Features

If you're a dizzy bird who's just read something in the hairdresser's about how your big SUV is murdering polar bears, then it's really not difficult to find a smaller, less bear-killing alternative.

The Range Rover you have now is, in essence, a five-seat estate car, so you could have a BMW 5-Series, an Audi A6, an Audi A4, a BMW 3-Series, a Mercedes C-Class, a Mercedes E-Class, a Ford Mondeo, a Vauxhall Astra, a Vauxhall Vectra, a Ford Focus, or any one of about a million Nissans, Toyotas, Skodas, VWs, Citroens or Fiats. Or if you are really worried about bears, an Oyster card.

Yes, I know you live in Surrey where the roads are sometimes covered in twigs or frost, but trust me, you'll be able to manage without four-wheel drive. No, really, you will. Cross my heart and hope to die.

We heard recently that sales of four-wheel drive cars dipped by 15 per cent in November, and most industry analysts reckon that there will be similar falls in 2007. So eventually, I presume, the car makers will get the idea and stop making them altogether.

That's bad news for the Army.

Replacing our boys' Land Rovers with Renault Espaces is a bit like replacing their boots with flip flops. It won't really work.

I've just been reading a book about the history of Britain's special forces - well, it beats the crap out the book my wife is reading which is called The Cloud Atlas - and I learned something intriguing. Contrary to popular myth, the SAS was not born from the Long Range Desert Group.

It was born from the commandos and simply used the LRDG as a taxi service. And here's something even more intriguing. To get around the desert, the boys had to use ordinary 2WD trucks. This, they say now, was jolly tricky.

I should say so. Have you ever tried to drive in a desert? If you try to keep the revs low, and use low end torque to pull you along, you will sink into the sand. If you keep the revs high and the wheels spinning you will sink into the sand. And if you do anything in between, you will also sink into the sand.

Driving over sand, in a two-wheel drive car, is like trying to marshal air with a dustpan and brush. It cannot be done. And yet, somehow, those boys did it. Digging and heaving and shoving and pushing their trucks over the softer stuff, and then blasting over the shale in the hope they'd have enough momentum to climb the next dune.

But not so much momentum that they'd reach the top of the dune with too much speed... and take off. One heavily laden truck, apparently, was going so fast when it reached the ridge, it flew for 96 feet. And then broke the driver's back when it landed.

Many things prompted the SAS to ditch the LRDG, chief among which was their capacity for theft. They could steal anything from Army supplies and some of the things they stole were a handful of new fangled American Jeeps.

They fitted them with two twin machine guns, fore and aft, and would whizz about the desert blowing up more Italian and German planes on the ground than even the best fighter ace could manage in the air. Put very simply, four-wheel drive helped Britain win the war in North Africa.