Australians are driving bigger, heavier, dirtier cars and it’s alarming both climate and road safety experts.
A decade ago, sedans and hatchbacks were the most popular cars in Australia. Today, Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) and American-style utes dominate new car sales and advertising.
How often is “as much as you can”, honestly? We don’t care that it’s your hobby. Pick a different hobby or move to a rural area. Big cars kill people at far higher rates.
Please, watch this video, it summarises nicely the argument against bigger and bigger vehicles and likely addresses most of the excuses you’ll come up with:
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo
It’s about the US, but a lot of it is applicable to Australia also.
They don’t need to pick a different hobby, they can just hire an off-road vehicle instead. There is no reason for people to be buying vehicles for extremely niche, rare use cases when they can just hire an equivalent for a few weeks.
Money saved on the cost of the vehicle, gas and taxes should more than offset the cost of rental once or twice a year. If it doesn’t, tax more.
I suppose the problem is going off road you’re likely to scratch the paint or bend something that shouldn’t be bent which might be costly
I’m sure if they’re renting offroaders they’re aware of that. I did that in Iceland and everything was covered and the vehicle was bent and scratched already when I got it.
The ones in my city cost about $500 per day, and they take an $8,000 deposit. If they can’t fix it for $8,000 then they charge an extra fee on top of that, and they will restore it to new car showroom condition - which means just scraping a tree branch could cost more than the deposit.
Worst part is though, they specifically ban all of the popular dirt roads within about ten days drive of the city. The roads you’re allowed on, I’d happily travel in my Mazda 3.
The thing is though - even if you set aside all of that… the main thing stopping people from going off road is time, and you’d waste half your weekend picking up the car, checking it for damage, signing paperwork, and then after the trip cleaning it and doing all that again.