fuel consumption legislation as ordinary cars. The trendy four-wheel drives are allowed to guzzle as much fuel as they like, opponents claim. Some of the offroaders use between 15 and 20 litres per 100 kilometres.For anthropologist Richard Wilk of Indiana University these conspicuous petrol consumers are perfect examples of a wasteful American society. Four-wheel drive means the SUVs are practical in the countryside and with their chunky dimensions the cars are seen as ideal “escape vehicles” for getting away from the urban humdrum and stress.At least that’s what their owners believe, says Wilk. In fact the SUVs have a tendency to topple over easily as tests have proven and only 13 per cent of drivers actually take them off the tarmac.But no matter. Americans love anything big, says Wilk who clearly does not approve of U.S. taste in oversized vehicles.The trend has long since reached European shores and according to market studies, the number of offroaders on European streets is set to nearly double between 1996 and 2006.The Californian stalwarts have used up nearly 30,000 stickers in their campaign, thanks to 2,000 volunteers. Both self-proclaimed experts say they can see signs that manufacturers are poised to bring out smaller offroad vehicles. They hope that rising petrol prices will force the Detroit makers to fulfil their promise of more compact, economical SUVs.It’s not hard to see why U.S. makers have been reticent so far. After all, there’s more profit to be had in making the larger vehicles.Environmental organizations like the Sierra Club have since upped the pressure on Washington to issue stricter fuel consumption guidelines and negative campaigns like the one run by the two Californians have heightened public awareness of the problem.Dines and Lind say they won’t rest until these tin dinosaurs are extinct. They’ve already had requests for stickers from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands. Activists in Europe have also asked where they can get hold of the “ammunition”.
