Day Five: End of the road for SUVs

It's no surprise to see the giant yank tanks, the Hummer, the Chevy Captiva (Chevrolet claim to have invented the SUV 70 years ago - reason enough to boycott them I would have thought), the mammoth Cadillac Escalade, the Chrysler Dodge Nitro (yes, it really does look like an SUV hot rod) and the various Jeeps, including the 'Commander', which must rival the Mitsubishi 'Warrior' and 'Animal' for the wankiest name. (Mitzi still comes out ahead due to having two such embarrassments and the wankiest slogan - 'It's Hard.')

But the Japanese are there in force too, and the Germans, and even the French are starting to get in on the act. The excuse for their symbolic struggle against reality will undoubtedly be that they are producing efficient cars too, and it's up to the consumer to choose. Choice is, after all, the market's great gift. The problem with this is that whilst the trend tide may be turning against SUVs, these companies need to sell large numbers of these vehicles and will market hard to do so.

The much touted wisdom of crowds has an unsavoury evil twin which is much in evidence here. Without getting too philosophcal, the problem is that each individual consumer choice, like each vote in an election, is unlikely to have much influence. Furthermore, everyone knows that if the rest of the world is driving SUVs, then one lone consumer switching to a Prius or even a G-wiz isn't going to save us. Equally, if everyone else goes green, then you can afford to drive what you like as the world is already saved. This is a variant of what is technically known as the Prisoner's Dilemma, and is significant in a whole range of areas from the Cold War to pulling in nightclubs. The problem is that everyone within the system can behave as a perfectly rational homo economicus, doing exactly what free-market theorists would like us to do, and still fuck everything up royally.

Say we have a hundred 1.8 litre Ford Focus drivers, producing a cumulative 18.3kg of CO2 per mile. They go to the motor show, and agree en masse that it's time to take the environment seriously, and so they all promise that their next car is going to be a Prius, thereby almost halving their emissions. On returning to their homes, some of them think that, as everyone else is getting a Prius, they can probably get one of those rather swanky Range Rover Sports without endangering the planet. As a nod to their newfound environmental sensibilities, they decide to go for the non-supercharged version. My question is, how many of them need to choose the Range Rover in order to counterbalance the positive effect of the others?

The answer is thirty two. Sixty eight virtuous yogurt weavers going for the most efficient family car on the market will have their contribution to saving the planet wiped out by less than half their number going for a gas guzzler. If they'd gone for the SUV featured in our new video, they would have only needed twenty eight to balance seventy two Prius's. If they'd gone for the least fuel efficient model on the UK market (don't bother, you can't afford it) then it would take only nineteen of them to balance eighty one of the hybrids.

The philosophical solutiuons to this are thin on the ground - that's why it's a dilemma - but the two I'm aware of are tit-for-tat, which necessitates repeated interactions between the same agents, and removal of choice. Tit-for-tat can only be applied in small, stable communities where no-one has the option of screwing people over and then moving on, so to try to apply this to the car market would involve the total transformation of global society. That might be a good thing, but it's not exactly imminent. The second solution, to remove choice from the hands of consumers and place it in the hands of a resposible authority with the consumers' interests at heart, would fly in the face of modern political thinking, but is probably the only thing which is likely to be practicable.

There are two competent authorities which might be able to do this - the government, either through bans or heavy taxation, and the car companies, through what they produce and promote. From the look of this motor show, the companies aren't going to shoulder the burden any time soon.

Finally, something entirely unrelated to SUVs.

The official Motor Show guide includes an article on how in the modern motor show 'promotion girls' are no longer the demeaning eye-candy that, back in less enlightened ages, they once were. "You're unlikely to find the kind of foxy totty who can reel off everything about the latest water-proof mascara but knows nothing about engines" it says. Many of you might think this is mere bluff of the most obviously false sort. I, however, have evidence to the contrary. The first comment I overheard from the perfectly formed lips of one of these automotive experts was, wait for it...

"Oh my god, it's awful, my make-up's running all down my face."

So the guide triumphs yet again. Oh ye of little faith.

Tomorrow, no mention of SUVs whatsoever. Guaranteed.