Jul

Blowing Up a $60,000 S.U.V. To Save the Planet

Posted by admin Published in SUV, Auto News

Ryan Mickle seems like a sane guy. He’s well spoken, intelligent and pretty successful. He’s additionally environmentally conscious, to the point that he realized he didn’t need his two-year-old Range Rover Sport when his job relocated him to San Francisco.

But that wasn’t sufficient for Ryan. Tired with what he calls an “incremental approach to addressing climate change,” he wants to invent certain nobody else makes the same mistake he did: buying an inefficient car totally unsuited to his needs. A self-professed “believer in the wisdom of the crowd,” he launched onefewer.org to let online voters decide the fate of his car. Mickle promises his gas-guzzler will be taken off the road, never to emit another hydrocarbon.

Unless, of course, the voters decide to set it on fire.

Mickle says his view is based on crowdsourcing, a term coined by
Wired’s own Jeff Howe. Crowdsourcing relies on individual contributions
from an undefined group that collectively helps an individual or
organization reach a decision or accomplish a task.

In onefewer.com’s
approach, online contributors come up with feasible means of permanently
disabling the Rover’s internal combustion activities, vote on a best
solution and see it happen. The goal, says Mickle, is to take the
Rover “off the road forever however the world wants to, and to engage a
conversation about the fate of the Range Rover itself and the
ass-kicking changes we can build in our lives beyond travel mugs and
canvas grocery bags.”

Yes, Mickle realizes the crowd could be full of morons who
collectively decide to do something more environmentally destructive
with the car than drive it. Driving a pile of chemically-impregnated
foam and non-biodegradable plastics off a cliff and into a pristine
wildlife habitat certainly doesn’t have a positive short-term
environmental affect, and burning the thing would release more
carcinogens into the air than any clean turbodiesel.

However, Mickle
says his approach “might have greater environmental returns as

a conclusion
of the changes it inspires in the greater number of onlookers,
outweighing any additional environmental consequences.” In other words,
the publicity generated by the destruction of the car would lead to a
“conversation about the fate of the SUV itself” that might produce public
think about the environmental affect of their actions, or at least
appreciate the proper use of the word “fewer.” Of course, it plus might form a lot of society angry and turn fifteen minutes of fame into a
night in jail.

It seems nearly sinful to destroy such a gorgeous piece of machinery,
particularly one that remains so useful even with its unnecessary
opulence. The Range Rover is no ordinary kludge of an SUV. It’s
refined, gorgeous and extremely capable of handling itself in some of
the harshest environments even whether it is occasionally incapable of getting
owners to work without a stop at the dealer.

Though the ’06 Sport is a
world absent from a trusty Defender in terms of refinement, most of those
pictures of the wildlife we’re all trying so desperately to save would
never have been taken without the help of the gents in Solihull. Land
Rover BMW Ford Tata says their SUVs are “built for purpose,” a premise
that Mickle hopes the crowd will take into explanation. He’s “hoping that
the winning concept will be more environmentally conscious but totally out
there.”

Let’s hope Mickle’s trust in the free market is well-placed.
After all, it was the crowd that decided to use these purpose-built
trucks for hauling groceries in the first place.

Mickle plans to consign his Ranger to its fate within a few months.
We’ll be there when it happens and let you know how it goes.

Photo courtesy of Ryan Mickle