your stirring the possum. i get 30mpg in my landy and it produces less pollutants than any petrol cars
i hire a lot of cars when i travel (family cars) and i always look forward to getting back in my car. i couldnt recommend any of the new vehicles for a number of reasons but chiefly a lack of rear vision (they are very high) and the blind spots. quite a few have terrible front orientation as well meaning it is difficult to determine where the front left bumper is in relation to the wall/car/other object you may hit
an extract from http://www.anfwdc.asn.au/Mythsfacts.cfm
The Fuel/Greenhouse Argument Furphy 4WDs are often accused of excessive fuel consumption and therefore being wasteful of natural resources. It is true that some heavy petrol 4WDs do consume more fuel on average than petrol sedans, because of the weight factor in the main.
Around the city, where average speeds are less than 30kmh and air resistance is negligible, a large 4WD will use exactly the same amount as fuel as any other vehicle of the same weigh: it's just a matter of physics. The anti-4WD lobby would have us believe that 4WDs have this magical ability to break the laws of physics. They don't!
A 2 tonne 4WD uses no more fuel than a 2 tonne Statesman or People Mover! If there is such a thing as an environmental tax or environmental levy then it should be applied equally across the board to all vehicles regardless of their type or design.
To give an example the diesel Nissan Patrol or Toyota Landcruiser, can easily achieve 10.5 lt/100 km in highway driving conditions and actually less in urban driving. This is almost identical if not less than the average large station wagon.
With regard to pollution older and/or poorly maintained cars and erratically driven vehicles are by far the biggest contributors towards airborne pollution (Source - EPA). In fact any vehicle older than about 10 years emits between 30-50 times the pollution of a modern 4WD! The mere fact that a vehicle is a 4WD does not mean that the contribution to pollution is any greater than that of a conventional family sedan.
Diesels come in for special mention in some articles. However as engineers are well aware the modern common rail diesels (Euro 3 and 4) with low sulphur fuels are actually less polluting than either petrol or LPG engines. Further, modern small diesel emissions are already clean and do not require catalytic converters that petrol vehicles do (many of which can become infective shortly after new anyway!).
The latest small diesels pass the stringent European Euro 4 (2005) requirements WITHOUT a catalytic cracker! in order to combat the problem of particulates in the emission of diesel engines some of them also have PARTICULATE filters (Citroen and Peugeot since 2000 for example). These can be easily retro-fitted to make all modern diesels meet the Euro 4 (2005) standards (Mercedes and Peugeot are already offering these as a retro-fit to existing models).
When you add to this the extraordinary fuel economy of modern diesels it is overtly apparent they are not the “polluting” “fuel guzzlers” implied!
