It was once estimated that the rise in popularity of SUVs had effectively undone all of the efficiency improvements made on internal combustion engines.
As in, the International Energy Agency said we’d burnt as much fuel in the previous decade as if we’d all stayed driving hatchbacks and made no tech improvements.
In 2023, some 60% of all cars sold in the UK were SUVs, up from 50% in 2021. There are two reasons for this. The first is that SUV is such a broad term that it now applies to a Ford Puma and a Tesla Model Y just as equally as it applies to a Jeep Wrangler or Land Rover Defender.
This is daft because these cars don’t all do the same thing: some SUVs are proper four-wheel-drive off-road-capable vehicles, while others are tall family wagons with big boots and a seat height that makes it easy for ageing hips or child seats to slide on and off them. Really we should call these practical family wagons something other than SUVs.
The second reason is that people think real 4x4s are cool and that off-roading might feel very adventurous, so they want to look like they do it. Hence some SUVs-not-4x4s try to look more like actual off-roaders. But not all 4x4s, let alone all SUVs, are created equal.
And I’ll let you into a secret, just in case you haven’t already tried it: off-roading is great. It’s as good a day out as a track day, by my reckoning.
Some of my best days at work are off-road days, typically where we hire a disused quarry and devise a series of objective tests for the assembled 4x4s.
Off-roading is so much fun that I go off the beaten path in my Land Rover Defender on my own time. I even do it on my motorbike, although, because that weighs a quarter of a tonne and I am a weakling, not terribly ambitiously.
You can do this too, without actually leaving the road. Organisations involved in using and maintaining places you can freely take your 4x4 are quite keen to make a distinction about this.
Using Britain’s network of byways, colloquially known as green-laning, is not off-roading. These are highways just like the M1 is a highway, subject to road laws and accessible to all traffic. These are roads.
There will be some in your area, if you live in England and Wales. (In Scotland, they don’t exist and access rights are different. In Ireland, they don’t either but some very minor rural roads are stony tracks.)
Byways vary from those accessible only by cars with a generous ride height and serious tyres to those you could drive a hatchback down if you didn’t care about it much. I like them all.
If you like using byways often, or just care about their future, I’d recommend joining an association like GLASS (The Green Lane Association) or for two-wheelers the TRF (Trail Riders Fellowship), because you’ll get more intel than an OS map can give you and it’s fair to say the future of access to many roads has been secured by these groups.
Your subs help defend the rights of drivers and riders to use roads as we have always been able to.
But if that’s not hardy enough and you want to give a 4x4 a proper workout, somewhere you can make a mess, get it stuck, get rescued, get stuck again, stop for a cup of tea and giggle while someone else gets stuck before towing them out, to hone a skill and find out just how far a 4x4 can go (and even after trying and seeing it dozens of times, I’m still surprised at that), hire some time in an off-road centre.
It’s affordable (tens rather than hundreds of pounds), slow, friendly, challenging, adventurous, probably not very noisy, and benign. And it’s immense fun, although I find it harder to describe exactly why than, say, doing a track day or riding a motorbike.
After all, it’s not like there’s the thrill of speed, and you’ll probably get wet socks.
But, then, describe to me the appeal of Diggerland or going on a steam train. I’m not sure it’s that easy. If you like machines, and seeing what you can make them do, it’s just fun.
The thing about a 4x4 is that you can have that fun, then also pull a horse trailer or a boat or caravan somewhere, then go to the shops and then to work in it.
And if there wasn’t an intrinsic, if insoluble, appeal to that, fewer drivers would buy cars that made them look like they did it.
