Today I picked up a free copy of the British International Motor Show Survival Guide. How to survive the motor show. Many of you may be thinking this is typical macho petrolhead bullshit, but the motor show is a pretty hostile environment. It's extraordinarily hot, for a start, and it's not exactly a vegetarian's paradise. The stench of burning entrails (burgers to you) is everywhere, mingling with the contrails from City Airport and the exhaust fumes from a dozen SUVs and some Mazdas. Plus the whole place has that wierd new-car-interior smell, which just has to be at least mildly toxic.
Anyway, the Survival Guide. It's not quite the classic literary work which is the 'Official Guide', but then that's sellling for two or three quid these days. It is more or less the same length, both are 'full colour' and consist of that strange hinterland between journalism and advertising where you have to check at the top of each page to see whether the writer could, theoretically, have been a bit less enthusiastic had he felt so inclined.
The Survival Guide includes two articles which may be of interest to my readers. On page 52 there is a piece about a new Audi (don't like it, and I'm normally a fan of Audis) which starts with a tale of a man no longer able to attend dinner parties in London due to the shame of owning a Range Rover.
"Drive a 4x4 and you'll become a social leper," is their moral of the story. Further heartening evidence of environmentalist infiltration, but there is a worrying corollary; "it's little wonder that more and more manufacturers are developing 4x4s which don't look like 4x4s."
This supports my fears detailed on Day Four, although the Audi appears to have taken it a step further, in that not only is the bodywork not in the design language of 4x4s, but it doesn't have the higher driving position or outsize wheels of a 4x4 either. In fact, if you don't actually take it off road, which according to Audi 98% of owners won't, the only difference between this and a normal saloon is that this is much heavier and more polluting. So, the truth appears to be out. We already knew that 4x4 drivers don't really want to go off-road, now we discover that the imperial driving position, larger and 'safer' body and cod-military styling cues are also dispensable. All they really want is to destroy the planet as quickly as possible.
Am I being paranoid here? Surely 4x4 drivers aren't really part of some evil, millenial cult to bring on the rapture, are they? I mean, they go on endlessly about how they need an SUV to protect their little darlings on the hazardous school run, so they must feel they have some stake in the future? Well, they could be lying about the little darlings - one child a week is killed in the US by being reversed over by an SUV in their own driveway, and being in an SUV increases the mortality rate for accidents generally due to their propensity to roll, never mind the increased dangers of being hit by one. But I'm not going for that, I think they genuinely do love their kids just like everyone else, it's just that they love their cars more.
Or maybe Audi have just made a very German sort of blunder - assuming that substance counts for more than style.
Anyway, any suggestions for what's really going on here gladly received and plagiarised.
The second article of note, on page 38, is entitled Going Green. Despite the title, this article manages to completely avoid mentioning the world's best selling electric car, the G-wiz from, wait for it, Goingreen, although they do have a stall at the show. I'd ask for my money back if I were them. The article, which ends with the inspiring 'The future's here. The future's green' is such a catastrophically confused collection of mistakes and worse, that it might explain some of the wierdness we receive at Greenpeace from disgruntled SUV drivers and the like.
Firstly, it begins with the reason why, according to unnamed 'doom merchants', we might need to use a bit less petrol in the near future. What is this reason? Why, certainly not climate change, sucker.
It's peak oil, which they completely misunderstand in several different ways.
No, we won't run out of oil in forty years, nor in a hundred and forty. One reason is that we would run out of humans first - if we use even half of the oil reserves we already know about then we'll be into the realm of 'runaway' climate change, and running out of oil will no longer seem worth worrying about. Anyway, serious peak oil theorists don't try to predict when we would run out, they predict the point at which production ceases to expand. This point may be in ten years, it may be today, or it may have been last year, but after that point is passed supply begins to diminish whilst demand continues to grow. Therefore, the price of oil will rise continuously and rapidly.
No, don't thank me, just doing my job, Ma'am.
So, do they acknowledge the existence of climate change at all? Er, yes, actually.
About half way through, whilst extolling the virtues of bioethanol, they casually mention...
"...atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, which some scientific research suggests is a major contributor to global warming" (my emphasis).
NnnngggrrrrrrrraaaaahhhhWANKERS!!! (my emphasis).
I'm so angry I think I may be starting to haemorrhage.
I think I'd better leave this until tomorrow.
And no, you can't have any more pretty pictures of shiny cars.
Just go to your room and think about what you've done.