Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland.
The ads always have them splashing through mountain rivers or speeding down desert trails. The reality sees them snarling at other SUVs outside school gates, and the closest they get to going off-road is a sneaky sprint up the hard shoulder during a traffic jam. The commercials feature a gaggle of surfers grabbing their boards from the back, whereas SUVs are more often than not transporting three kids having a fight over the portable PlayStation.
You have to wonder when exactly that 4x4 option ever comes in handy. Maybe when using the PlayStation has made the children so overweight that the car won't shift without a little help.
The British call them Chelsea tractors, which has a suitably sneering ring about it. Because everybody hates SUVs. Except for those who drive them, of course. Climbing into one of those things, and cruising along several feet above the road, with enough boot space not only to carry several children but also to lose a handful of them, has a strange way of making a person feel good. Which is perhaps why they have become so desperately popular.
Their number and size add so much to Dublin's lengthening traffic jams that they should have a port tunnel all of their own. Given that SUV drivers appear to own the road anyway, surely something could be arranged.
As families get smaller, the cars gets bigger. In the future, most families will contain only a single child, but they'll each ride to school in something previously reserved for transporting helicopters. Although they may yet be partly responsible for ensuring there isn't much of a future, because driving one of these monsters is particularly environmentally unfriendly.
It's not the worst thing a person can do, but it ranks quite highly. Somewhere between serving up a corncrake for Sunday lunch and agreeing to store Chernobyl's leaky nuclear fuel in your local park. SUVs guzzle gas and belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to a global-warming problem that has the potential to push the world's temperature up by several degrees.
SUV drivers should think of the awful consequences, because such a rise would surely play havoc with their vehicles' climate-control systems.
Which means that there is always great irony in watching a queue of SUVs at a recycling centre on a Saturday morning. A bag of magazines and 40 empty white-wine bottles seems a small gift to earth's future, given that the SUV might be better driven straight into the scrap-metal skip.