I dislike SUVs for many reasons including ecological reasons. We have a couple electric cars and a very small gas car here at home.
However, there is no excuse though for touching or vandalizing other people’s property no matter how “good” your cause is…especially when the SUV drivers have done nothing to you personally. Certainly deflating tires is at least better than slashing but neither should be condoned.
I drive an electric car and am concerned about climate change, but this type of horrible behavior turns me off from that group completely. I find it disgusting. And harmful. Just because you can call AAA—there’s a tremendous cost to that (even if it’s part of your subscription, somebody is paying for the labor AND ironically the gas for the TRUCK to come from the service station to help you out. It’s time-consuming and expensive and multiply that by 43. And not harmless to require that kind of time commitment (whether having to go back to your home—-many people in Beacon Hill do not get to park near their house—to retrieve a pump and try to figure out how to do that, or calling AAA and having to wait out on the street for them, perhaps with your babies with you) when people have lives to live. I would certainly never donate to a group that behaves that way. There are a million good ways to educate and make an impact and I have a hard time seeing any good coming from this harmful and wasteful behavior.
Some of the issue is keeping the miles down as much as possible, whatever the vehicle.
I have a mild gas guzzler, a 2006 Honda Odyssey minivan about to turn over to 100,000 miles (ha, yes - the first time). When I worked from home a lot, only added about 3000 miles per year. Less now. It has been worth it for us to do maintenance (including brakes, alternator) and keep it on the road as 2nd vehicle… out of the landfill. Someday we may go down to one car. In the meantime, I keep the seats out of it and treat it like a pickup truck.
Thank you for that sensible post.
I own and drive a full sized pick-up as my daily driver. It gets similar mileage to an SUV, can carry six people and is useful for hauling and towing. It’s a great multi use vehicle. I’d be absolutely pissed if someone defeated one of my tires, much l ss all four of them. Not everyone has AAA coverage. Not everyone has an air compressor or hand pump available. I’d like to see anyone here tell me how much fun it would be after just pumping up one tire with a hand pump, it’s not. Multiply that by four. I don’t care what your cause is, you have no right to vandalize my property. I bet anyone here wouldn’t like their tires on their electric vehicle deflated either. It’s simple, don’t touch other people’s stuff. It’s not ok, even if it is essentially harmless. In the end it is not harmless to those affected. I’d hope the police could find and charge those involved.
This sums it all up very, very well.
And whatever the cause is, one is only preaching to their choir, not winning converts, by doing such things. You can also be chasing people away from your cause.
I’m in the being chased away from your cause group!
We have a travel trailer to tow - so yes, sometimes a truck is necessary.
Is the travel trailer necessary?
Funny what people think is necessary. I’m of the mind that our family cars are extras not necessities. Food, shelter, whether appropriate clothing, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink are necessities. I have a LOT of extras and luxuries in my life and my cars are some of them. If I had a truck or a travel trailer they would both be extras not necessary.
I definitely would pissed off if someone deflated my car tires for whatever reason. But I’m pretty sure this group was just trying to get publicity not trying to convince the individual SUV owners. So in that sense this was a success for them because here we are still talking about it. We’ve talked about how eating beef is bad for the environment and how just driving less can help even if your vehicle gets bad gas mileage and how our next cars might be EVs. This is all the conversation that group wanted to start. I live about 800 miles from Beacon Hill but still I’m part of this conversation now.
Sure it was. Many more car owners will be on the lookout for these wet behind ears little dweebs to give them a good chase. 
We are, but we’re already in the target group, so it just counts for preaching to the choir.
I know plenty of people who go buy a steak each time they hear, “Eat Less Beef” spoken by someone.
In this case I doubt people are going to go out on a whim and buy an SUV, but they are turning people away from the cause by their actions - likely more than they are gaining.
Is a 4000 sq ft House necessary? Flying in an airplane to a vacation spot? Eating meat ( I’m a lifelong vegetarian by the way)? Most things aren’t necessary. Most of our vacations are done via our travel trailer. We did own a Toyota Sequoia but sold it and bought a Ford F150 hybrid.
Forgot to address this… while not necessary, one of our next large purchases is likely to be a Class B RV. We’re already shopping. We’ve done tent camping all of our life, but we’re getting older. We refuse to give up wanting to stay places in nature and going various places to see nature’s eye candy.
There are electric models out there, but they only have a range of 100-150 miles. That won’t work for us.
For all of us, we make our choices based upon our lives. We scrimp elsewhere on our impact, but travel adds to it.
I think the main thing is that we each just examine our lives, limit the “green splurges” to things that give a real personal value-add…. like your trailer.
Well, ours is going to be a Class B RV because I’m not fond of pulling trailers, but not much different overall. We’re choosing Class B (or B+ maybe) because I also don’t want to drive a huge behemoth around and we don’t need that much space to live in when we travel.
LOL - I should have said “RV”
Exactly.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I love to travel too and am hoping to do more of it (although I’m not that into camping anymore or RV-ing), but I recognize that as a big luxury. I am conscious of my choices and know that when I travel it is a luxury that many people don’t have.
Most regular people don’t need a pick-up truck or an SUV. It’s a luxury. I have many luxuries in my life, but I’m just trying to be conscious of them as such.
Or one as large as many current pickups are today. Ford seems to have rediscovered that some people want an open bed to carry bulky or dirty things but do not want a large truck (that is too bulky and thirsty for them) – hence the hot selling Maverick (whose base version is a 37mpg hybrid), the spiritual descendant of the Ranchero (i.e. a pickup that is otherwise more like a car than a large truck).
For folks who love the idea of having a truck occasionally but don’t want to drive it full time, check if you local Home Depot or Lowes rents trucks. No purchase necessary. We’ll probably need to try it ourselves if we get rid of my beloved 2006 Odyssey.
As a cultural reference, the protagonists and heroes of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory (2018) were nonviolent eco-activists with disruptive methods of a magnitude much greater than this.