CLIVE GAMMON
Amongst their other duties recently, Los Angeles police have had to deal with 2,000 complaints in a six-week period concerning riders of what they delicately call 'recreai tional vehicles'; more robustly, the manu‘ facturers have other names for them, as Play-Cats, Fast Cats, Catagators, Bazoos, Terra Tigers and American Eagles. And, recently also, one such vehicle has been accorded the supreme accolade of American sporting equipment: it is being stocked by Abercrombie and Fitch of New York.
I used to have a recreational vehicle my- self. It was a huge grey twelve-seater safari Land-Rover and for quite a long time, may be for three months, my weekends were spent submitting it to fearful tests on high sand-dunes and boggy moorland. It wilted under this treatment and had to go back to Solihull for a week's convalescence. It never fully recovered its virility and this, coupled with the fact that it could only manage twelve miles to the gallon, made me trade it in finally for an ordinary, non4 recreational vehicle that was forced to cons fine itself to boring old roads.
I was ahead of my time, of course. In the United States now, and more than likely in Britain before very long, all-terrain vehicles that can leave the Toad and travel across Country are enjoying a great vogue. By 1980, it is forecast that there will be a quarter-million ATVs in the United States —the sales rate at the moment is about 30,000 a year. Two years ago, their use was almost confined to hunters and farmers. Now, they are increasingly being used as 'fun' vehicles.
My first taste of a real ATV was on Jura this autumn (the island in the Inner Heb- rides where, ironically perhaps, Orwell wrote 1984). There I found that, in deer- stalking, the traditional pony which is led out to carry the stag home has been re- placed either by a weird tricycle called a Gnat or a blunt-nosed Austrian Haflinger, a kind of super-Land-Rover that the makers claim will tackle a 58° incline. As a bonus to your day on the hill. you travel home in the Haflinger over peat-hags and burns and dizzyingly down hillsides. It is a remark., able experience.
The Haflinger, though, is still a con- ventional vehicle basically. The new breed of ATVS are entirely different. Typically they have plastic, bug-like bodies and six wheels equipped with proportionately huge tyres which sometimes dig into the ground and sometimes glissade over it. They are steered like bulldozers: one bank of wheels is arrested if you want to turn. They use the small, 300 cc power unit originally,
'developed for snowmobiles and are said to be able to cope with desert, swamp, snows covered ground, jungle and mountainside. Like a spider in a bathtub, they will move up a steep incline until they tumble back down again, the two riders being theoreti4 cally protected by a framework of tubular steel.
Naturally, they are already being raced. The first, seventeen-mile course was estabi lished in New Hampshire two years ago and now there are regular cross-country races and rallies which sound perfectly adapted, as a new non-sport, for Saturday afternoon telly.
As my Land-Rover days taught me, it is exhilarating and liberating to leave the road and go on a wild switchback over rough country. Unhappily it is impossible to ignore the truth that it is also destructive, intrusive and, as we say these days, environmentally unacceptable. Think of the way that power- boat cowboys have made crowded parts of the coast hideous with noise and danger. And then think of the Baz,00s and Terra Tigers roaring across Exmoor or the Brecon Beacons. ATV riders are already in trouble with conservationists in the us for des- troying the peace of what is left of the American wilderness and the state of Michi- gan is already Considering limiting the use of ATVS,
David McCahill in, heir to a washing machine fortune and maker of the leader in the field, the Attex Arv, is fighting back. 'We are working very hard,' he says, `to perfect mufflers that will make the vehicles quiet in the woods.' Some of his salesmen are said to urge customers to drive Attexes over their prone bodies to demonstrate the very light (14 lbs per square inch) pressure of the tyres over the ground.
All the same, I've changed my mind about getting one,
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