http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/07/...
1990, Arnold Schwarzenegger was driving in the American north-west, where he was filming Kindergarten Cop, when a convoy of 50 Humvees - the US military's rugged, wide-bodied transport vehicles - rumbled past. Among soldiers, the Humvee, short for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, was far from glamorous: it was a boxy, 1970s-era workhorse with uncomfortable seats, canvas doors, and an engine so poorly insulated that riders tended to swelter. But Arnie was captivated. "I stopped my car and said, 'I've got to have this car'," he recalled, years later. "I saw myself driving in the mountains in this car. I saw myself driving in the desert in this car."
Schwarzenegger contacted the Humvee's manufacturer, AM General, to demand one, but the firm said no: as an army vehicle, it didn't meet regulatory standards for sale to the public. "I said, 'Wait a minute. Are you telling me, the Terminator, that I can't have something? That's impossible'." As the journalist Keith Bradsher relates in High And Mighty, his book on the rise of the sports utility vehicle, Schwarzenegger launched a months-long campaign to pester AM General into creating a civilian version of the Humvee. He won, and in 1992, the Hummer H1 was born: a seven-foot-wide behemoth, capable of climbing over boulders, or fording water two feet deep - and so unashamedly militaristic that the engine start-button was originally going to be labelled "fire". (The company's lawyers overruled that plan at the last minute.) Schwarzenegger bought the first one that rolled off the assembly line.
The reason, of course - as manufacturers and analysts all agree - is rising fuel prices as opposed to, say, some kind of environmental crisis of conscience among buyers. Critics of the SUV tend to assume that those who drive them would be constitutionally incapable of such selflessness, which would be an annoyingly smug point of view if it weren't for the fact that market research conducted for the automakers themselves backs it up. The average SUV owner, according to studies cited in Bradsher's book, is "apt to be self-centred and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbours or communities." In addition, they are "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills ... they tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church, and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."