I watched BBC’s Breakfast programme this morning… Why do I do this? Is it a form of masochism?
Anyway, the item that caught my attention was the one about the reliability survey that apparently says that 4x4s are unreliable heaps… er, well, not exactly…
If you’re just about to set off for work, or take the kids to school by car, you’ll probably be hoping that you make it there without breaking down.
And a survey published today, might just help you work out what your chances are.
That’s because a company specialising in car warranties has looked at 33 manufacturers, and 450,000 models of car and they have come up with a reliability index.
The programme pitched the piece as a blatant anti-big gas guzzler road hog story and it went downhill from thereon in. I’ll put my own prejudices on the table first, though. I don’t like them one little bit. On crowded city streets a large 4×4 is little better than a Transit van – they are cumbersome, clog up the road in front of me, block my view and four wheel drive is nothing more than a fad in the urban environment. I fail, utterly, to see their appeal. But, then, taste is an individual matter and many people cannot understand why I ride a motorcycle. So, that said, if people want to spend their money on these monsters, well, that’s their business.
Not so, according to the undertones displayed on Breakfast. 4x4s might just as well be the spawn of the devil. Indeed, the opener was that this survey is another reason not to own one. They wheeled out Jenny Jones, London’s road safety advisor with Quentin Wilson brought in to provide a little balance*. The subsequent discussion was, to say the least, interesting. Jenny Jones spouted the usual half baked nonsense fuelled with nothing more than emotive argument; “heavily polluting”, “dangerous” and such (watch the video). Quentin responded with extreme good grace given the bollocks he was forced to listen to and placed facts before the daft bint with whom he was supposed to be having the discussion. The general tone being that not only are these things “not green”, not only do they clog the roads and are unsafe for other road users (that rather depends on who is driving, of course), but now there’s proof that they are the spawn of the devil as they are unreliable as well. Quentin’s facts were no match for the propaganda and he pretty much gave up trying at one point.
As I said earlier, I don’t like the things myself and for some of the reasons put forward by Jenny Jones. However, given her blatant prejudice and inability to put forward a rational argument supported by facts and evidence, I distance myself from her and her ilk with as much space as I can muster. The substantive points she made are, as Quentin pointed out, not supported by the evidence. Ah, but, who needs evidence when you’ve got a good little witch hunt going?
*This appears to be a later version of the discussion to the one I saw, but you get the gist.