The four-wheel-drive off-roaders, or Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) as they are commonly know, are under attack yet again.
Previously they have been blamed for causing traffic jams, global warming, endangering pedestrians and spending too much time in the cities and not enough in the rough off-road conditions for which they were designed.
Sales of SUVs in Ireland are up 35 per cent so far this year and one-third are sold in Dublin, giving rise to complaints about the extra road space they take up and the feelings of invulnerability they give to drivers, which is sometimes reflected in their driving .
Now, however, they're under attack even in their traditional stomping ground of muddy field and arid desert.
Amid complaints from other car owners and city councillors in Paris and London that 4x4 off-roaders spend too much time on city and town school-runs and not enough time in the fields where they were conceived, an Oxford professor is calling for them to be banned from driving off-road as well.
Dust storms emanating from the Sahara have increased tenfold in 50 years, contributing to climate change as well as threatening human health and destroying coral reefs thousands of miles away. Now an Oxford professor is pointing to the 4x4s as one major cause. The likes of the Toyota Landcruiser and Land Rover Defenders have replaced the camel as the desert vehicle of choice and they're kicking up a storm.
Andrew Goudie, professor of geography at Oxford University, blames the process of "Toyotarisation" - a coinage reflecting the near-ubiquitous desert use of Toyota Land Cruisers - for destroying a thin crust of lichen and stones that has protected vast areas of the Sahara from the wind for centuries.
Four-wheel drive use, along with overgrazing and deforestation, were the major causes of the world's growing dust storm problem, the scale of which was much bigger than previously realised, Prof Goudie, master of St Cross College, told the International Geographical Congress in Glasgow last week.
"I am quite serious, you should look at deserts from the air, scarred all over by wheel tracks, people driving indiscriminately over the surface breaking it up. Toyotarisation is a major cause of dust storms. If I had my way I would ban them from driving off-road."
He claims the problem has become so serious that an estimated two to three billion tonnes of dust is carried away on the wind each year. Storms in the Sahara transport dust high into the atmosphere and deposit it as far away as Greenland and the US.
Increased drought due to climate changes, over-grazing and ploughing have also played their part in increasing the amount of dust coming out of some parts of the Sahara by nearly 10 times since the late 1940s, the academic said.
Although the storms are mainly particles of quartz, smaller than grains of sand, they also contain salt and quantities of pesticide and herbicide which can cause serious health problems.
Microbe-laden dust from storms is also credited with carrying cattle diseases such as foot and mouth.
The world's largest single dust source is the Bodélé depression in Chad, between an ever-shrinking Lake Chad (now a twentieth of its size in the 1960s) and the Sahara.
The depression releases 1,270 million tonnes of dust a year, 10 times more than when measurements began in 1947, according to Prof Goudie's research.
Taking the whole Sahara, and the Sahel to the south, dust volumes had increased four to sixfold since the 1960s. Countries worst affected were Niger, Chad, northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania, the research found.
But the effects went far beyond. In the Caribbean, scientists had directly linked the death of coral reefs to smothering by dust which had travelled 3,000 miles.
African dust had also found its way to Greenland, Prof Goudie said. While white ice reflected sunlight and remains frozen, the dark dust on top absorbed the sun's heat, causing the ice to melt and accelerating the raising of sea levels.
Prof Goudie said it was as yet uncertain what other effects the dust was having on the climate. The airborne dust both reflected sunlight back into space and blanketed the earth holding the heat in. When it dropped in the sea it fertilised the plankton which absorbed carbon dioxide and cooled the ocean surface, creating fewer clouds and less rain - a vicious circle which made the dust problem worse.
Where the dust source was the dried-up bed of a salt lake or sea, salt deposited from the storms could ruin agricultural land, leading to more deserts and more dust. There might be more serious consequences for human health emerging elsewhere in the world.
Prof Goudie also warned that climate change might cause dust problems to return to the US prairies Dust storms were now common in the US and could lead to a disease, Valley Fever, an allergic reaction to pesticides in the dust which caused inflammation of the nose and throat.
In China, extensive efforts had been made to plant trees to hold back the dust, and increases in rainfall had also helped, the study found. However, large dust storms were still emanating from the vast deserts in the north, which included the Lopnor nuclear test site - raising fears that storms could interfere with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and might contain radioactive particles. The Chinese have said they were confident this would not happen.
Guardian Service /Reuters