“It’s not surprising to find a piece in the Guardian entitled 4×4s are killing my planet. But rather than write a statistics-driven polemic like Keith Bradsher’s High & Mighty, Robert Macfarlane (the author of Mountains of the Mind), is more concerned with the co-option of rural imagery as a means of selling cars, a process that goes hand in hand with the ‘apocalypse [that] has fallen upon the environment’.
The countryside of car advertisements is certainly seductive. By means of illustration, Macfarlane uses the example of OneLife magazine, a glossy lifestyle publication for Land-Rover, produced by Redwood Publishing, king of the contract magazine. Throughout OneLife, he finds “glossy centrefold spreads of eco-porn,” and nature “being used to sell a product which embodies the principles by which nature must not be understood.”
As well as noting how 4×4 names are a blend of cunning blend of the overbearing, almost militaristic, and the indigenous – Freelander, Toureg, Explorer, Pathfinder, Navigator, Tahoe, Landcruiser (which ‘carries the wisdom of seven continents in its soul’) – the crux of Macfarlane’s piece is that off-road vehicles are one more way of widening the ‘gap which currently exists between knowledge and place’:
‘4×4 advertising is dedicated to manipulating landscapes into generic forms. All that it requires of a landscape is that it evoke the idea of challenge – something resistant to be conquered, something natural to be tamed. A river is valued for its difficulty of fording. A mountain for its dramatic and nameless escarpments. No landscape can be only itself: it must represent an obstacle of some sort… The hypocrisies of 4×4 marketing are dark, multiple and pernicious’.”
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“Whatever Happened to Automated Highway Systems? AHS were once the dream of car manufacturers and consumers alike, epitomised by GM’s Firebird II concept, shown at the 1956 Motorama and the star of a film detailing the Dream Highway of Tomorrow, one of the earliest AHS. The Firebird II could actually drive without human intervention, provided a wire was buried in the surface of the road.
But although the idea has been around for literally decades, other advocates are still suggesting we take the first step. The political will and public desire for automated systems expired long ago, and the last flurry of interest was just eight years ago at the Demo ‘97, when 20 modified Buick LeSabres ran along a stretch of Interstate 15 in San Diego. At the time, concepts like Buick’s XP2000 (very software-sounding) were getting geared up for the widespread implementation of automated highways, yet nothing really happened. What will change is the advent of true car-to-car communication, using Bluetooth-like broadcasting, rather than unreliable sensor-based systems. A common standard has now been agreed for cars to broadcast their position to others and monitor exactly what’s going on around them; once these systems are in place, AHS are almost inevitable. Only now, the issue for the public is no longer one of convenience but of control.”
– originally from things magazine