November 14, 2004

American Icon: Big, Bad S.U.V.'s Are Spreading to Europe

By SARAH LYALL

OME - The Land Rover barreled around the narrow corner like a whale splashing into a swimming pool, parking, for lack of a better alternative, in the middle of the road. Needless to say, it was not making many friends.

"I'm totally against those cars," said Giorgio Carpanese, a 48-year-old office worker, gesturing toward the offending vehicle, whose owner could be seen blithely disappearing into a fancy wicker-furniture store. "They're too big; they pollute; they're too expensive. And I think that it's only arrogant people who drive them."

S.U.V.'s, or soovs, as they are called here, are becoming increasingly popular on Rome's traffic-clogged streets, as they are across Europe. But even as more people are attracted by their heft and machismo, a countermovement is developing of those who believe that S.U.V.'s are not only pollution-spewing monstrosities, but also unwieldy symbols of American-style excess.

"They're status markers because they're big and expensive and profligate with the earth's resources," said Steven Stradling, professor of transport psychology at the Transport Research Institute at Napier University in Edinburgh. "There's also a degree of anti-American feeling in Europe, and they are identified as American. They are a symbol of power without responsibility, and that's what we feel about you guys right now."

In the United States, S.U.V.'s are no longer novelties, but until recently they had not made much impact in Europe, the land of ancient, narrow streets and $5-a-gallon gas.

Lately, however, S.U.V. sales have soared, touching off bitter complaints about American cultural imperialism and a flurry of proposed anti-S.U.V. legislation in several countries. So far, though, none of those proposals have passed, and, just as they did in America, S.U.V.'s are spreading steadily across the European landscape.

European wariness of S.U.V.'s is expressed in different ways. In Rome, the city government has proposed charging S.U.V. owners triple the regular rate for permits to drive in the historic city center, a 1.8-square-mile area of narrow streets that is home to 22,000 people. With 50,000 cars and trucks, 300,000 motorbikes and some 600,000 to 700,000 pedestrians using the zone each day, the feeling goes, there is just no room for the unwieldy and intimidating S.U.V.'s.

The city's transportation commissioner, Mario Di Carlo, said that if he could, he would put up signs saying, "Please don't come here with these cars."

"I don't want to be like Freud, but S.U.V.'s are a projection, a compensating thing," Mr. Di Carlo said in an interview. "They're when you want to show how rich, how powerful, how tall, how big you are."

It has proved hard to enact anti-S.U.V. legislation, partly because of the different ways of defining what exactly constitutes an S.U.V., and partly because of the influence of the automobile industry in places like Britain, Germany and Sweden. But that has not stopped leftish politicians from bad-mouthing the cars at every opportunity.

"S.U.V. drivers are less respectful of other people - you can tell by the way they drive," Mr. Di Carlo said. "They park on the sidewalks. Mobility is freedom, but these cars in cities mean immobility, and someone has to have the guts to say it."

The automobile industry, though, says the government is unfairly singling out S.U.V.'s when other cars are just as guilty.

"If they are thinking about passing a new law to protect the environment or avoid pollution in the cities, it should be a serious one, not just something that is going to affect 2 percent to 5 percent of the cars in Italy," said Wanni Zarpellon, general secretary of the Italian Federation of Off-Road Vehicles.

In London, where S.U.V.'s are known derisively as "Chelsea tractors," after an upscale neighborhood in which they are especially thick on the road, Mayor Ken Livingston recently dismissed their drivers as "complete idiots." Drivers report having rude things shouted at them by pedestrians, and a group called the Alliance Against Urban 4x4's has taken to slapping fake tickets on parked S.U.V.'s, citing them for poor vehicle choice in an echo of similar campaigns in the United States.

"People who see Hummers driving around think, 'Oh, disgusting Americans,' " said Sian Berry, a founding member of the group. "We're saying that what happened in America must not be allowed to happen here."

Among other things, she said, her group would like to ban advertising that promotes the inappropriate use of S.U.V.'s, as in a television commercial she saw recently where a man drives up a mountain to fetch an ice cube. "It's saying, 'Please use this car for a really stupid errand,' " Ms. Berry said.

Like the Italian government, the French government has proposed increasing taxes on cars that use more fuel and thus contribute more to global warming, including S.U.V.'s. In Paris, where some members of the city council tried unsuccessfully to ban the cars from the city center during peak traffic times, the council passed a resolution last summer criticizing the cars for their carbon dioxide emissions and their low fuel efficiency, and Deputy Mayor Denis Baupin, a Green Party member, publicly ridiculed the S.U.V. as "a caricature of a car.''

In Stockholm, legislators on the left have been pushing the government to levy higher taxes on the cars. But Volvo - which makes the XC90, a popular S.U.V. - is based there, and so far the government has balked.

Understandably, manufacturers of S.U.V.'s are not happy about their poor image in Europe. Among other things, they point out, European-manufactured S.U.V.'s are in many instances more compact and environmentally friendly than their counterparts in the United States, blurring the distinction between different classifications of car and muddying the legislative debate.

"A lot of the criticism comes from envy," said Nigel Wonnacott, a spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which represents the British automobile industry. "If you start stripping down the facts, you learn that S.U.V.'s are not really that much larger than other cars."

"As far as carbon dioxide emissions go, they're not worse than a large executive-class car," he continued. "Where do we go from there - do we start banning those cars, too?"

S.U.V.'s still make up a tiny percentage of the market, but sales have been growing more or less steadily in the last decade. In 1999, 85,247 cars fitting the loose definition of S.U.V.'s were sold in Italy; last year the figure was 108,457 in Italy, according to Jaro Dynamics, which provides market intelligence on the automobile industry. In that time, British sales rose to 159,032 from 98,929, Jaro said.

S.U.V. owners like them for all the familiar reasons. They like their muscularity, their swagger. They feel safe and powerful up there, looking down at everyone else. And although they will probably not say it in so many words, they cannot be unaware of what their S.U.V. says about them: namely, that "they have a lot of money and want to show off," as Marcello Signorile, a Roman taxi driver, put it.

In Rome, it is hard to find anyone who will admit to being an S.U.V. fan, except for the actual owners. One of them, 34-year-old Ivano Stephanelli made no apologies for his impressive gray BMW X5, parked - if jutting out halfway into the street can be considered parked - in front of the pizzeria he owns. "This is a family car, not an ostentatious kind of car."

Mr. Stephanelli, who said the car was perfect for ferrying around his two children, delivering supplies to his restaurant, and tooling up to the family place in Tuscany, argued that he had actually used restraint in selecting it. "My friend got an even bigger car, a Toyota Land Cruiser," he said, "but I'm happy with this one."

His father-in-law, Otto Rino, pronounced the BMW, for which his son-in-law paid 76,000 euros, or about $98,000, with accessories, "awesome" and attributed the mean looks it sometimes attracted to the fact that "other people are jealous."

Not that he spends much time behind the wheel, himself.

"I'm afraid to drive it," he said.