There is an environmental rebel club that deflates tires to harass drinking SUVs from the world. The saboteurs consider these cars to be climate killers and a traffic hazard. Their X-bio leaves no room for misunderstanding. “We are The Tire Extinguishers. We will make it impossible to own an SUV in urban regions of the world. For the climate, health, public safety.” A kind of moving Extinction Rebellion.
They appear everywhere, from England to Overijssel and from Brussels to Vienna. Just hit The Tire Extinguishers in Wiener Neustadt, where they disabled eighty SUVs. And according to their “First time the city has been hit and one of many strikes in Austria. Well done folks – more to come!”
I hope the rubber terrorists know the difference between an eight-cylinder BMW X6M and an electric BMW iX. Would they tailor the punishment to the environmental labels? Apply a more lenient regime for last-generation plugin SUVs? They run on electricity more often than on petrol, especially in the city. Reasonably, you should hear the balaclavas whispering on the street at night: “It runs electrically for up to a hundred kilometers. Just set it to 1.5 bar, then it has been punished enough.” Or: “Take that iX too. Slurps 25 kWh per hundred kilometers, while the dwarf who drives it could also have fit in a Mini.” They may be able to take into account mitigating circumstances such as the active safety systems that can prevent many personal injuries in the city. Won’t happen. Electric is no excuse for the activists. “A child killed by an SUV doesn’t care if it’s electric or petrol.” False rhetoric of course, but I understand the tactics. Nuance kills combativeness. Then the image of the enemy that must be preserved will falter.
I think something about that, namely that the action group is betting on the wrong horse. Those shipping containers are too big for me. I understand very well why a busy city would rather lose them than gain them. But especially in its electrified form, the SUV is no longer by definition that perverse drunk. There is also a safety argument beyond the pot. Many ‘normal’ cars are just as confusing for drivers and are therefore potentially no less dangerous in the city. When judged on length and width, many non-SUVs take up just as much, if not more, public space, meaning that middle-class cars now show the lust for power for which the SUV is blamed.
So the reasonable bet should be to curb the size of cars; making them lower, lighter and therefore more economical. Guerrilla only creates bad blood. I think it would be better to regulate the shrinkage target legally and to make agreements at European level about the regulation of external dimensions. I am in favor of that, because the physical growth of the car is escalating. I don’t even take many test cars through the car wash anymore. The risk of damage is too great.
In my opinion, this should be related to clarity by and the view from the car must be tested for safety issues at Euro NCAP level, so that good all-round visibility is also included in the score. Don’t get me started on sensors and cameras. I use it to my advantage like everyone else, but in hectic traffic it helps so much to see what you are doing. Physical contact with the outside world is essential for the safety of both the driver and the environment. In that line of thinking, everyone is better off with my i3 than with a Porsche Cayenne. Even though I wish everyone had their racing truck, the parking garages are getting a bit full.
Let’s arrange this reduction in scale in a fair manner by agreeing, for example, that from now on we will make passenger cars no longer than 4 meters 50 and no wider than 1.80. But before that happens, people can drive whatever they want and you keep your hands off their stuff, okay?
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl