But instead she wrote to the council, which arrived to paint red marks across the road. The result was both dramatic and immediate. Last weekend I noticed the average speed was down from 180mph to somewhere in the region of 165.

And now it’s my turn to do something. So here goes. First, I should explain that being heterosexual with no fondness for rubber clothes, I don’t like bikes very much. And I don’t want my children to like them either. Some parents say drugs are the biggest threat to youngsters today, but I disagree. Every weekend, everyone under the age of 25 takes crack, smack and E and very few are harmed as a result. Bikes are far more dangerous. So, to put my kids off, I take them into the garden on peaceful Sundays and we watch them hurtle by. ‘See that man, kids?’ I say. ‘He likes looking at pictures of other men’s bottoms. And by tonight he’ll be all dead.’

Am I getting through yet? Well, let me try another tack. Bikes are not that fast. Only last month I went to the Thruxton racetrack in Hampshire with a Porsche 911, which is by no means the speediest car in the world, and a Yamaha R1, which can knock on the door of 200mph. But over a lap the car was faster by 0.75 of a second.

As the flag dropped, the motor-bicycle tore off at a truly breathtaking pace but, as the first corner approached, it came over all weedy and pathetic. To get it round a corner at more than a brisk walking pace, the rider had to lean right over so that his knee was actually touching the road. They call the scuff pads on the end of the footpegs ‘hero blobs’, but I have no idea why because halfway through the bend the car, despite the burden of four-wheel drive, just sailed past.

Yes, the motorized bicycle was faster on the straight bits, but where’s the fun in that? If you want to go fast in a straight line, try easyJet, which, for as little as £29, will take you pretty damned close to the speed of sound.

I’m regularly overtaken by bikers, and I’m sure they feel manly as they sweep by, but come the next corner I like nothing more than getting right up behind them and flashing my lights. Get it right, and without wishing to be too lavatorial, you can almost smell their fear.

For sure, it must be pretty damned scary to ride around on something that will skid into a hedge if you sneeze. But look, guys, if it’s a cheap thrill you want, why not rent Armageddon from the video shop? That way, there’s a zero chance of running over my dog.

Seriously. Hit a dog in a car and they’ll make you a freeman of Seoul. Hit a dog on a bike and you get a one-way ticket to the pearly gates.

Bikers fight back by saying the motorized bicycle is faster in traffic, but it isn’t. When I want to go somewhere in London, I pick up the car keys and set off. You have to go upstairs and spend 45 minutes dressing up like Freddie Mercury. By which time I’m there.

And I’ve got the girl, who assumes, as you struggle in, dressed in chains and rubberwear, that you’d be more interested in her brother.

So look, instead of hacking out to the Cotswolds this afternoon, why not mow the lawn or play tag with your mates?

If not, then would you mind awfully fitting an exhaust system that masks the sound of the engine in some way. Because if you don’t, I will set up a stereo in your garden tonight. And play Barclay James Harvest at full volume until dawn.

Freedom is the right to live fast and die young

It’s strange that new Labour should choose to take its holidays in Tuscany. Italy, for heaven’s sake: it’s the very antithesis of grind-your-own potpourri, nanny-knows-best Islington.

A friend who teaches sociology at Rome University once said that it is not difficult to govern the Italians, just unnecessary. ‘You can have as many laws as you like,’ he explained, ‘just so long as they are not enforced.’ And you have only to look at Italian history to see why. One minute they had Caesar nailing orders to the village notice board, then along came Hannibal with a different set of instructions: ‘Kill a Florentine: Win an Elephant!’

And it’s still going on: governments never last more than a year, so new rules that come along one day are overturned the next. Best, really, to just get on with living and ignore the edicts. That way you have anarchy, which before a change in the 1929 OED, meant ‘a perfect state where no government is needed’.

So I wonder what Mr Blair and the wide-mouthed frog thought when they found people openly smoking in Pisa’s no-smoking airport. What went through their minds when they found that, contrary to Euro-rule 277/4b, the lavatories in the restaurants do not have two doors separating them from the kitchen? And how on earth did they cope on the roads?

They have bus lanes in Italy. But cars go in them, too, because, it’s said, the police are more interested in crime. Rubbish. They are only interested in their uniforms, which were designed by Fendi. Except the bags: they’re Gucci. Maybe if British police had Reebok shoes and Paul Smith suits they might worry less about your dirty rear numberplate and whether you’ve had a wine gum. It’s a thought.

Contrary to popular belief, though, you can get stopped by the Italian police. A friend was hauled over for jumping a red light but, when she explained that this was permitted in Britain after 11 p.m., the officer said ‘Good idea’ and let her go. It is a good idea. My professor mate says it is an act of ‘monumental stupidity’ to sit at a red light when nothing is coming. And he can’t fathom the new Italian law that says you must wear a seatbelt. ‘It’s like betting against yourself,’ he says. ‘Putting one on is like saying, “I am, at best, a mediocre driver. I may crash.”’

The Italians do crash, a lot. Every bend on every road is garnished with floral tributes to poor old Gianni, who, at a crucial moment, ran out of talent. But in Italy to die in a 100mph fireball is to live.

Certainly, I pity poor old Mr and Mrs Blair if they chose to drive around at the speed limit, because other road users will have thought them mad. Indeed, in Sicily once, while trying to discover just how fast the Sierra Cosworth would go, I chanced upon a police van trundling down the inside lane. Naturally, I braked hard, but it was no good, and out of the van’s window came an arm, followed by a head and then a whole torso. He was waving at me frantically, demanding that I put my foot down again. Sure, he was a policeman, but he was, first and foremost, an Italian bloke and therefore he, too, wanted to know if the 150mph rumours were true.

And it isn’t just the police who encourage you to go faster. I was once struggling down the outside lane of the autostrada in some godawful diesel Fiat with a large Alfa ramming me gently, but repeatedly, up the rear. And in the back of it were two nuns.

Go to an Italian motorway service station in the holiday season and the car park will be littered with tourists, usually American, crying their eyes out: ‘We just daren’t go back on the road.’

To stay out of trouble, you need to go fast. Really fast. People will dive into a hedgerow when confronted with an onrushing Ferrari. There’s none of the mealy-mouthed Terry and June pettiness you get in Britain.

Of course, they have drink-driving rules, but, so far as I can tell, there’s no specific limit, so nobody gets prosecuted. Then there’s parking: to find a space, you use your bumpers to move another car out of the way. And hands up anyone who’s seen a double yellow line in Italy. Or a speed hump. Or a Gatso.

But here’s the thing: it works. And while I’m sure Mr Blair was initially horrified by the freedom bestowed on the subjects of a fellow Euro-state, I do hope that, as he lay awake at night, digesting the fagiano alla caruso and listening to the crickets, he realized that ungoverned traffic is like an ocean: it will find a natural level that swells like the tide at rush hour and then, all by itself, ebbs away.

Unfortunately, Canute Prescott is still in charge of the roads, and I think he takes his holidays in Mablethorpe.

A shooting star that takes you to heaven

A senior Ford executive told me the other day that modern customers will make up their minds about a car in just five seconds. Five seconds? What planet is he on? Five seconds is far too long. The Big Breakfast can give you an entire news bulletin in five seconds. And I certainly didn’t need five seconds to make up my mind about the new Nissan Almera GTi. I saw a picture and knew immediately it was horrid.

Oh, I’m sure its fuse box wasn’t nailed in place by an Indian, and I’m sure it’s jolly fast. But telling someone at a drinks party that you have a Nissan Almera is like telling them you have ebola. And that you’re about to sneeze.

Nissan says in its press advertisements that the Almera is better than the Golf GTi, but I don’t need five seconds to find out that it isn’t. It’s a bloody Nissan, for crying out loud. In the 20-year history of hot hatchbacks, only one car maker has ever been able to take the fight to Volkswagen. Peugeot.

Peugeot, of course, is French, but I see that as a good thing. While we wail and wring our hands at American trade shenanigans, they just up the price of Coca-Cola to £50 a can. Marvellous.

Then we must consider Peugeot’s latest advertising campaign, where we see Gatso cameras with long lenses and cars taking off from humpback bridges. These are designed specifically to annoy the ‘speed kills’ lobby and that, too, is a good thing.

And, finally, their new pocket rocket, the 206GTi, is made in Britain. But spend just five seconds in the cockpit and you’ll be overcome by a need to get out again. It’s vile. The dashboard is made of deeply veined plastic so it looks like an elephant’s arse. And you cannot find a comfortable driving position. Unless you are an ape.

Then you’ll note there is no sunroof and, despite a dashboard-mounted readout that says GPS, no satellite navigation either. After five seconds you’ll not only be out of the car but out of the showroom, on your way to see that nice man at VW with his solid-as-a-rock Golf.

Mistake. Big mistake. What you need to do is turn the key, ignore the engine scream and set off. Eventually the overactive choke shuts down and you are in what can best be described as an asteroid. All the other cars on the road become big lumbering planets. But the 206? It’s doing 2000mph on the back roads, where neither Mr Prescott nor Isaac Newton can get at it.

You know that ball that Will Smith found in the Men in Black laboratory, the one that Tommy Lee Jones said had caused the New York blackout? Well, that’s what the 206GTi is like. You don’t so much drive it as hang on and hope for the best.

For those who haven’t seen Men in Black, it’s like taking a terrier for a walk.

It’s like body-surfing down an alpine ravine. It’s an extreme sport with wheels.

It’s fitted with frantic, sprint gearing so that, at motorway speeds, the engine is doing 4000rpm. This means it’s loud, but it also means you’re right in the power zone and even so much as a breath of wind on the throttle pedal will give you a whole new hairdo.

It’s not that the 2.0-litre engine is particularly powerful, but Peugeot has used every trick in the book to eke as much as possible from it. And it’s the same story with the rear suspension. Front-wheel-drive cars understeer, right? Turn into a corner too quickly and the nose will want to plough straight on. Not in a Peugeot. If you lift off the power, the back swings round and you get armfuls of oversteer, which is exactly what the enthusiastic driver wants.

Seven years ago it seemed the hot hatchback was about to breathe its last. The performance meant they became a must-have accessory on the Blackbird Leys housing estate. And they were getting bigger and fatter, which meant that their engines, strangled by catalytic converters, were not capable of justifying the insurance premiums.

However, engineers overcame the catalytic menace, and clever alarms brought the insurance premiums down again. And I’m delighted, because I reckon the hot hatch is man’s cleverest automotive achievement yet.

The Peugeot costs just £14,000 and for that you get a car that provides as many smiles per mile as a £140,000 Ferrari. It carries as many people as a Jaguar, but fold the rear seats down and you can get a filing cabinet in. It’s small, nippy, easy to park and classy enough to cut ice with a liveried doorman. It’s the little black cocktail dress of cars and, in my opinion, the best label right now is Peugeot.

I’ve just been out for a 100-mile spin in the 206Gti, and I’m still beaming. I’m terribly, terribly fond of it.

Congratulations to the Cliff Richard of cars

At school, a very simple punishment was meted out to anyone suspected of liking Cliff Richard. They were pushed into a plunge pool eight feet deep and eight degrees below zero. And they weren’t allowed out again until they admitted that ‘Devil Woman’ was drivel.

I recall the night when a close friend inadvertently put ‘Carrie’ on the pub jukebox. He was taken outside and stoned. Cliff, we explained, was not only a fully paid-up member of the St George’s Hill godsquad, which made him about as cool as an Indian jet fighter on reheat, but he was musical sediment.

Given one bullet and dispensation from Jim Callaghan to kill one person with no fear of retribution, I’d have gone for Colin Welland. But given two bullets, Cliff would have had a whole new design on the front of his zany blazer.

Yet today Cliff is the only artist to have had a hit record in five separate decades. He’s been knighted for not smoking, and when he plays at the Albert Hall, Kensington just stops. He can enliven a dreary day at Wimbledon, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never walked down the street humming ‘Living Doll’.

It’s 40 years since Cliff’s first No.1 but, as everyone says, he doesn’t look a day over 25. Well, no, on television he doesn’t, but he forbids any camera to be positioned below the height of his nose. If you saw his neck, you’d think he was an iguana.

And so it goes with the Mini, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this weekend. There’s a big party at Silverstone today, and upwards of 70,000 people are expected to turn up. So let’s just get that straight. A party… for a car. A car that was designed on the back of a napkin, a car that was in production for just six days before strike action shut down the lines.

They say it was the first car to offer a transverse engine, but so what? The Wright brothers’ aeroplane was the first to become airborne, but that doesn’t make it better than an F-15.

At school, anyone found in possession of a Mini was pushed into the plunge pool and made to sing Cliff Richard songs until they drowned. The Mini was a BL thing and, by the time I was old enough to care, even the cute charm had been replaced by an Austin Maxi radiator grille.

What we wanted as the 1970s drew to a close was one of the new Golf GTis, not some relic that Twiggy used to drive. This was the Farrah Fawcett-Majors generation.

The only reason the Mini survived is that BL kept making it. And the only reason they kept making it is that they were too stupid to stop. Even when the superior Metro came along in 1980, they didn’t dare pull the plug. Today the Metro has gone but, incredibly, the Mini lives. And, strangely, I’m glad, in a cosy, nostalgic, changing-the-guard sort of way.

There’s a new ad campaign for this odd little throwback, but the nation’s vicars won’t let us see it. It shows a bunch of naked men being judged by a panel of women in a game show. They work out which one has the Ferrari and which one a Porsche, then say in unison, as they encounter one particular crotch: ‘Aah. This one drives a Mini.’

And that’s the point. The Mini started out in life as a damned clever response to the Suez crisis. Then it was a silly joke, and now, just by hanging around, it’s become a cheeky chappie: a wheeled Terry Wogan, as important to UK plc as the Queen. Today, Clint Eastwood has one, and half are sold in Japan, where they sit on the shelf alongside tins of Harrods shortcake and posters of Michael Caine. It’s a lava lamp, with a chequered flag on its roof and pop socks on its funny little wheels.

Of course, if they were to launch it now, with a price tag of £9300, we’d laugh and want to know where the hatchback was. But we don’t. We turn a deaf ear to the transmission whine, and we even manage to ignore the relationship between the pedals and the steering wheel that forces drivers to adopt a vaguely lavatorial driving position.

Next year, all this will be swept away when the new Mini breezes on to the market wearing what some are saying will be a price tag of £14,000.

Great. But will it be better than the original? Well, lots of cars have tried to beat it and, dynamically, all have succeeded. But if all my motoring were limited to urban roads, where comfort and silence and performance don’t matter, I’d buy a Mini and ‘boing’ down the road with men going ‘aah’ and women thinking I had a big one.

I hope it doesn’t rain today for what is this little car’s last birthday. But if it does, I have no doubt that the 5000 Minis on show will rear up on their hind wheels and belt out a few tunes to keep everyone happy.

David Beckham? More like Dave from Peckham

Cruise the neo-Georgian executive housing estates of suburban Britain and you’ll find a BMW 3-series on every driveway. While Cheryl is inside, tending to her baggy knicker curtains, Dave is outside with his carriage lamps and his stripy lawn burnishing his 318i.

BMW is so successful that while every other European car plant shut in August, it kept right on going. Three shifts a day, quenching the thirst of photocopier salesmen everywhere.

BMW is Manchester United, a single cohesive force, a perfectly synchronized robotic being that moves around the world destroying everything in its path. And me? Well, some say I’m biased when it comes to BMW, that I’ll support Leeds or Chelsea or anyone who wants to take them on, and it’s all true. But even I’m able to recognize that they do field some truly great players.

The 529i, for instance, is sublime. It embodies the whole mission statement of BMW, combining Teutonic quality with a zestfulness you just don’t expect in this class of car. It is a world-beater, a David Beckham with wheels. It even has a skirt.

Then you have the M5, which is perfect, and the M coupé, which looks like a bread van but goes like a pepperoni pizza. And that’s it. BMW makes three great cars. And the rest?

This week I’ve been driving around in the new BMW 3-series coupé. But it isn’t a coupé. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a two-door saloon that costs more than the four-door. And if you’re not paying a premium for style, then what, pray, is the point of paying a premium at all?

It looks like a BMW, which, in The Close, is obviously a good thing, but compared with the Peugeot 406 coupé and the knuckle-bitingly gorgeous Alfa Romeo GTV, it looks half-hearted. You do get pillarless doors, though, and therein we find the cause of a gigantic bruise that has now enveloped the entire right side of my face.

Here’s why. You open the door and, with an end-of-the-day sigh, drop into the carefully moulded driver’s seat. But halfway through the drop, the heavy door starts to swing shut and you don’t see it coming because there’s no frame round the window. Scream? I sounded like Jamie Lee Curtis in Hallowe’en.

BMW must be aware of this problem because, by pressing the remote buttons on the key twice, the window is lowered out of harm’s way. That’s called retroactive engineering, which means responding to a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

This is a 3-series that is supposed to be sporty. Not only that, it’s a 3-series coupé, which is supposed to be sportier still. And on top of that, it’s called a 323, which harks back to the car that, in 1984, was the holy grail for every estate agent in SW6. After the summer of love and the winter of discontent, we burst into the 1980s with a spring in our step. We were playing hopscotch on the heads of the homeless, and the badge of belonging was a 323i.

The new car, actually, has a 2.5-litre engine, so it should be called a 325, but hey. With property prices again heading for the heavens, BMW’s marketing department wants to milk the mood of the moment, and who cares if the end result makes no sense.

No, really, it doesn’t. The old 323i was light, fast and agile, whereas the new one is a suet pudding. Sure, the engine is a deal more powerful than the old one, but compare the crucial power-to-weight ratio of both cars and the problem is plain to see. The 1990s 323 coupé offers up just 120 horsepower per ton, whereas the 1980s equivalent delivered 140.

This shortfall is devastatingly obvious on the road, where the new car has about the same get-up-and-go as a boulder. It is not even remotely fast. And there’s no point turning to the 2.8-litre 328i either.

So what about the handling? The 50:50 weight balance? The rear-wheel drive? The years of racing pedigree honed and tamed for the road? Well, I’m sure it’s all there, but I couldn’t find it. I looked hard for an hour or two, and all I found was an airbag in every single nook and cranny. In many ways, this 323 reminded me of an old Volvo. Except, of course, no Volvo ever tried to slash my face off.

The 323 coupé is more than just a disappointment. It is genuinely a poor car, a bad effort from a company that teases us with greatness but, as often as not nowadays, delivers a plateful of offal.

What this car should have to suit the needs of its fan base is bull’s-eye glass and a couple of hanging baskets dangling from the door mirrors. And what you should have if you want a lemon-sharp coupé is the Alfa GTV.

A prancing horse with a double chin

The Road Test Editor of this magazine and I have been friends for more than 20 years. In that time we’ve spent every single New Year’s Eve in one another’s company. We’ve been on holiday together. We’re great friends. But this week I told him to f**k off and slammed the phone down.

So what’s brought this about, then? Has he been sleeping with my nine-month-old daughter? Or have I inadvertently urinated in the petrol tank of his motor-bicycle?

Sadly, not. I’m afraid the row is about a car. The Ferrari 360 Modena. Tom says it’s motoring nirvana, and I say it isn’t. Tom says the F1 paddle shi(f)t gearbox doesn’t jerk, and I say it does. Tom says I can’t drive, then. And that’s when I put the phone down.

Tom thinks I have an agenda and that I’m being controversial simply to make a name for myself. But I’m not. I’ve read what the road-test department has to say, and, while I respect their opinions, mine differ. And now I’m going to explain why.

First of all, the 360’s new 3.6-litre V8 develops 400 brake horsepower and that, I’ll admit, is an achievement. I doubt very much, for instance, whether Cilla Black could design an engine that churns out 111bhp per litre. I know I couldn’t. But if you look at the power-to-weight ratio, you’ll find it’s no better than the 355. So, we can deduce from this that the new boy’s a bit of a fatty.

Certainly, it has a double chin and a dumpiness around the arse which weren’t there in the 355. Dare I suggest that in Ferrari’s endless quest to keep the signs of age at bay, they’ve gone a face-lift too far and created Zsa Zsa Gabor in aluminium? And what’s that smile all about? Ferraris are supposed to snout down the road like angry bloodhounds, not cruise into town looking like Jack Nicholson’s Joker.

They say they’ve raised the front end so owners don’t graunch it quite so often on pavements and the like, but I don’t want practicalities sticking their nose into the equation. I want my V8 supercars to hunker down and snort the white lines right off the road.

Same goes for the interior. Yes, it’s a good deal more spacious than it was in the 355, and now Tiff has somewhere to put his woods. But I’m not bothered. Just so long as there’s enough room for me, and Radio 2, I couldn’t care less.

Then there’s the question of comfort. Ferrari has tried to make the 360 as user-friendly as a Porsche 911. That way, owners will actually drive the car, rather than putting it in an armour-plated garage under a carefully laid ermine dustsheet. And that way, they’ll need more services and more spare parts, which is good for Ferrari’s bank balance. But look. If you use a car every day, it will cease to become special. In three years I’ve done only 5000 miles in the 355. Each one has been under a blazing sun, on the way to somewhere agreeable and nice.

You’ve read, I’m sure, that despite the new comfort, the 360 makes a bloodcurdling noise as the revs climb round towards the stratospheric red zone. And for sure it does, but the howl you get from a 355 has now gone, and that’s a pity. So’s the razor-edge sharpness. A 360 in its ‘sport’ setting feels exactly the same as the 355 in ‘comfort’. And why, pray, does a 360 have traction control? I thought the whole point of a Ferrari was that you spent your time not only fighting the road but the machine itself. Wading into battle with a silicone nanny tips the balance too heavily in the driver’s favour. It’s like putting Nato up against the poor old Serbs. They never stood a chance.

Needless to say, I turned the traction control off within six seconds of starting the engine… and unlocked the key to another problem. When you go past the limit in a 355, it is surprisingly easy to control. But the 360 isn’t. You end up sawing away at the wheel, and it’s only a matter of time before you nudge one of the gear shifters, making the problem even worse. I’ll admit the F1 gearbox works well on down-changes, but it is ferociously jerky on the way up, and it’s a nightmare when the rear lets go.

It’s like a Psion Organiser. To input a vital piece of information takes well over a minute, whereas carrying out the same task with a pen and paper, you can have the whole thing jotted down and stuck to your wall in – what? Five seconds. So why not save yourself six grand and stick to a proper gearbox?

In fact, save yourself thirty grand and buy a used 355, because it is more aggressive than a 360, more lithe, more moreish. Sure, the 360 is user-friendly, but if you want an everyday car, buy a 911. Or an Alfa GTV V6.

As a once a month, high days and holidays funster, which is the whole point of a Ferrari, the 355 is still the best car in the world. And if you don’t agree, I couldn’t give a damn.

£54,000 for a Honda? That’s out of this world

If a Martian walked through the door right now, wanting to know about Earthman’s motoring habits, I’d be weak on, I think, two areas. I’m a bit shaky on why the M4 has a bus lane. And I’d need at least an hour to explain why the new Nissan Skyline, a two-door saloon, costs £54,000.

I mean, a Nissan is hardly a prized possession, like myrrh or a Myrrhcedes. Quite the reverse. It’s down there with Primark and those tree-trunk house-name plaques.

So Mr Martian would ask if perhaps the Skyline was a comfortable touring car, able to swallow vast distances with the careless disdain of a similarly priced Jaguar. And I’d have to say: ‘Gosh, no.’

Without any doubt, this is the most uncomfortable car I’ve driven. On urban roads, where the surface has been mutilated by cable TV companies, the Skyline can devastate your entire skeleton. You learn to weave round potholes, veering on to the wrong side of the road if necessary. And if you encounter a speed bump, why, you just turn round and go home.

The problem is threefold. First, it runs on tyres of such incredibly low profile that it appears someone has simply smeared a veneer of black paint on the wheel. They offer no give whatsoever. Then there’s the chassis, which has all the flex of a steel girder. And finally there’s the seat, which is padded like Kate Moss. Driving this car is like being dragged across Iceland behind a horse.

If the Martian had eyebrows, I’m sure they’d be raised at this point as he sought the reason for that £54,000 price tag. Is it fast, he’d ask. To which I’d have to reply: ‘Er, not especially.’

Japanese law forbids any car maker from producing a car with more than 280 brake horsepower – I haven’t a clue why – so that’s all the Skyline can muster. It’s fast, yes, but not spleen-shattering, not so fast that your ears start to move about.

Bald figures show it does 0 to 100mph in 10.5 seconds and will carry on accelerating all the way to 155mph. That sounds good, but in reality the 2.6-litre engine suffers from whopping turbo lag that the six-speed gearbox does little to mask. Put your foot down at 70mph and it behaves just like a Nissan: 15 seconds later you’re still doing 70.

No matter what sane, level-headed question the alien asked, I’d be stumped. It costs at least £1000 a year to insure. It’s gaudy to behold. It has a fuel tank the size of a yoghurt pot and, because it does only 18mpg, it needs filling up every 35 yards. There’s no sunroof or sat nav.

I’d be forced to explain that the only reason it costs so much is that it goes round corners quickly. That’s it. That’s the Skyline’s party piece. It’s good at roundabouts.

I lent the keys this week to Colin McRae who, after five laps of Silverstone, climbed out and smiled. And called it ‘pretty impressive’. Which is like a normal person saying it’s ‘unbebloodylievable’.

I remember being amazed about 10 years ago when Chevrolet announced their new Corvette could generate 1g in a corner. Well, the Skyline manages 1g without so much as a chirp from its tyres. I know this because in the middle of the dashboard is a TV screen that tells you how much g is being generated at any one time. Or, by pressing buttons, it will say how much power is being transmitted to the front wheels and how much to the back. It gives you readouts on the exhaust temperature, the intercooler temperature, the percentage of throttle travel you’re using, even the state of your fuel injectors. And now we’re starting to get to the nub of this incredible car.

You see, I looked round a London flat recently, which was on the market for £450,000. A lot when you consider it had no rooms. I mean it. There were no walls, floors, heating, lighting, anything, the idea being that buyers tailor it to suit their needs. That’s what you get with a Skyline. Nissan sells you the bones and you, by plugging in a computer and changing the odd chip, add the flesh. I know a bloke who’s taken the engine up to 800bhp.

You can play around with the thinking four-wheel-drive system, you can alter the aerodynamics – and that’s probably why the Skyline has become the car of choice in Formula One. Ask Johnny Herbert what he drives and, like a good Ford boy, he’ll say: ‘A Ford.’ But really he drives a Skyline. They all do.

And the new version? Well, it’s like the old one, only a little bit stiffer, a little more aggressive, a little more fantastic. You can’t compare it to any other car because there’s nothing remotely like it.

So if the alien asks how a Nissan could possibly be worth £54,000, I’d just toss him the keys. And after a mile or two, he’d be trying to part-exchange his spaceship.

It’s Mika Hakkinen in a Marks & Spencer suit

I met a food stylist the other day and wondered, How did that come about, then? How do you start out in life wanting to be an astronaut or a film star and end up with a Davy lamp on your head, using surgical tweezers to arrange sesame seeds on a bun?

And then I wondered some more. What a sham. It is this person who builds up my hopes in hamburger restaurants. I see a photograph of a bulging, steaming snack that bears no relationship whatsoever to the tired old cowpat I’m actually given. Apart, perhaps, from the steam.

And that brings me neatly to the Audi TT. When they first showed me a photograph of this Bauhaus barnstormer, I was positively moist with anticipation. But then I went for a drive and, within half an hour, found myself wearing that detached, middle-distance expression normally reserved for dinner parties when I find myself next to a man who services reservoirs.

The Audi TT looks like a sports car, but it isn’t one. It’s an automotive Ginger Spice, superficially lithe and speedy, but beneath the clothes all droopy and loose. Like a soggy walnut.

Interesting, then, that I’ve fallen madly in love with the new Audi S3, a car that shares the same turbocharged engine as the TT along with the same four-wheel-drive system and the same six-speed gearbox.

This is because the S3 doesn’t try to look like a sports car. Apart from bigger wheels, wider arches and a more crouching stance, it looks like a normal A3, which is an unpretentious hatchback. And because I wasn’t expecting it to garnish the road with Tabasco sauce, I didn’t really mind that the gearbox was vague and that the brake pedal acted like a switch.

And so what if it doesn’t have electric responses when you turn the wheel? Audi, bless them, have never been able to make a car that handles properly but, for the thousands of doctors and solicitors who buy such things, it doesn’t really matter.

If you want a sharp suit, go to Subaru and buy the Armani Impreza. If you want Boss badging, buy a BMW, but if you just want something for work, there’s always good old Audi & Spencer.

But then I pressed the accelerator pedal and thought: Whoa, hold on a minute. The S3 may not be up to much in the bends, but in a straight line it is positively explosive. Even in sixth gear at 70mph, it hurtles off towards the horizon like a rabbit.

I simply wasn’t ready for such vivid performance from what is basically a 1.8-litre, three-door hatchback. And that’s where the S3 really scores. By maintaining low expectations, you’re constantly being delighted – by the epic night-time dashboard that glows like Los Angeles, by the blue-tinted headlamp beam and, most of all, by the Recaro seats. Not since I drove an old Renault Fuego have I ever been quite so comfortable. In a car, that is.

It’s also been a while since I felt so comfortable with a car. While it doesn’t actually turn heads, it has real-world good looks. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t Brad Pitt or David Beckham; it’s just a handsome bloke on the other side of the bar.

And that four-ringed badge comes with no unpleasant baggage. When I see an Audi coming up our drive, I’ll rush to the door to see who it is. When I see a BMW, I close the shutters and pretend to be out.

You buy an Audi because you want a practical, well-made tool to convey you, and some passengers, sensibly and with the minimum of fuss from your agreeable house in the country to, let’s say, Assaggi in Notting Hill. People with Bee Ems go to Quaglino’s, so they can shout.

And finally we get to the price: £27,000. Which is a lot for what, as I said, is basically a hatchback. But it is not a lot for a car that does quite so much, quite so well. For the same money, you could have a Mitsubishi Evo VI, but you’d arrive everywhere looking like Gary Rhodes. Or you could have the BMW 323 coupé. But you’d arrive everywhere late.

For the past year or so I’ve been singing the praises of Alfa Romeo’s GTV6, which is £28,000. In fact, I’ve come awfully close to telling strangers in traffic jams that they’ve bought the wrong car. ‘Oi, you. Why are you driving around in that p.o.s. when you could have had an Alfa? You are a moron, and I hate you on a cellular level.’

Well, now there is an excusable alternative. If you really, really need back seats and you absolutely must have a boot that can take more than one prawn, you may buy an Audi S3. It’s the second-best car in this class, which is like being the second-best racing driver after Michael Schumacher.

There you are. The S3 is Mika Hakkinen. Cool. Detached. Handsome. And much, much faster than you’d think.

Like classic literature, it’s slow and dreary

I don’t like patterned carpets, but I know why people buy them. They may be unrestful on the eye, but turquoise and gold squirls are to be found in smart restaurants like the local Harvester. So they’re seen as posh. And practical too. The Torrey Canyon could crash into your sofa and only the most eagle-eyed visitor would be able to spot the stain.

I know why people buy Agas too. They can’t cook food, choosing instead to heat the kitchen to a point where cutlery melts. And when they go wrong, you have to spend half an hour listening to some gormless customer-care woman who says that all her engineers have personal problems. But Agas bring a certain country goodness to your kitchen, and you get an owners’ club magazine that features other Aga louts like Felicity Kendal.

I know why people live in Wilmslow. I know why people become burglars. I know why the M4 bus lane was built. But I never got to grips with the Vauxhall Vectra.

There’s a new version now and, even though it looks much the same as before, Vauxhall says there have been 2500 alterations, prompting those wags at Viz to suggest the old one must have been a ‘right pile of crap’.

They’re right. It was. When I was asked to review this hateful car for Top Gear, I adopted a philosophy that took Ronan Keating all the way to No. 1: ‘You say it best when you say nothing at all.’

It was shamefully dull, enlivened only by a tool to get the dust caps off the tyre valves. And guess what? The new Vectra is no better. Oh, I’m sure its chassis is more responsive and it’ll break down less often, but this was never the problem. The problem was the shape, the dreariness, the sense that someone else had styled this car while the proper designer was at home waiting for the Aga engineer to call round.

So I don’t care that the new model has one-piece headlamps or a new grille. It’s still boring. We want our cars to be like airport best sellers. We want the cover festooned with swastikas, guns and girls, but instead Vauxhall gives us Thomas Hardy. It’s the Penguin classic of cars. I bet if you peeled away the bodywork you’d find an orange spine.

And I’ve been testing the lavishly equipped V6 GSi, which is supposed to cast a halo of sportiness over the rest of the range. Basically, it’s a normal Vectra that appears to have been magnetized and driven round a motorists’ discount shop. Hundreds of cheap bits have just sort of stuck to it, so you now have Thomas Hardy in a tracksuit.

The problem is money. The GSi costs £21,500, and Vauxhall knows full well that everyone with even a modicum of sanity would buy an Alfa Romeo 156 instead. Or a BMW. Or a wheelbarrow.

So, to make the Vectra more appealing, it is decked out with gizmos. Inside you get satellite navigation, traffic master, which is like ‘ask the audience’. It even has a ‘phone a friend’ button. Press it and you’re connected to an operator who can tell you whether the male seahorse carries its partner’s eggs. And where the nearest breakdown truck is. This is all very nice, but it means the entire glove box is filled with a machine.

Then there’s the air-conditioning. Looks good in the brochure. Doesn’t work properly. Rather than cooling the whole car, it delivers jets of ice-cold air in narrow corridors so that your nose is fried while the wax in your left ear is turned into an uncomfortable icicle.

And then there’s the steering wheel, which is metal. So, on a hot day it’s like driving with your hands in a toaster. This car has everything, but nothing works properly. Not even the engine. The 2.5-litre V6 develops 170bhp, which means the Vectra goes from 0 to 60 in 7.5 seconds and onwards to a top speed of 143mph. Theoretically. But in my test car, it felt like the fuel was being delivered not as a fine mist but in large lumps. Under hard acceleration, it felt like it was trying to drink minestrone through a straw.

And even if you leave this unsavoury element out of the equation, you’re left with a car that, despite the spoilers and the gravelly exhaust note, is really not very fast at all. It’s merely adequate, like the handling and steering and brakes and interior space and styling and fuel economy and ride comfort. There were only two points that could be classified as good: the Recaro seats and the shape of the door mirrors. And that isn’t enough, not by a long way.

I’d like to say that, despite the 2500 alterations and the V6 power, the new Vectra is still the most horrible car you can buy. But the Chrysler Voyager diesel is nastier, and I suspect the new Kia Clarus is even worse.

So there we are. The new Vauxhall Vectra: not even any good at being bad.

Prescott’s preposterous bus fixation

Earlier this month I wrote a column for The Sunday Times in which I might perhaps have said motorcyclists were a tiny bit gay. Certainly I claimed that they liked to look at photographs of other men’s bottoms.

Well, there’s been an awful lot of fuss and bother, with e-mails flying hither and thither, flicked V-signs in traffic jams and a piece in Motorcycle News which said I was being deliberately controversial. As opposed to what, I wondered? Accidentally controversial?

It also said that I only wrote the column to annoy the Road Test Editor of Top Gear magazine. ‘A tad wasteful’, they suggested, to devote an entire column in a national organ to one man.

Oh, really? Well, they devoted a whole column to me, and now I’m going to devote what’s left of this one to John Prescott, who has a brilliant new wheeze. Basically, if Railtrack don’t get the trains to run on time, they’ll be fined £40 million. Which is more than you get for urinating in a public place. I find myself wondering what good this will possibly do. Certainly it’ll ensure that money, which could be spent making the network better, goes to the government, where it will be spent on a few more focus groups. And big penalties like this will scare away investors. So, the trains will get worse. And then they’ll get fined again.

I wouldn’t mind, but it’s not like the people at Railtrack sit around every morning thinking up new and exciting ways to bugger up the network. I’m sure they’re doing their best, and the last thing they want is Jabba the Hutt and his ginger-haired, rhubarb-shaped sidekick at the Rail Regulator acting like a brace of school bullies.

I should have thought it would have been more helpful if Taffy Two Jags had said: ‘Look, if you can’t do anything to make the trains better, we’ll give you £40 million to spend on new signals or better coffee or something.’ But, oh no. Chopper Prescott has decided to spend all his money on another lunch. And a diving holiday in the Maldives. And a helicopter to get to the Grand Prix, where he cheered wildly for someone called ‘Damien’. And what little there is left over is being spent on turning the road network into a giant f****** bus lane.

Now, look. Trains are a good idea. They help alleviate the pressure on Britain’s roads and work well in tandem with the car and truck. Buses don’t. Buses are stupid.

With the power of hindsight, everyone can see that Beeching was wrong to rip up the railways in 1963. It may have seemed like a wise move at the time, what with the coming of the car, but now we can all see it was madness. And I will bet everything I own that in 30 years’ time we’ll all be sitting around saying: ‘Prescott was an arse when he made all the roads buses-only.’

Actually, I’m saying it now. It’s all very well claiming that each bus is full of 50 smiling motorists who’ve left their cars at home, but that’s simply not the case. If you look at a bus after, say, 10 o’clock in the morning, it is almost always empty. And if there is someone on it, you can just tell they’ve never owned a car in their lives – not with that hairdo. And that coat.

Prescott doesn’t seem to understand that no one will buy a car, tax it, insure it, pay to park it somewhere and then use the bus to go to work. But then we should remember that he failed his 11-plus and was described by his mother as ‘not very bright’. But even he, surely, can see that a car is far more comfortable and far more convenient than a bus. A car goes where you want it to go and comes home when you’re good and ready. A car offers you peace and Terry Wogan. A bus offers you nothing more exciting than the opportunity to sit on someone else’s discarded chewing gum.

And buses are not fast. All the coach operators who use it say the new M4 bus lane has made no discernible difference to their journey times. And one operator, in Reading, even cut services after it was opened because there was ‘insufficient demand’.

Only 50 buses an hour use the M4 between Heathrow and London – that’s less than one a minute – and they now have a lane all to themselves. While the 16,000 cars that use the same stretch are hemmed into the remainder. It’s idiotic. It’s insane. It’s the product of a damaged mind.

And it gets worse because a quick survey of the 50 buses using the new lane reveals a nasty surprise. Most are airline coaches ferrying flight crews into central London for a little light sex.

And then we have the 350 taxis. Well, that’s really helping the road network and its overtaxed users. Sitting there watching American businessmen whiz past you into town at 50mph while you just sit there and sweat.

History, I assure you, will not be kind to Mr Prescott, and I suggest that history starts right now. So drop him a line, explaining exactly why next time round you’ll be voting for… well, anyone, really, just so long as he goes back to serving gins and tonics on the QE2.

Take your filthy, dirty hands off that Alfa

Did you know that there’s such a thing as a summer truffle, and that it’s nowhere near as good or tasty as a winter truffle? No? Well, don’t worry, because neither did I until I tried to order dinner the other night at a restaurant where this sort of thing matters.

I had to sit there, nodding sagely, while the waiter guided me through truffle technology. We’d gone through earth and moisture and pigs when, all of a sudden, he adopted the look of a man who’s just been stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. His open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression showed he was in deep shock, but analysis showed there was bewilderment too. Maybe a hint of anger. And all because here, in Michelin central, a man on the next table was putting Tabasco sauce on his fish.

I understood this expression well, because I had worn something similar two days earlier, when Alfa Romeo delivered to my house a 156 with a diesel engine.

This is like teaming white socks with your new suit. It’s like playing Mozart at 45rpm. And, yes, I imagine, it’s like spending eight hours preparing the perfect fish only to have someone with an asbestos mouth pour nitroglycerine all over it.

I’ll tell you some things about Alfa Romeo which will outline the preposterousness of such a thing. We think of McLaren as a dominant force in Formula One today, but back in the 1950s Alfa was so far out in front it once pulled in its car on the penultimate lap and polished it. So it would look smart when it crossed the finishing line.

Enzo Ferrari began his career with Alfa, a company that has given the world some of the most exquisite cars ever made. Have you ever seen a 2900B? Have you heard one? Henry Ford did, and said later: ‘When I see an eight-cylinder Alfa Romeo, I take off my hat.’

And it’s still going on today. Oh, sure, people who want four wheels and a seat can buy a BMW or a Vectra, but those who know, those who care, those who want the steering to talk and the engine to howl: they buy an Alfa. So what in God’s name were they thinking of when they fitted a diesel engine to their magnificent 156? A filthy, carcinogenic, rattly diesel! In a work of art!

Yes, I know that in Italy diesel fuel costs 3p a ton, and the savings make up for the catastrophic loss of self-worth, but why export it to Britain? Why? Here, diesel engines are for mealy-mouthed, penny-pinching, open-toed beardies in Rohan trousers. They’re for people who absolutely don’t care about cars or motoring, only the need to do it as cheaply as possible.

Diesel Man yearns to be a parish councillor. He fits yellow headlamp covers and a GB plate when driving in France. He studies road maps before he sets off rather than on the motorway, and he always fills up when the tank is still a quarter full.

You can always spot the son of Diesel Man in the playground at school. While all his mates are telling one another how fast their dads’ cars go, he is warbling on in a nasal whine: ‘Yes, but my dad’s car does 50 miles to the gallon.’ And then they steal his milk, and rightly so.

Because despite the wild claims of Diesel Man, diesel cars rarely average more than 35mpg. If he says he’s getting 50 or 60, you can tell him from me that he is a liar. And then punch him in the face.

Alfa Romeo has done its level best to enliven the concept of diesel motoring, droning on and on about its new five-cylinder turbocharged 2.4-litre five-cylinder engine. But the simple fact is this: at 4000rpm, when a normal Alfa would be rolling up its sleeves for an all-out, spine-tingling assault on the upper reaches of its bloodcurdling rev band, the diesel version is out of puff and begging for a gear change.

Yes, the diesel has torque, but where’s the power? Where’s the zing, zing, snap, snap, whoa-that-was-close excitement of a Twin Spark. Or the would-you-listen-to-that bellow of the V6. Where’s the fun?

You sit there, on your Recaro seat, clasping a Momo leather steering wheel, gazing over a carbon-fibre dashboard, listening to an engine that belongs in a bloody tractor. They say it’s eight decibels quieter than a normal diesel, but that’s like saying Concorde is quieter than a Harrier. It’s still noisy enough to give you a nosebleed.

And at £20,300, it’s not cheap. The Twin Spark 2.0-litre version is £100 less and completes a double whammy by being about a million, billion, trillion times better.

PS. Oh, and before I go, A.A. Gill wants to buy an Alfa, so if you have one for sale drop him a line. Doesn’t matter what model. He can’t tell them apart.

Yes, you can cringe in comfort in a Rover 75

I’ve just finished reading this month’s edition of GQ, which is a style magazine for men, and it seems 1970s kitsch is very much in vogue at the moment. Beanbags are back, and so are lava lamps. Then we find page after page of furniture that is made from black leather and brushed aluminium, such as you’d have found on an old Akai tape deck. Or wood, which is so dark and so heavily grained it actually looks like Fablon.

So, if the 1970s are in, then the new Rover ought to be the car of the moment. It’s even called the 75, to remind us of a time when 10CC were not in love, and it is festooned with all sorts of natty throwback styling details. If this car could have its hair done, it would probably go for an Afro.

Seriously, it’s actually very handsome and, though it’s big, it’s not at all tank-like. No more than a tank top anyway. But, strangely, this is an acutely embarrassing car to drive. Maybe it’s me. I’m the first to admit that I don’t like Ben Sherman shirts or those new shoes which look like punts. I buy into fashion only when I’m absolutely sure it isn’t fashionable any more.

I can’t abide the idea that I might be setting a trend because – who knows? – it might be a trend nobody else will follow, and I’ll be left out there with a halibut on my head and big pink kneepads. Well, that’s how I felt in the new Rover. Idiotic. Out of step. Not sure whether I was Dr Finlay or Dr Feelgood. Did I want milk or did I want alcohol?

The problem is simple. The 75 has been on sale for months, and I have not yet seen one. The new Jags, which are a deal more expensive, are everywhere, but nobody is buying the 75. So people were looking at me, and that’s unnerving.

I think I see why Rover has taken on Sophie Wessex to help get the nation ‘on message’. According to Brian Sewell, the art critic who was used in commercials for the 75, she will get high-profile, trendsetting opinion-formers into the car, so the rest of us will breathe a sigh of relief and follow suit.

But I fear it won’t work. Sewell cites A.A. Gill as a prime target for Sophie, but I know he’d rather pay for an Alfa than be given a Rover. And when you look at all those smiling faces at GQ’s Man of the Year party, you can’t help thinking: How many of you lot would buy a Rover. Jamie Oliver? Johnny Vaughan? TPT? Not a chance.

Above all, you see, it’s Rover, and that is just about the least cool badge in the business. At best, it is associated with tweedy doctors in Harrogate; at worst, it conjures up visions of Red Robbo dancing like a Cossack in Lickey End. Rover, the name, is a dog.

But what of the car? Mine came with a 2.5-litre V6 that went with the automatic gearbox about as well as a marriage between Harold Pinter and Scary Spice. Do not think this is a fast car and you will still be disappointed. It is woefully lethargic, unwilling to kick down, and, even when it does, a lumbering barge.

Then there’s the interior, which is even more wrong. I liked the piping on the seats. I liked the seats themselves, and I liked the creamy dials. But why have they put ultramodern LCD displays alongside ancient LEDs and set them all against a wood ’n’ leather backdrop?

That said, my car had every conceivable toy, which caused me to guess its price at £35,000. In fact, you could buy such a thing for just £25,000, and that’s good value. Good, but not amazing.

The handling, however, is neither good nor amazing. I suspect BMW ordered Rover’s engineers to stay away from 3- and 5-series sportiness and, as a result, we’ve been given a wheeled suet pudding. But because of this the Rover does have one trump card. After a hard day at work, when your head is pounding and the traffic is awful, there is no better car in this class for getting you home. It is as comfortable as a Rolls-Royce, soaking up Mr Prescott’s speed mountains like they’re just not there. And it’s eerily quiet, too, so that as you get on to the motorway and hit the cruise control, you simply cannot believe you’re in a machine that goes head to head with a BMW 3-series, let alone a Ford Mondeo.

So if you’re in the market for a car that drives like a candlelit bath, the Rover 75 should be your first choice. But, of course, if you’re in the market for such a thing, you are almost certainly old. With Volvo out of the way, and Nissan now importing the Skyline GTR, Rover has a clear run at the Saga louts. 75? It should be the minimum age limit for buying one.

Don’t you hate it when everything works?

I’m writing this on a new computer, which has decided that all ‘I’s shall be capitals and that occasionally it’s fun to type the odd word in Greek. So I’ve spent most of the day on the phone to a man who explained, with a lot of sighing, that it’s all very simple. And I suppose it is, if you’ve spent the past 14 years in an attic.

Even now, the Internet isn’t working, there’s a new machine on my desk which apparently does nothing, I can’t send e-mail and, every time I ask the computer to print something out, it says I have performed an illegal operation and will shut down. What I should do, of course, is take the whole damned thing over to Seattle and shove it up Bill Gates’s arse. But I don’t have the time because I’m learning how to use my new mobile phone, which is the size of a pube.

It’s funny, but all I want from a telephone is the ability to converse with people who are a long way away. But this mini-marvel can do so much more. I can have conference calls, receive the Internet and, best of all, there is voice-activated dialling. However, if you record someone’s name and number in your house, it won’t work if you try to recall them in the car or the street. So that’s handy.

And tell me this. My last phone was an Ericsson, and this new one is an Ericsson. So why are the connection pods completely different? Why have I got to buy a new hands-free set for £40? Not that I will, because hands-free is one of the most dangerous inventions since the shark. No matter how carefully you lay out that wire on your passenger seat, and no matter how steadily you drive, I guarantee that, when the phone actually rings, the earpiece will be in the seatbelt clip, the microphone will be stuck under the handbrake and the wire itself will have tied itself in a double reef knot round the gear stick.

I’d like to send someone a strong fax about this, but I can’t because all fax machines don’t work. I am on my third this year, and even the latest version, which is the size of a helicopter gunship, makes origami animals out of every piece of paper that goes near it. Or if you stand there with a hammer in your hand and murderous intent in your eyes, it pulls the paper through neatly, but 84 sheets at a time.

The simple fact of the matter is this. No piece of modern technology works… except your car. No, really. Think how cross you’d be if your engine died as often as the signal to your mobile phone. Or if your heater broke down with the regularity of your printer. Nowadays, we just get in our cars and expect them to work. And they do.

Unless they’re Toyotas. I bought a three-year-old Landcruiser in the summer, partly because I thought it would be safe for the children, partly because it is an eight-seater, partly because you don’t need to slow down for Mr Prescott’s speed mountains and partly because I knew it would be more reliable than a Discovery. Which only goes to show how much I know.

Now I know it could have been owned previously by a man with butter fingers and ham fists. I know it could have spent its entire life taking fat people up Ben Nevis. But it’s a Toyota Landcruiser, for heaven’s sake. It’s built to head-butt the Kalahari and arm-wrestle the Outback. This car is designed so that it can sidle up to the Sahara Desert, call it a poof and escape with its differentials intact.

So why is it the most unreliable piece of junk I’ve ever had the misfortune to own? It judders, creaks, lurches every time it stops, the electric windows have broken, and last week I was faced with a £400 bill for new brake discs. If it really has only done 30,000 miles, that’s pathetic.

Obviously, I’m angry but, conversely and rather perversely, I’m also delighted. You see, like all the other motoring writers, I’ve always been happy to peddle the story that Japanese cars are reliable because… well, because they just are. But I now have first-hand experience, and it’s rather nice to find that our inscrutable little friends make mistakes too.

Obviously, it has to go, but what should replace it? My first choice is a Range Rover – from Belgium, where they cost 40p – but some of me fancies an M-class Mercedes. American colleagues tell me that early models were made by mad people in blindfolds and that an endless catalogue of faults would give me acres of good material for this column. And you’d be surprised to find how important that is.

I mean, I’ve clocked up 20,000 miles in my Jaguar XJR and absolutely nothing has gone wrong; 15,000 parts continue to work in perfect harmony, which makes it great to own. But not so much fun to write about.

The kind of pressure we can do without

I love this time of year. As the temperature drops, Jack Frost does dot-to-dot drawings on our windowpanes and we’re greeted every morning with a visible reminder that we’ve woken up breathing. Even the countryside manages to look interesting, with a Technicolor blaze in the treetops and a crispness that makes the air almost brittle.

Yes, I love the autumn, but what I love most is the torrent of advice we get from motoring organizations about the preparations we must make if our cars are to survive the winter. We’re told that, before every journey, we should check our shock absorbers, our headlights, our wipers and that there is a thermos of hot coffee in the boot in case we break down on a moor. They even say we should clear all the frost from all the windows before setting off, but that’s stupid. As soon as I have made a hole big enough to see through, I’m off. It’s far too cold to stand around doing pre-flight checks when the most I’ll be doing on the way to work is 4mph.

Only this morning, Goodyear sent me a missive saying that in wet and possibly freezing conditions the only contact your car has with the road is four small patches, each no bigger than a postcard. So… what exactly are we to do about that, then? Well, it seems we must check our tyre pressures regularly because, as the thermometer falls, so does the pressure in our tyres. This increases the rolling resistance, meaning fewer miles to the gallon and curious handling anomalies.

Well, now, look. I’m very sorry, but I’m a busy man, and I really don’t have the time to check how much air is inside my tyres. If the steering goes all wobbly and the car starts to veer wildly, I’ll be aware of a problem but, until then, leave me alone.

Going to a garage is one of the most unpleasant experiences a human being will ever encounter. It’s so awful that, when my petrol gauge is down beyond the red, and I’ve just driven past a sign saying ‘Services 1m and 27m’, I will always, always, go for the gamble. And when I get there, I’ll gamble again.

I have driven past garages with the fuel needle bent around its bump stop. I have felt the first cough of doom and still kept right on because the station forecourt looked a bit dirty. This drives my wife insane with rage. Indeed, I’m on my final warning. I’ve been told that, if she climbs into my car once more to find the tank is full of nothing but air, she will kill me. And, to put that in perspective, an affair will only get me broken knees.

I hate filling up. And there is nothing in life that annoys me more than a slovenly petrol pump. Or one that cuts off every two seconds. Or an attendant who won’t reset the counter until you’ve been into the hut and called him a fat, gormless waste of the world’s resources.

You can imagine, then, that after I’ve put £50 of petrol in the tank, quite the last thing I want to do is buy a token for the air machine and grovel around in a sea of diesel getting brake residue all over my fingers. And why, when you drop a dust cap on the floor, does it evaporate? They do. They just disappear.

I wouldn’t mind, but it’s all so pointless. I remember reading a report recently which said that all garage air pressure gauges are out by as much as 20 per cent, which means you stand absolutely no chance of keeping pace with the law, leave alone microscopic fluctuations in barometric pressure.

Not that there are any nowadays. Goodyear paints this picture of winter as a looming asteroid, an extinction-level event heading our way, and that there’s diddly squat we can do to prevent impact some time in late November.

Well, look. I have not seen a single snowflake for four years and, even if we do get a light dusting, the radio will immediately fill with police messages warning us all to stay at home. Why do they do that? We pay £30 billion a year to Mr Prescott for our road network, and we expect him to provide, in return, a selection of gritting lorries and snowploughs. I mean, they can keep the roads open in Alaska and Lapland, so surely it isn’t beyond the wit of a nation that gave the world Brunel to clear a motorway in Kent once every five years.

The fact is that cars have helped to make the world nice and snuggly warm these days, which in turn has made the roads much safer. But if, by some miracle, you encounter some black ice, or perhaps a little sleet, don’t think, as your car slithers towards a ditch: ‘Oh, no. I wish I’d checked my tyres.’ Because it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. You’re in a two-ton car, and a bit of air pressure here and there is no match for the laws of gravity and momentum.

Three points and prime time TV

Why don’t you go catch a burglar? For 50 years or more it’s been the automatic, kneejerk reaction of any errant motorist who’s been pulled over by plod. It’s even become a music-hall joke, a ritual in the tired old plots of 8 p.m. sitcoms. But it’s true. Why don’t they go and catch burglars? I mean, the only reason we drive too quickly is because we want to get home and catch one before he deposits a large turd on our Bukhara rug.

CCTV has driven teenagers out of the city centre, so now they queue outside remote farmhouses waiting for their turn to defecate on an heirloom. And where are the police?

Well, they know you’re only after a crime number for insurance purposes, so they’re about 40 miles away, trimming their moustaches so they’ll look good on next week’s exciting edition of Police. Stop. Kill. Today, the police spend all of their resources on JetRangers and sophisticated infrared cameras so they can get action-packed footage of car-azy motorists. And the Crown Prosecution Service? That’s busy sorting out the video rights.

Small wonder, then, that people are beginning to take the law into their own hands. In France recently, a much-burgled home-owner left a radio on his kitchen table and a note that said: ‘This is not a radio. It is a bomb.’ He came home later to find a burglar spread evenly around his kitchen and was promptly arrested. And now it appears to have happened here with the news that a Norfolk farmer has been charged after two youths were shot in the garden of his house.

Friends say the poor man had been driven to despair by an endless stream of burglaries and that the police weren’t interested. Well, they wouldn’t be. It’s hard to see a marketing opportunity in painstaking house-to-house enquiries. It’s late-night BBC2 at best. Nah, let’s go get another speeder.

Certainly I’d shoot anyone who broke into my house. Then I’d bury them in the garden and carry on with life as though nothing had happened.

No, really, a friend and I once staked out our street in Notting Hill, saying that if we caught the youth who’d been breaking into our cars we’d chain him up in a shed and invite other victims of car crime round to spend some time with him. And we meant it. Of course, this has to be against the law. You can’t condone vigilantes in a civilized society. If you let home-owners shoot intruders willy-nilly, burglars will tool up to meet the threat. Then you’d arm the police, who’d shoot motorists for ratings, and it would all be like America. We might even end up with the wide-mouthed frog as president.

So what’s to be done? The police no longer feature. I know nowadays it says they’re ‘Fighting Crime. Slashing Fear. Filming Disorder’ on the side of their cars, but that’s just a slogan to inspire Bruce Willis action from the men. The reality is that in the countryside, one policeman has to cover more than 200 square miles – impossible when his superiors demand 35 motorists a night, DVD footage and format rights.

We can’t expect tougher sentences for the tiny minority that are caught, either, because the prisons are full of speeders and people who’ve shot burglars. And all the while, IslingTony is being lobbied by inner-city councillors who plead for leniency.

So the burglars who are daft enough make faces in front of CCTV cameras end up with 10 minutes of community service. Little deterrent for someone who’s being driven out of his mind by an all-consuming need for heroin.

There’s the nub of the problem. Eighty per cent of all crime is drug-related. No one breaks into your house because they need funds for music lessons. They break in because they need some smack ’n’ crack.

And I’m sorry, but we’ve got to give it to them. Legalizing drugs will bring the price down, and cheaper drugs will mean less crime. It is as simple as that. And to argue that we’ll all become junkies as a result is nonsense. You can buy drink, but we’re not all alcoholics.

The police have lost the war on crime because they’ve been diverted by the lure of fame and fortune on television. And we aren’t allowed to blow the little sods to kingdom come, so let’s see the root cause on sale in 24-hour filling stations. Alongside the cigarettes.

You could even tax them. This would surely generate enough to get the police out of their Volvos and into something a little more big-screen friendly. But until this happens, I’m afraid, there’s a better-than-evens chance that you’ll come home one night to find a burglar peeing into your grandfather clock. And all you’re allowed to do is offer him some buns.

Every small boy needs to dream of hot stuff

Dream all you like about one day owning a helicopter and a Bentley, but the sad fact is this: nearly four in every ten new cars sold in Britain come from Ford or Vauxhall. Ford is the market leader, and they may think this has something to do with a combination of good cars, a dealer on every corner and a bit of natty television advertising. Well, they’re wrong. Ford is ahead because of something that began 30 years ago…

One fine morning in June 1969, I set off for school dimly aware that my father would pick me up that night in his new car, a nothing-special Saluki Bronze Ford Cortina 1600 Super. Had he done so, I might never have become interested in cars. I might have become an astronaut. Or a homosexual. But he had a last-minute change of heart and swished up to the school gates in a 1600E, which had Rostyle wheels, extra fog lamps and a bank of gauges set into the wooden dashboard. Well, I was smitten. From that day to this, I’ve been a Ford man.

This means my first car was a Ford, and we have a Mondeo now. But elsewhere in the English-speaking world, it can mean so much more. In Australia, for instance, during the annual motor race at Bathurst, Ford and GM supporters have the sort of full-scale battles that would make British soccer hooliganism of the early 1980s seem restrained. Only once have they reached a peace, when a Nissan won and they all joined forces to jeer at its driver.

Then we have America, where you can buy T-shirts saying ‘I’d rather push a Ford than drive a Chevvy’. But then, I know a chap in Texas who says he would shoot anyone who came on to his premises in a vehicle that bore the blue oval. He hates Fords; says they’re made by communists and long-hairs.

I suspect the reason this kind of thing doesn’t happen here is that Vauxhall has been so catastrophically dreary for 30 years. Whereas Ford has always had a little something to tickle the ticklish bits of the nation’s nine-year-olds.

After the 1600E went west, they were quick out of the blocks with the RS2000, a hot Escort that neither handled nor went quite as well as legend suggested. But it looked good and had wrapround seats and a steering wheel the size of a shirt button. This car softened the blow of failure. ‘Oh, well, I’m a bank manager so I’ll never have a Bell Jet Ranger. But who cares, because if I can just close this deal I could have an RS2000. And that’s not so bad.’

In the 1980s we had the XR3, the RS1600i and latterly the RS Turbo. Even the Fiesta leapt on the bandwagon, sprouting a wholly unnecessary turbo to match the mood.

Vauxhall tried to keep up, with hot Astras and Novas, but their hopeless attempts were in the end blown away by, first of all, the Sierra Cosworth and then its four-wheel-drive Escort sister. Executive power for middle-management money made it a hit in the real world, while a spoiler the size of Devon made it a must-have for any nine-year-old’s bedroom wall.

Believe me. Anyone who was under 12 when Ford and Cosworth started making babies is a Ford man and always will be.

But since the Escort Cossie was removed from the scene by EU noise regulations, Ford has been strangely quiet. Oh, I know there’s a mildly tweaked Puma coming out this Christmas, but it’s only a chicken korma and, anyway, only 1000 are being made.

I’ve looked into the future and I see no rip-snorting, muscle-bound brute. They came up with a modular 6.0-litre V12 engine that was nice, but that’s been given to Aston Martin. They bought a Formula One team, but they’ve handed that over to Jaguar.

Where’s the next GT40? Where’s the turbo nutter bastard Focus? My three-year-old is entering the phase where his motoring future is about to be mapped out and there is nothing around to stamp a blue oval on his heart. If anything, he’s erring towards Luton. Vauxhall has revealed plans for a two-seater sports car, and he likes the look of it very much, especially the orange paint. Me, I’m more interested to know it will be built by Lotus and will share many components with the spectacular Elise.

It’ll be called the VX220 and is designed to be just as much fun as the Elise but with a little more comfort. At £23,000 or so, it could be the first car in 10 years that even gets close to Mazda’s MX5.

Ford would, of course, explain that they own Mazda, and that’s true. But what’s the point of buying up other car companies when the mother ship is left out in the cold. If it doesn’t offer up a chicken chilli jalfrezi with extra-hot sauce fairly soon, my boy’s going to end up in a Vectra. And that’s a big worry.

Footless and fancy-free? Then buy a Fiat Punto

Should I ever be banned from living in England, I’d go to France, partly because the houses are cheap, but mainly because you’re never more than four feet from an ashtray. Italy, sadly, is out of the running, partly because it has been colonized by Mr Blair and his cohorts and partly because the Italian notion of an emergency plumber is someone who can be there in less than seven weeks.

France works. Italy doesn’t. Explain, for instance, to an Italian hotel receptionist that all the lights have fused in your bedroom and she’ll say it’s time you were in bed anyway. Arrange to pick up a hire car in Milan and, when you get there, the man will look at you as if you’re mad. A car! From me? At the car-hire desk?

Then there’s the noise. In rural France, you are woken every morning by a hundred schoolchildren swarming past your bedroom on scooters, and this is annoying. Vespa, remember, means wasp. But they’re soon past. Whereas in rural Italy, the dawn chorus comes early and noisily, not from the birds but from the nation’s dogs, all of whom think they’re Pavarotti. Then, round about six, you get the two-stroke descant. In Italy you are never more than four feet from that bane of countryside living, a strimmer.

Italy is a nation of extremes: extreme beauty, mood and fashion, tarnished with extreme noise and disarray. That’s why you should always think twice about buying an Italian car.

Of course, I’ve got an Italian car, but then I am mad, and anyway I’m not talking about that sort of Italian car. I’m talking about the urban buzz bomb, the wheeled mule, the metal donkey, the covered wagon with a dashboard. The small Fiat.

Last time I looked, Fiat had a 60 per cent share of the Italian market, which tells us that Italians love them. Which means they are ideally suited for people who train their dogs to sing; people who were born to strim. And that’s not us. Take a look at the new Punto. It looks great, as chic as the changing room at a Milanese fashion house, and it handles with the sort of verve and aplomb Italian drivers demand.

When the plumber takes seven weeks to get to your burst pipe, the delay breaks down like this. Six weeks, six days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes sitting around drinking coffee. And one minute to drive his van the fourteen miles to your house. Italians like to drive quickly, and the Fiat responds to this challenge well.

It makes you lean a little further forward in your seat. You stretch the revs a little more between gear changes. You brake later, steer more vigorously. It makes your heart beat a little faster. So, yes, it has the gut-wrenching, come-back-for-more appeal of the country that makes it.

At £13,000 or thereabouts, the 1.8-litre HGT model I drove is also good value, compared, that is, with similar cars in Britain. Obviously, it is available in Belgium for 25p.

So you may be tempted to go over there and buy one. Well, yes, and in the showroom it’ll look good. You’ll like the lights, the seats, the dash, the cheekiness. And you’ll keep on liking it until you get to an oblique junction, where you find the rear pillars, so fine and fluted from the outside, mean you can’t see if anything’s coming. They should really provide a rabbit’s foot on the dashboard, or a sprig of heather. Something you can rub before closing your eyes and lunging out into the traffic flow.

And then we have the pedals, designed for someone whose feet have been amputated. You have the same problem with an Alfa 166 in that, when you go for the brake, you will also press the throttle and clutch at the same time.

And what about the gearbox? Well, go for second in a hurry and it’s like you’ve stuck a steel rod and a bag of gravel into your blender.

All things considered, then, I’d love to buy a Punto and drive around watching girls, but all the little day-to-day faults would leave me cross that I hadn’t bought a Fiesta.

Let me put it this way. If the Punto is San Gimignano, the Fiesta is Bolton. It is a department store, not a boutique. It is a supermarket, not a delicatessen. The Fiesta just does everything well and, if you accept the car is not a two-weeks-a-year holiday home but a device for moving around, it’s what you want. And if you don’t, I suggest you turn to Peugeot, because even the 206 is a better everyday bet than the new Punto. It can be Calais when it’s raining and you just want to go to work, but it can also be Paris chic and a hoot in the Alpes Maritimes. It has a huge ashtray, too, and – who knows? – it may even run on sewage.

To sum up, then. If you want a small car, buy a Fiesta. If you want a small car with style, buy a Peugeot and, if you have no feet, buy the Fiat.

Now my career has really started to slide

Audi are in all sorts of bother at the moment as they try desperately to fix a handling problem on the TT sports coupé. Two people are dead, and the newspapers are littered with stories from drivers whose £30,000 cars have head-butted beech trees.

Here’s the problem. You’re barrelling along when all of a sudden the road tightens unexpectedly. Worried, you take your foot off the throttle and brake, which causes the nose of the car to dip. This raises the rear, causing the back tyres to lose grip, and now you’re going sideways. This is called oversteer, and, in Ladland, the petrolheads love it more than life itself.

In motoring magazines every car is photographed going sideways, its driver dialling in lots of opposite lock to counter the problem. This is deemed to be fun. When you apply for a job on a car magazine it doesn’t matter if you can’t spell, or even if you have personal hygiene problems, just as long as you can take a ton of metal and noise and make it dance. If you can, you’re man. If you can’t, you’re gay.

This was a big worry in my early days because I simply couldn’t do it properly. I never had big enough balls to drive into a corner faster than was prudent; often, when presented with my puny efforts on film, art directors would pull my hair and call me Mandelson.

Eventually I mastered the art of making a car go slightly sideways for a thousandth of a second, just long enough to get it on film, then I’d undo my seatbelt and get in the back, where I’d lie, whimpering, until I coasted to a halt somewhere. But this didn’t work well on television. With a Top Gear camera pointed at me, I was expected to make the car slide and keep it sliding. I just couldn’t do it.

I will admit now, for the first time, that I used to take demonstrator cars to an airfield at night and practise. But it didn’t matter whether they were front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, four-wheel drive or even side-wheel drive: I’d always come home with nothing more than four bald tyres.

I read up on the theory, buried my nose in books about physics, and talked to racing drivers. But it was no good. The years rolled by in a cloud of wasted tyre smoke and pirouetting steel. By the time I left Top Gear I had summoned up enough courage to make the car slide, but then I’d run out of talent and it would always spin. Time and time again I needed a tow truck and a bandage for my ego.

But then, while filming the Aston Martin DB7 Vantage for my new video – called Head to Head and out now – it all came together. I turned into a corner doing about 110mph and lifted my foot off the throttle. As usual, the back started to swing wide and, as usual, I applied some opposite lock to the steering. But this time the car didn’t go into a spin, and I had all the time in the world to put my foot back on the accelerator and hold the slide. Finally, I learnt what it was like to ‘steer the car on the throttle’. And it was great.

At 39 I became a man, and to celebrate I got out of the Aston and showered it with big, sloppy kisses. I bought it flowers and am thinking of moving with it to a little house in Devon where we could rear geese.

Of course, the DB7 Vantage has all the right ingredients for stunt driving like this – fast steering and a colossal 6-litre V12 engine that drives the rear wheels – but since that glorious moment I have the confidence, and now I can make anything oversteer. Front-wheel-drive Golfs, no-wheel-drive Hyundai Accents. I bet I could even make my Aga go sideways. All you need is a 600-acre airfield.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s taken nearly 15 years and about 15,000 sets of tyres to reach the point where I could confidently handle an Audi TT. But the question is: could you? You know what it says in the Highway Code. You know you should steer into the skid. But could you be relied on to get it right, at 80mph, in a rainstorm, with a tractor coming the other way? Probably not.

Car makers need to think about this before they make those final tweaks to a new model’s suspension. It’s all very well providing oversteer for the road-test department of a car magazine, but when normal people break free of Mr Prescott’s traffic jam and put their feet down, you really have to offer completely fail-safe handling.

Few cars have it. The Golf GTi is one and the Alfa GTV is another and, er… that’s about it.

In the interests of balance, I should say that the Audi TT is by no means the most tail-happy car you can buy. You should try a Peugeot 306GTi. If you think you’re man enough.

The best £100,000 you’ll ever waste

If I’d designed the new Mercedes S-class, I’d have packed a lot of towels and headed for the beach. I’d have spent a while jet-skiing and barging in queues, safe in the knowledge that it would take the rest of the car industry years to catch up. But then I come from a country whose car industry is now restricted to a wooden sports car from Malvern and a plastic one from Blackpool. The Germans think differently. When they finished work on the new S-class they immediately handed it over to AMG, the in-house tuning division, and ordered them to make it better.

Where do you start? I drove the standard car six months ago and described it in this column as the best car in the world. So being ordered to ‘make it better’ would be like asking a plastic surgeon to make Kristin Scott Thomas prettier. First of all you’d ask how. Then you’d ask why.

Unless you were German, in which case you’d take the engine out and start work. First of all, it was increased from 5.0 to 5.5 litres, then the crankshaft was redesigned. They added forged aluminium pistons with oil injection jets to keep them cool. Then a twin stream intake system was fitted, along with a new intake manifold.

Every single thing under the bonnet was changed, and the results speak for themselves. The new car churns out 360bhp, making it precisely no miles an hour faster than the standard model. In a dash from 0 to 60, however, the gulf is obvious to anyone with a brace of laser beams and an atomic clock. The standard car does it in 6.5 seconds; the AMG derivative does it in 6 seconds dead. Oh, dear. All that work for half a second.

I’d have given up at this point and gone skiing, but, no, Hans took off his bad jacket, rolled his sleeves up even further and began on the styling. He developed all sorts of plastic add-ons, spoilers, aprons and skirts, but each one spoilt the purity of the original.

So the car he lent me this week came with none of it – just four big wheels that were just about acceptable and a brace of chromed exhaust pipes that looked ridiculous.

And what about the suspension? What wizardry has been woven here? What little tweaks? Well, they did a lot of head scratching and decided that the original couldn’t really be beaten, so, er, well, they did nothing. Just fitted some bigger brakes that reduce the stopping distance by about an inch, probably.

So there you are. The new AMG S-class Mercedes-Benz: £25,000 more than the standard car, and for that you get absolutely nothing. Not even peace of mind that it’ll still be there in the morning.

No, really. It comes with what’s called keyless entry. You keep a credit card-sized transmitter in your wallet so the car can sense when you’re getting near. It then opens the doors, allowing you to slide in and start the engine by touching the gear lever. But when you get out again and walk away, how do you know if the doors have locked? Every time I walked back to check, they were open, but that’s because the transmitter was in my wallet. So I have no idea whether the system works or not.

I have no idea either how much this car would be worth after a year. Standard S-classes will always find a home with one of the endless upmarket minicab firms who see it as a short cut to all the plum jobs and big tippers. But I can’t see Mr Patel going for a model with oil injection jets.

All in all, then, the new car is daft. You pay £100,000 now and, in a year, you’ll get £1 back. If you’re lucky.

That said, however, the world is a daft place. You could provide Michael Winner with hot and cold running flunkies and he’d still complain that the sun was in his eyes. And I know plenty of people who do a £30 million deal and think, ‘Right. Where’s the next 30 mill. coming from?’

For some people, enough is never enough. You could put them in the first-class compartment of a 747 and they’d spend the entire journey fidgeting because they weren’t far enough forward. They wouldn’t even be happy with a deckchair nailed to the nose cone unless it came with an extending arm that enabled them to fly along 40 feet in front of the plane itself.

These are the guys at whom the AMG S-class is aimed, and they will lap it up. It’s no better than the standard car, but it’s no worse. And it is a lot more expensive, which is what matters most of all.

Put an imaginary billion in the bank and you’d have a car like this. I would. And if next year they came out with a special Myrrh edition with panda bear ear upholstery, gold pedals and a Jacuzzi, I’d have one of those too.

In the real world, the normal S-class is still the best car in the world, but on planet Plutocrat the AMG is even better.

Styled by Morphy Richards

It’s happened again. Just months after Mercedes was forced to recall all its A-class hatchbacks because they had a worrying habit of falling over, Audi has had to pull the TT. It seems that if you lift or brake while cornering at high speed, the back will snap into violent oversteer and you will slam into the crash barriers. Already, in Germany, two people have been killed, and Audi has had to act fast.

Remember, Audi was pretty well wiped out in America 10 years ago by rumours that their cars suffered from ‘unintended acceleration’. Dim-witted Yanks said that even if they had their foot on the brake, the car kept on accelerating at full speed until it slammed into a child/pensioner/dog.

I must confess that I felt rather sorry for Audi on that one. It was, let’s face it, the fault of America’s education system and a proliferation of lawyers rather than an engineering problem over in Ingolstadt. A car simply cannot accelerate unless its driver hits the wrong pedal – easily done in a land where the smart bombs can’t even be guaranteed to hit the right country.

And now I feel sorry for them all over again. Quite apart from the major redesign, they’re having to pay a small fortune to fit the 40,000 examples they’ve already sold with different stabilizers, altered dampers, modified wishbones and a new rear spoiler. They’ve got two deaths on their hands, and they’re looking down the barrel of a serious public relations disaster.

The trouble is, the TT never really knew what it was. If it had been billed as just a motorized jacket, a poseur’s pouch with no delusions of racetrack glory, they could have fitted wooden suspension and all would’ve been well. But it was, after all, going to carry the Quattro badge, and it was going to have a 225bhp engine, so it needed to be sporty as well. And that meant it had to have some lift-off oversteer.

In motoring magazine land, we’ll tolerate front- and four-wheel-drive cars only if they give us this handling quirk in spades. Lift-off oversteer is more vital than customers. If we can’t get a car to go sideways while careering past a photographer, it is dismissed as a hopeless dud. Understeer is for wimps.

It’s a saloon-car thing. It’s pants. And the car makers know this, so they dial it into their sports cars to keep us happy. Oh, sure, they know full well that in the wrong hands, in the wrong weather and on the wrong road it can be fatal, but they want good reviews…

The thing is, though, that the Audi was by no means the worst offender. If you want real lift-off oversteer, try a Peugeot 306 for size. That thing behaves like a hungry puppy, wagging its tail at the slightest provocation. And while this is a huge hoot on an airfield, it can be downright scary in the wet.

Just think. You’re barrelling along, snicking through the gears, feeling the tyres scrabbling for grip when, all of a sudden, while going round a corner, you find a tractor coming the other way. So, in a panic, you lift off. And whoa, now you have to miss the tractor while controlling a lurid tail slide.

Only recently I was called old and fat for saying I’d rather have a Golf GTi, which always ploughs straight on, than a 306. But it was for this very reason. On a racetrack, the 306 kicks the Golf’s arse, but in the real world, I’m telling you, it’s the other way round.

I congratulate VW for ignoring the pleas of us motoring journalists. And Alfa Romeo too. Back in the summer, I went to an airfield with a GTV and tried everything in my limited repertoire to make it misbehave, but it wouldn’t. So, if you’re faced with an emergency, there’s one less thing to worry about.

And what about the Focus? Car of the Year. Best-selling car in Britain. Darling of the motoring press corps. And why? Because when you lift off in a bend, the tail swings out.

Audi was only trying to get some of this glory with the TT, and that is probably why the company was angry with Tiff and me when we came back from the launch and said it was a dog. We said there wasn’t enough feel and that the oversteer, when it came, was rather cynical; a bit of icing to disguise the fact that the cake itself was a bit stodgy. Autocar, of course, raved, saying the handling was in fact superb. Just like they did with the Mercedes A-class.

And Audi pointed this out to the two TG boys who wouldn’t toe the line. Everyone else likes it, they said. We’ve had rave reviews in Germany, they said. And now they are admitting that the car’s handling ‘in certain circumstances’ has been criticized. I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.

But I still feel sorry for them, and that’s why I have spent the last few minutes working on a solution. Cars that oversteer need to be ugly, and that way people who want a car to pose around the harbour bar are not going to be caught out when the damned thing starts doing the waltz at 150mph. Enthusiasts are forever saying they don’t care what a car looks like, so fine. Get someone from Morphy Richards to come up with some poseur-repelling styling and all will be well.

The terrifying thrill of driving with dinosaurs

This week I was going to tell you all about the new Rover 25, but after my less-than-flattering review of its bigger brother recently Rover says that all their press demonstrators are booked out until February. And no more reservations are being taken. Roughly translated, this means: ‘Get lost, sunshine.’ Undaunted, I asked if I could perhaps borrow one of the new Land Rover Defenders. Finished in original Atlantic green and equipped with snazzy alloy wheels, I’m seeing quite a few in south-west London and, to be honest, they look rather good. But guess what? Rover has only one demonstrator, and it’s booked out for ever.

I’ve been down this road before. Toyota once banned me from driving its cars, and Vauxhall made life difficult after the Vectra episode, but there are other ways of getting test drives and, in time, I’ll explore them. So be afraid, Rover. Be very afraid.

For now, though, let’s talk about the Lamborghini Diablo, which Autocar says is ‘the last genuine supercar on sale’. It’s a thought-provoking argument that made me think about the definition of a supercar. I’ve always taken it to mean a car where practicality and cost worries are crushed in the quest for speed and style. And, on that basis, lots of cars fit the bill, but I sort of know what they mean about the Diablo. You can’t drive around in this heavyweight brute with its rippling abs if you have a concave chest and spectacles. No, I mean it. If you have limbs like pipe cleaners, you will not have the strength to push the clutch pedal down and, even if you could, you’d think the gearbox had jammed every time you tried to move the lever.

This is bad enough, but it must also be pointed out that you can’t drive the Diablo if you have a neck like a birthday cake and arms like ship’s pistons. Oh, sure, you might be strong enough, but you’ll be too big to fit in the cockpit.

I know only two people who have bought a Diablo, and one is Rod Stewart, so, really, it’s pretty pointless talking about the new model. But since there’s no Rover, I shall plough on regardless.

It’s called the GT, and it is able to whisk small, strong people from 0 to 100mph in under nine seconds. Scientists call this level of acceleration ‘bleeding scary’. To achieve this, Lamborghini’s engineers – and they are the maddest bunch of people I’ve ever met – lifted a few quid from their new owners at Volkswagen and threw the old Diablo’s body away. They replaced it with one that looks exactly the same but is made from ultra-light carbon fibre. This added about £100 million to the cost of making the car but saved 70 kilogrammes.

Then they set to work on the V12 engine, which was taken up from 5.7 litres to 6.0 litres and equipped with all sorts of titanium wizardry so that it now produces perfect silence and geraniums at town-centre speeds but a colossal, thunderous, ear-splitting, tree-felling 570bhp further up the rev range.

I could tell you about the top speed, but I have no idea what it is and no intention of finding out. I do know that the official fuel consumption figures say that, around town, the Diablo GT will return seven miles to the gallon.

It won’t. Cars never match the official figures in real life. So actually, it will probably return no more than 4mpg on a busy, stop-start Friday night. And that is so bad it’s quite funny.

But then this is the point of the Lambo. The whole car is so bad it’s hysterical. The air-conditioning works with the punch of an asthmatic blowing at you through a straw. The rear visibility is almost completely nonexistent and, while I see the new model has a backwards-looking video camera and a screen on the dash, you’ll still have to say a few Hail Marys before pulling out of an oblique junction. There are no gadgets and gizmos either. Just an angry snarl and a big right fist.

And yet. When you put your foot down hard and that engine girds its loins for a full-frontal assault on the horizon, there is an ‘Oh, my God’ moment that no other car can quite match.

I once drove a Diablo at 186mph, not because I wanted to, but because I lost the ability to move my feet. Ferraris have lost this raw terror factor in recent years, and Porsches never really had it. The only other car I know that can do this bowel-loosening, supersonic baritone thing is the Aston Vantage, and that’s nearing the end of its life.

So Autocar may have a point. It seems the chill wind of environmentalism has created an ice age in which dinosaurs like the Diablo find it hard to thrive. Only six of the new GTs are being imported to Britain, and I suggest that, if you want a last-chance power drive, you give it a whirl.

Perfect camouflage for Birmingham by night

Eating out in Birmingham was always one of life’s more disappointing experiences. First, you had to find Birmingham, which is located above a series of tunnels, and then you had to find some food. Usually, this meant parking in a multistorey and then being beaten up a lot. Eventually, you’d have your wallet nicked, so, bleeding and hungry, you’d go back to the multistorey to find your car had been stolen as well.

When the ambulance finally took you home, six weeks later, you’d had time to ruminate on your night out, and most people usually reckoned that going into Birmingham city centre after dark was a ‘bad thing’ and that they wouldn’t be going again.

To entice them back, a number of restaurants are now opening. You must still zigzag from your car to the front door, making use of whatever cover you can find, and your car still won’t be there when you come out, but at least you won’t go home hungry.

Le Petit Blanc opened recently, and in the next few months there will be Bank and Fish. But my attention was drawn this week to the launch of a new ‘independent’ called the Directory that offers food which is described as eclectic modern British. At the bar this includes a club sandwich, Cajun chicken or a chargrilled vegetable sandwich that could be modern British were it not for the addition of pesto and crème fraîche.

Therein lies my point. Modern British is entirely eclectic, a selection of ingredients that are only British insofar as they were nailed together here before being served. I even found out this week that the chip was invented in Belgium and that fish in batter was introduced to us by an Italian.

And so it goes with the eclectically British Nissan Primera. To get round EU import restrictions, it was assembled in Tyne and Wear, but the parts came from Japan. Oh, sure, Nissan will argue that a huge percentage of the car’s total value was British, but this included the lavatory paper in the gents and the flowers given to customers on delivery. The gearbox and engine were as Japanese as sushi.

I used to hate this notion: that you could employ half a dozen former dockers to fit a car’s windscreen wipers and it would suddenly become all John Bullish and strut around shouting ‘two world wars and one world cup’ every time it saw a BMW. But I note that the new Primera is not only being built in Britain. It was designed here, too, and it isn’t even being sold in Japan. Nissan has woken up to the fact that Ford and Vauxhall are perceived to be European because the cars they make here are designed here and, generally speaking, are not sold in America.

So the new Primera: what’s it like? Well, I’ve just spent a week with one and, to be honest, it’s like a Japanese saloon car. It looks like a Japanese saloon car. It drives like a Japanese saloon car. And this is not a criticism. There’s nothing wrong with Japanese saloon cars providing they don’t pretend to be Moroccan or Portuguese. This new car is European. It just doesn’t feel it, and that’s not the same thing at all.

Like the old model, the new one is almost wilfully boring to behold. They’ve fitted a new nose, but it looks like a tongue, and round at the back it looks like… do you know, I can’t remember. And I can’t picture the side either – just that tongue at the front.

Inside, it’s grey. It was probably black or brown, but I remember it as grey. As far as space is concerned, it is fine. I could sit behind myself, if you see what I mean, and there were lots of little nooks into which the sales rep could put his electric razor and gum.

But you know, sitting there in the showroom, the new Primera is like the old Primera. Just another car. Just another way of spending £15,000 on four doors and a seat. To see why this car is so good, you need to take it for a drive.

Now, I know I had the 2-litre super-sport ripsnorter, so of course it was good. But the chassis on this new car is little changed from the chassis on the old, so even the lowly models will have handling way above their station. This is perhaps the only repmobile out there that is genuinely good fun to drive.

I must say the five-speed gearbox was a bit vague, but you could always opt for the hyperdrive auto with six-speed sequential override. I have no idea what this is, but it sounds fab. As does the engine. At high revs it makes an angry, growly noise which urges you to explore that handling prowess.

Indeed, this is exactly the sort of car you should use if you wish to eat in one of Birmingham’s new restaurants. It’s big enough to take all your friends, and good fun on the way. But best of all it looks so terribly dreary that nobody will nick it.

Another good reason to keep out of London

The first time I drove a Porsche Boxster, everything was just so. I was on my way to Scarborough to film it, with nine of its closest drop-head rivals, and I was crossing the Yorkshire wolds, which play host to some of the best driving roads in Britain. And, boy, was I having fun, slithering round the corners, enjoying the metallic rasp of that 2.5-litre engine as it passed 5000rpm and generally doing the sort of speeds that aren’t allowed.

And then I noticed a pair of headlights in my rear-view mirror, a way off to start with but getting closer. Eventually, they were right on my tail and, obviously, I reckoned this was one of the others on its way to Scarborough – the BMW Z3, perhaps, or the fearsome TVR Chimera.

But no. When it finally overtook, it was a 1.3-litre Vauxhall Nova. And from that moment I’ve always rather hated Porsche’s attempt at a mass-market sports car.

I suspect that, when the original idea came along to do a small, two-seater convertible, the Stuttgart marketing boys in their tartan jackets were well aware that such a car might pinch sales from the 911. So, to create a gulf, they insisted that the Boxster should be de-tuned to the point where its engine would struggle to mix cement.

And quite apart from the fact that it couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom, it was far too expensive. Why pay more than £30,000 for a two-seater car when, for half that, you could have a Mazda MX5, a car that manages to have front and rear ends that are distinctly different? You could drive a Boxster backwards and nobody would be any the wiser.

Given the choice of any two-seater sports car, I’ve always put the Boxster in about ninth place, just ahead of the three-wheeler Morgan but behind pretty well everything else. Even the dreadful BMW Z3.

However, Porsche’s engineers must have been aware that their baby was out there being minced by Novas, so they walked into the marketing department, taped everyone to their chairs and set about righting some wrongs. Thus, there’s now a 2.7-litre engine in place of the 2.5 and an S-version that costs £42,000. And at that price it had better be unbloody-friggingbelievably good.

Let’s start with space. There’s plenty, if you’re a suitcase. In fact, there’s a choice, if you’re a suitcase. You can go either in the back, behind the engine, or in the front with the spare wheel. If you’re the driver, things are not so good. Obviously, there’s plenty of headroom, if the roof is down, but if you are cursed with a brace of legs I’m afraid you’ve had it. They simply won’t go under the wheel, which is like the London Eye, only bigger.

My first instinct, on climbing into the new Boxster S, was to climb right back out and use the Jag, but in the name of research I persevered. And now, a week later, I’m glad because, truly, the car has been transformed.

Sure, it still looks like something out of Dr Dolittle, and the engine sounds like it came out of a Hoover, but there is fun to be had here. It is what the old Boxster wasn’t. A sports car that’s capable of outrunning a Vauxhall hatchback. And this is important.

Whereas the original car was fine at dinner parties, where you could walk into the room brandishing a Porsche key-ring, this new one can cut it out in the real world. Up here in the Cotswolds, or down here if you’re Scottish, there’s a meatiness to the power delivery and an unusual crispness to requests from the helm. Yet none of the old car’s rigidity or comfort over bad road surfaces appears to have been lost. This means that, on the motorway, it doesn’t interfere with the job in hand: thinking up new nicknames for Mr Prescott, mostly. I guess since he’s now in charge of second homes and building in the south-east, we’ll have to call him Two Houses.

And before you know it you’re within the M25 and ready for the cut and thrust of London, where it goes all wrong. Because it looks the same as the old car, nobody knows you’ve bought a serious flying machine and, as a result, everyone gobs at you.

Really. In a BMW, people won’t let you out of side turnings, and rightly so, but in a Porsche, people deliberately get in your way and, if you ask them, politely, if you could squeeze by, most indulge in the most fabulous hawking before letting fly with a docker’s oyster the size of a cabbage. If this is something you find undesirable, then don’t buy a Porsche.

Or if you must, make it the S and stick to the countryside. Out here, you’ll be going too quickly for anyone to realize what you were in. And you’ll be having far too much fun to care, even if they do.

My favourite cars

With the possible exception of the Vauxhall Vectra, every single new car that comes along is better, faster, safer and more reliable than the model it replaces. So, on that basis, the best car ever made must be in production right now.

Obviously, it’s something compact and fuel-efficient, like the Volkswagen Lupo. And yet somehow the Lupo misses the point completely. It’s a tool, a device, a white good that happens to be blue or yellow. It is bought with the head, rather than the ill-gotten gains of some rash moment when you stood bolt upright and said: ‘I have just got to have one of those.’

If cars were like Black and Decker workbenches, people wouldn’t talk about them in the pub, drool over them at motor shows, yearn to own them so much that it actually starts to hurt. And that’s why the Lupo, excellent though it may be in the Co-op car park, actually comes pretty close to the bottom whenever I’m asked to name the three best cars ever made.

Number one on that list is the Ferrari 355, and I really don’t think I can be bothered to explain why. Not again. So let me put it this way. Until quite recently I didn’t actually own a car. There seemed little point when, every Monday morning, a raft of new models would be delivered to my door, fully fuelled, insured and ready to go. Obviously, I enjoyed driving them, but not once did I ever think of actually buying one. Some were good, but none was ever that good.

Until one day I climbed into a 355 and, within an hour or so, I knew my standard of living was about to fall dramatically. I bought one a month later and, really, that says it all. Actions, you know, speak so much louder than words.

Not that you can hear either in my next choice, the Aston Martin Vantage.

Now I know there’s a new DB7 Vantage, and I know that, dynamically speaking, it eats the big old bruiser, bones and all, for breakfast. It’s prettier, easier to handle, nicer to drive, more reliable, and all those other things that just don’t matter.

I’d love to own a DB7, but I fear I’d spend my entire time beating the steering wheel in a silent rage, angry that I didn’t buy the real thing. The most powerful car on the market. Its big brother. The old V8.

Aston likes to say the DB7 Vantage is made by hand, but in reality the 6.0-litre V12 engine comes in a box from Ford – well, Cosworth to be precise, but let’s not split hairs. My point is that the 5.4-litre V8 that goes in the old car is beaten into shape on site by men in brown store coats.

And there’s more. The old engine delivers 600bhp, which might sound like overkill, but remember the car into which it’s fitted weighs more than two tons. That’s really why I like it so much: it’s all so excessive, bigger than it should be, heavier, faster, more brutal. You just know that, if it were a person, it would have gout.

Choosing a third car was hard. Every fibre in my body said it should be the new BMW M5, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. I went back to the reference books, kicked some twigs round the garden and racked my brains for something less… less German.

The car I’ve come up with is a Datsun. Well, actually, it’s a Nissan, which is nearly as bad, but then it’s also a Skyline GT-R, and that’s not bad at all. What I love about this car is that it’s so completely Japanese. It’s as though the designers just gave up and said: ‘Look, we’ve tried for 50 years now to copy European style, and we’re hopeless.’ So the roof is there simply to keep the rain out, the doors exist only to facilitate entry, and the bonnet is a device for providing access to the engine. This car has absolutely no style at all. And it’s even worse on the inside, where you’re treated to acres of grey interspersed with lots of shiny black. Horrid is too small a word.

However, what the Japanese can do is technology. So the Skyline wades into battle sporting every gizmo known to man. It has four-wheel steering, variable four-wheel drive, a g-meter, ceramic turbos, the lot.

And it all works. I spoke last week to a chap whose last Skyline did 160,000 miles before it blew up. And that was only because he drove all the way from London to Val d’Isère with no oil in the engine.

In the real world the Skyline is faster than an Aston Vantage and a match for the 355. Mainly because the Nissan’s arsenal of driver aids allows you to take diabolical liberties and get away with them. Seriously, you can turn this car into a corner at a preposterous speed, then alarm your passengers by undoing your seatbelt and getting in the back, safe in the knowledge that the unseen silicon will save the day.

Some say that Subaru’s Impreza and Mitsubishi’s Evo VI can match the Skyline for less than half the price, but then there are those who say marzipan is a foodstuff and that anchovies make an ideal topping for your pizza. They’re wrong. As a driver’s car, the Nissan is about as good as it gets.

And would I buy one? No. Not a chance.

Need a winter sun break? Buy a Bora

All is not as it seems. In this month’s edition of the Geneva airport in-house magazine, they talk of a city where the people ‘add a friendly note to the litany of pretty valleys, castles, cathedrals, abbeys and, of course, the old traditional pubs. A region of unforgettable splendour.’

Would you like to guess what they’re talking about? Nope, you’re quite wrong. In fact, they’re describing Birmingham, which to my knowledge has no pretty valleys, no castles, no abbeys and no unforgettable splendour. Just a lot of cars on bricks.

And this brings me to the television advertisement for the Volkswagen Bora. ‘Any excuse’ is what it says, and to hammer the point home we see a Dutch architect driving all the way back to an Alpine research institute because he’s forgotten his pen.

Well, when I was faced with a trip to Blackpool last weekend, I did indeed choose to use a Bora, rather than any of the other cars lying around in my drive. And why? Because of the new V5 engine? The blue dash or the discreet styling? Because it would offer unflappable reliability and silent running? No, not really. I used it because it was the only car out there that had a full tank of petrol.

And then there was the business of coming home. I was faced with a simple choice. Take the car or take up the offer of a lift in a helicopter. Ooh, that’s a hard one. I’ll have to ask the audience.

Obviously, I should have said: ‘Look, I know I’m tired after marching round all day with a cannon on my back and a ton of lead shot in each pocket, but what I want now is four hours on the M6. I don’t want to fly over Birmingham’s pretty valleys and unforgettable splendour. I want to see it all from ground zero. I’m going home in my Bora.’

But, strangely, I was more tempted by the notion of getting home in 50 minutes and leapt into the Squirrel as though it was Saigon in 1975 and Charlie was swarming through the embassy gates. I even thought about filling the seatbelt fastening with Superglue in case someone tried to drag me out again.

So off we went at 113mph in a straight line from Clitheroe to my garden, where we’d touch down in a furious flurry of spinning blades and strobing lamps. My children are going to love this, I thought. Nearly as much as I will.

But with just 13 minutes left to run, snow began to fall, the pilot dived for the deck and dropped me on an industrial estate in Banbury. Naturally, I carry the phone numbers of all Banbury’s cab companies in my head. And take it from me: absolutely nobody laughs at you as you tramp around a provincial town on a Saturday evening dressed in tweed plus-fours.

Then we have the children. Be assured that they weren’t the slightest bit disappointed that Daddy didn’t drop into the garden from a helicopter but came up the drive instead in a Ford Mondeo with a Mr Whippy aerial.

I’m afraid that while helicopters may be man’s greatest achievement thus far, they have one big drawback. If the weather goes wrong, you end up miles from home, on an industrial estate, trying to pacify the guard dogs with the pheasants you’ve shot.

The Bora, on the other hand, can cope with any weather you care to throw at it, even the British winter sun that can’t really be arsed to haul itself more than six inches above the horizon. You know what I’m talking about here. It doesn’t matter if your car has sun visors the size of barn doors, if they swivel or if they come with illuminated mirrors on the back, the sun will always be in that tiny gap just above the rear-view mirror.

I bet that’s what got Q. Over the years he’s come up with ejector seats and machine guns in the sidelights, but I bet he was finally and tragically nailed because he never thought to fit his own car with a central sun visor.

The Bora’s got one; a bit of plastic six inches wide and an inch deep which, all on its own, justifies the £19,000 price tag. It means you can see where you’re going but, unfortunately, you will not necessarily know where you are.

To make the satellite navigation work, you need to slot a CD-ROM into the CD player and, if you want to listen to ‘The Best of the Pretenders’, you must take it out again. This means you could end up on an industrial estate in Banbury or, worse, one of Birmingham’s pretty valleys.

So what of the car itself? Well, bearing in mind that I need to say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, there’s only enough space left to say that all is not as it seems. This is not, as we’ve been told, a driver’s car for the thirty-something architect with a lost pen. It’s a Golf with a boot, and claims to the contrary are nothing more than 15 feet of warm wind.

Driving fast on borrowed time

Satellite navigation will soon become a standard feature in all new cars, and some of you may be very happy with that. Me? Well, I’m not so sure.

Here’s why. Your car will be receiving information from satellites, so how long will it be before it starts to receive instructions? How long before it’s restrained from doing more than 70 on a motorway or 40 in the suburbs?

You might think that this is all some kind of pie-in-the-sky dream that could become available, one day, perhaps some time in the new millennium. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it squeak into reality before this one is over, 13 months from now.

The impact would be colossal. Think. If you were suddenly unable to break speed limits, there would be absolutely no point, at all, in buying a car with a large engine. And please don’t talk to me about track days or big torque making for relaxed driving, because that’s nonsense. If you could never go faster than 70, you wouldn’t even think about a 1.6, leave alone a supercharged 12. You’d buy a bloody Yaris.

No, worse; you’d buy a hybrid, a half-petrol/half-battery-powered obscenity with smooth rear wheel arches and an electronic Prescott under the rear parcel shelf, charging you £4000 for moving and £4000 every time you stop.

That’s coming, too, you know. It doesn’t matter how many times the RAC says motorists are up in arms, and it certainly doesn’t matter how many pages I manage to fill with pro-car news, Phoney Tony has a 170-seat majority, so he can do whatever he damned well wants. And what he wants is to hang you up and bleed you dry.

He wants empty streets for his new baby to play in, and to get them he’s going to impose legislation that’ll make the tax disc of today seem about as costly as a penny chew. The technology already exists. Each car will be fitted with a black box, and every time you drive on to a motorway or into a town centre, your credit card will be debited.

There will be automatic debits for lawbreakers too. Obviously, you won’t be able to speed, but anyone who jumps a red light will have £50 deducted from their pay at source. We already have this for absentee fathers, and forget the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty. You’re a motorist, and that makes you as guilty as hell.

A few classic car magazines will survive, but Top Gear will be an early casualty. Along with all the lads’ mags. These promote a lifestyle not in accord with the teachings of the Blair Witch Project and, bit by bit, their editors will be made to see the error of their ways.

This is already happening. A government think-tank, made up of no-hoper housewives in ill-fitting trouser suits, decided this month that the time has come to nail some sense into motoring programmes that promote speed. Pretty soon now, James Bond will be on the sparkling mineral water. And she’ll not be allowed a car, either.

You probably think that if this were to come to pass, there would be riots in the streets and burning effigies of Prescott lighting the night sky. But look what’s happened already. They’ve put speed mountains on every back street in the land and no one has done a thing about it. And every time they slide a bus lane down an already congested street, there’s a chorus of silence.

They do nothing to bring down car prices, which has only managed to inflame the Consumers’ Association – a body with as many teeth as the Padstow Tufty Club. Performance motoring is doomed, and we’re all remaining silent.

This is because we don’t have a single leg to stand on. They need only to wheel out the bereaved parents of a four-year-old girl who’s been killed by someone doing 50 in a 30, and there’s not a damned thing you can say. Not a thing. You may say that we’ll behave in built-up areas if they leave us alone on derestricted normal roads, but this time, they wheel out the kids of a man who was killed when two nutcases in a brace of 911s ran out of talent at a critical moment. And again, you’re stumped.

They have a way of dealing with us, even now. When we turn up in a bespoilered GTR or Evo VI, they smile the smile of someone who has the moral high ground and one day will win.

This is a promise. In 15 years you won’t be able to buy a performance car in Britain. Ferrari will survive, making art forms for people’s garages, but the days of fire-spitting Subarus and hot Pugs are numbered. Mr Blair is going to win the next election and, with or without European help, he’ll make fast driving about as acceptable as rape.

And there is nothing you or I can do to stop it, so I suggest that very early tomorrow morning you head for the Buttertubs Pass in Yorkshire. Drive it hard and fast, concentrating until your back and armpits are flowing like Niagara. Scare yourself, because that thrill, that sense of being over the edge, that moment when you’ve never felt so alive: soon, it will be a thing of the past.

Welcome to the world of Johnny Cabs. No need to fasten your seatbelts. We’ll never be going fast enough.

I’ve seen the future and it looks a mess

Let me guess. This morning, you did not get dressed in a Bacofoil suit, you did not eat a pill for breakfast and you did not use a robot dog with aerials coming out of its ears to fetch the papers. I’m sure you were given a gadget for Christmas but, let’s be honest, it was a lava lamp, and that’s about as now as Slade.

I think it’s fair to say that pretty well every single prediction about life in the year 2000 was wrong. We weren’t hit by a giant meteorite on New Year’s Eve. There was no second coming in Bethlehem, and the only millennium bug out there is the one that’s making your wife’s nose run.

But one thing did change. Over the Christmas holidays, a new type of car crept on to the market and, at a stroke, changed things for ever. Oh, sure, it still uses a series of small explosions to move about, rather than dylithium crystals, but it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Rarely do I lament the absence of a picture with this column, but today I could really do with one because using old-fashioned words to describe the new Fiat Multipla seems almost philistine. We should be tele-pathizing.

The whole back end is square and slopes inwards, like the rear window on a Ford Anglia. The roof is perforated by two sunshine roofs and has a dip in the middle so that, after a rainstorm, you have a lake above your head.

Then there’s the front, and that’s just insane. It’s as though Fiat used two designers. One made a bus, the top half of which has been lowered on to the bottom half of the other’s low-slung sports car. Aesthetically, it’s a shambles, a jumble of shapes and angles that have no place in the same country, leave alone the same car. It is roast beef and gooseberry fool, served up in a bowl that’s part sherry schooner, part fish.

I could tell you that the Multipla is now the car in St-Tropez, but it won’t make any difference. The first time you see one, your jaw muscles will turn to uncontrollable mush. ‘Why,’ you will wail, ‘does it have eyes in its forehead? And why does it have a duck pond on the roof?’

You’ll be sucked in for a closer look and then you will be converted because, inside, there are six seats: three in the front and three in the back, each of which does the triple salchow at the touch of a button or the tug of a lever.

So what we have here is a car that’s a bit shorter than a hatchback but, because it’s wider, can take six people and still leave room for a boot. So who cares if it looks strange?

And we haven’t got to the dashboard yet. Obviously, it’s carpeted, but, less obviously, all the instruments are in the middle except the satellite navigation screen, which slides out of its box right behind the wheel. This is logical. Who cares how many revs you’re doing or what track is on the CD? You want a talking road map in your line of sight because you’re in Birmingham and you want to get out.

But people carriers tend to be expensive and thus the preserve of only the more affluent prime ministers. A bottom-of-the-range Ford Galaxy, for instance, costs £18,000; the Renault Espace is even more. This new Fiat, however, is yours for just £13,000.

And that means it appeals on all sorts of levels. On the one hand it’s an inexpensive, practical car that will suit the family man in a cardigan. On the other, it’s very new Labour. Very Guggenheim. With its truly innovative design, it would fit right in at the Groucho. But it is also ideal for someone who wants to stand out from the crowd and no longer wishes to walk round in a lime-green knitted suit. It even works as a minicab.

You could use it on the moon or to fetch the papers. I dare say you might even be able to eat it as a sort of twenty-first-century food substitute.

And I think we’ll be seeing more of its type in the years to come. You see, the days when cars broke down or got punctures are gone, so car companies can now begin to concentrate on being clever rather than worrying about reliability and safety. I mean, the Multipla is available with either a petrol engine or, if you spend more, a diezzzel. Both can get from 0 to 60 and would exceed that on the motorway. Both use some fuel, make a bit of noise and go round corners.

Really, I have no idea what it’s like to drive because, while I was there, in the driver’s seat, pressing the pedals and things, I wasn’t really driving. There was no wrestling with the wheel, no leather helmet, no need for supersonic derring-do.

It was a car, like any other, and yet it just wasn’t – and that’s why, without any question, it’s the best new model we’ve seen for a long, long while. It crept into the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth, but it’s the only car out there that really belongs in the twenty-first.

Nice motor; shame it can’t turn corners

When a new car is launched to the motoring press, it is a lavish affair. Hundreds of hacks in Rohan trousers and Christmas jumpers are shepherded into the front of an aeroplane and flown to some exotic hotel, where they spend an evening eating artichokes with butter knives and wrestling with those snail-vice things that have no name. The next day they climb into the new car and drive on a predetermined route back to the airport. Simple, but a complete waste of time.

You see, in order to discover what the car is like, all you need do is ask the manufacturer to fax a copy of that predetermined route. They choose it specifically to suit the car they’re launching. So, for instance, if it is made up entirely of twisting mountain roads, the car is obviously noisy on the motorway. Or, if it is short, there’s a strong likelihood the car is uncomfortable over a long distance.

When Saab launched the 9-5 Aero, journalists were flown to southern Germany and asked to drive 150 kilometres up a motorway and 150 kilometres back. And what can we deduce from this? Easy. The Saab 9-5 Aero doesn’t like corners. More than that, actually: it hates them. I’ve just spent the Christmas break driving the saloon and the estate, and I’m duty bound to tell you something. In the same way that you would not call a member of the Russian Mafia a big girl’s blouse, you should not say to a Saab salesman: ‘Yes, I’ll take it.’ The results will be the same. Great discomfort, followed by lots of bleeding.

It’s not the torque steer, the desperate writhing of the wheel under harsh acceleration, and nor is it the astonishing lack of grip. No, it’s a combination of the two, made worse by a traction control system that works in geological time. Only after you’ve left the road, ploughed through a hedge and are halfway to hospital does the silicon brain think ‘Oh-oh, something’s not right here’ and try to cut the power to an engine that, by now, is three fields away.

Saab, of course, is now owned by General Motors, and the 9-5 is basically a Viking version of the Vauxhall Vectra, itself one of the worst-handling cars of the modern age. But the Vectra is never asked to handle more than 200bhp, whereas this Aero is fitted with a 2.3-litre turbo motor that churns out up to 240bhp. It’s like fitting a Saturn V rocket to Ben Hur’s horse. It’s a damned shame, because the engine is wonderful. After 23 years at the forefront of turbo technology, Saab has eliminated ‘lag’ and come up with a blinder, a strong, immensely torquey, rip-snorting power plant that desperately needs a better home.

I wouldn’t mind, but it was an engineer from Saab who once told me that you couldn’t possibly put more than 220bhp through the front wheels of a car. ‘It would be dangerous,’ he said. And it is, matey. It is.

It seems pointless to talk about the rest of the car. I feel like the mother of a murderer, who tells reporters that, apart from his fascination with Nazi memorabilia and axes, Shane was a lovely lad. But it’s true. Apart from its allergy to bends, the Saab is a lovely car, the estate version in particular. First of all, despite GM’s involvement, it manages to look like a Saab. In fact, with the Aero body kit, it looks fantastic.

And inside it’s Saaby too, with a dashboard that seems to have been lifted straight from one of their jets. It even has autopilot in the shape of cruise control and a night panel button that turns everything off except the speedo. And the ignition key is housed in the centre console next to the gear lever. Not better. Just Saaby.

This is key to the appeal of Saab; that and the fact that it’s been a long time since the Vikings came up the Humber for a spot of pillage and rape. When we think of Sweden nowadays we think of pine furniture and mobile phones. We like to think that Saabs are made by teams of topless willowy blondes who spend their tea breaks gently beating one another with twigs. And we like this.

Saab people find BMWs a touch too pushy and Mercs way too flash. Saabs tend to be bought by kindly, New Labour souls who don’t punch you in the face if you’re 0.0001 of a second late leaving the lights. In times of trouble, you’d go to a Saab driver for help because you’d know that Merc-man would draw the curtains and pretend to be out. And that BMW-man would pour boiling oil all over you.

You could have a dinner party for Saab drivers, and it would be brilliant. They’d be opinionated, interesting and well read. Unless, of course, they’d spent £28,000 on the Aero, in which case they’d be very poor company indeed. Because they’d be dead.

Stop! All this racket is doing my head in

Tiredness can kill, they tell us on motorway warning signs. Well, yes, I’m sure it can, but frankly I’d rather die in a 100mph fireball than pull over for a nap. In fact, nothing is guaranteed to ruin my day quite so effectively as an unplanned pit stop.

I look sometimes at those people mooching around in a motorway service station and I’m overcome with a need to ask them not so much why, but how. How can you have organized your lives so effectively that you have time for lunch in one of Julie’s panties? A motorway is quite literally a means to an end. And judging by some of the prices out there, it can also be an end to your means.

When I set off somewhere, I absolutely will not stop until the petrol gauge has broken off the bump stop at the bottom of its range and the car has what sounds like whooping cough. If I need a pee, I will use my left leg on the throttle and my right leg on the clutch. I won’t be diverted by those brown signs advising me of an American Adventure ahead and, even if my eyes feel like sandpaper, I’ll still keep right on going.

So you can imagine my disappointment this week when, after just 60 miles with Ford’s new Racing Puma, and with the gauge still showing full, I had to pull into a filling station.

The problem had started just a few miles down the M40 when, in a rage, my wife had turned the radio off saying that she could only hear the trebly cymbals and it was annoying. Then, a few miles further down the road, she asked me to slow down because, really, the noise was just too much.

And it was. So I eased it down to 80, then 70 and then, in desperation, to 50. But still, the balloon that had begun to inflate in my forehead kept on getting bigger until eventually, just outside High Wycombe, it burst. This was not simply a headache. This was cranial meltdown.

So I broke the cardinal rule and pulled over for a packet of Nurofen. This new Puma is like Ibiza at 3 a.m. It’s a Hawaiian barbecue and a plane crash all rolled into a 12-foot package and amplified a thousand times through the Grateful Dead’s speaker system.

And it isn’t even a nice noise. It’s not Supertramp or early Genesis or even the rumble in the jungle that you get from a TVR. It’s just noise.

Then there’s the ride. On a pockmarked road you can’t have a conversation because the ceaseless jiggles add a vibrato warble to your voice. Imagine Lesley Garrett on helium and you’re sort of there.

So what the hell is this car, then? Well, it’s basically a normal Puma that has been pumped up in every way. The 1.7-litre is beefed up so that it develops 153bhp. The gearbox is beefed up so it can be a bit bolshie from time to time. The seats are beefed up so you can’t get in or out easily. And the body is beefed up so that it looks just about as good as any car on the road.

No, really. The wings are flared and filled with massive 17-inch wheels that are smothered in ultra-low-profile 40-section tyres. And in case you were wondering, 40-section means the wheel is painted with nothing more than a thin veneer of rubber. Pull a condom over your head one day and you’ll get the picture.

Just a thousand of these Racing Pumas are being made, and all are to be sold in Britain, at a rather steep £22,000 each. To be honest, I’d rather have an Alfa GTV, or a Subaru Impreza. Hell, for that kind of money I’d rather have a new pair of breasts.

But then I’m nearly 40. I no longer find it a hoot to spend the night after a party on one of those fold-up wooden chairs. I’m puzzled by late-night TV. And if you put me in a nightclub where they play white noise through 8m-watt speakers, I’ll go home and seek solace in the Yes album.

You, however, are probably different. If you can tell the difference between Westlife and 5ive, then you’ll barely notice the Puma’s shortcomings. You’ll revel in the dash it cuts round town, and in the countryside you’ll marvel at its truly electric responses. On the handling front, a normal Puma scores 10. This gets a solid 12.

You won’t worry that the back seats are fit only for amputees, and you’ll actually be quite glad that it’s not really a modern-day Escort Cosworth. With just 153bhp on tap, it takes 8 seconds to get from 0 to 60, and that means cheaper insurance.

Sure, you won’t be able to speak to anyone while on the move, but then you don’t anyway. I mean, how can you with the stereo making those computerized banging noises all the time?

What I’m trying to say is that the Racing Puma is only for people under 25. Like a good night out, it’s deeply uncomfortable and deafeningly loud, but on the way home, when nobody’s looking, it’ll go like a jack rabbit.

Looks don’t matter; it’s winning that counts

It’s just 20 years since Jaguar was renamed the British Leyland Large Car Division, and its workforce celebrated by going on strike again. Back then, Jaguar didn’t have a workforce as such; just a group of men in donkey jackets who stood round a brazier outside the factory gates, throwing things at policemen.

Occasionally, they’d go inside and make a car, in the same way that, occasionally, a dog will go into the bread-bin to make a sandwich, but there was little point, because it wasn’t a car in the strictest sense of the word. Oh, it looked like one, and it had wheels, but if anyone tried to go somewhere in it, they’d arrive somewhat later than anticipated, in the back of a tow truck. Jaguar, like the animal after which it was named, was on the verge of extinction.

So it’s good to report that, after careful nurturing from American conservationists at Ford, Jaguar’s numbers are rising. Indeed, 1999 was its best ever year, with 80 per cent of output going abroad.

Part-time workers have been told they can’t go home and, while new lines are built at the Halewood factory, staff have not simply been laid off. They’ve been told to go round Liverpool painting schools and helping old ladies across the road.

And then, of course, there’s the new F-type sports car, which was designed to raise eyebrows at the recent Detroit Motor Show but found its way instead into every newspaper, motoring magazine and news bulletin around the world. Jaguar insiders are saying it’s a concept that could, if people like it, perhaps, be put into production. To which I say: ‘Oh, for crying out loud. Just get on with it.’

Of course, I know there are difficulties. The Audi TT, for instance, began life as a concept car but ended up wrapped round a tree. And Peugeot once made a concept car that looked great, but there was no space anywhere for an engine. So if Jaguar ever puts the F-type into full production, it won’t look like that car you saw last week. But it will be similar, and that’s good enough. I mean, you’d sleep with someone who looked similar to Liz Hurley, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if it’s true Jaguar could put it on the market for £35,000, you can kiss goodbye to Porsche’s Boxster. And the TT. And the miserable Z3.

People have forgotten these days that price was the E-type’s biggest selling point. We remember it now for having that long, long bonnet and for doing 150mph at a time when most cars wouldn’t do 4, but it was the price tag of just £2000 that mattered most.

And that’s what will sell the F-type. Price is what pulls the punters in. Looks, and the promise of up to 300bhp from a supercharged V6 engine, will only serve to pull their trousers down.

I shan’t go into the details of this fabulous car, because Ray Hutton did that last week, but I will say that there is one fly in the Pimm’s.

On 12 March Jaguar will field two cars at the Australian Grand Prix. This is like David Batty stepping up to take that penalty against Argentina. He’d never done it before and it would be a very public place in which to miss…

I’m desperately glad to see Jaguar moving in on Formula One. I like the idea of a pit crew dressed in tweed helmets and plus-fours. And I’m hoping they’ll take that silly drinks thing from Eddie Irvine and give him a pipe instead.

But as a Jag driver I’ll find it rather disappointing if I get up in the middle of the night to find a Mercedes-powered McLaren on pole, a BMW-powered Williams in second and the Jaguars down in eleventh and twelfth places.

F1 was fine when autocratic teams ran the show. You can’t buy a Minardi, so it didn’t really matter that their cars drove round at the back. The team members could be magnanimous in defeat, say they did it only for the thrill anyway and go home. But now the sport is being taken over by manufacturers, failure will be rather more serious.

It’s funny, but while we are surprised when a Mercedes or a BMW breaks down, most people are still surprised when a Jaguar doesn’t. A large part of F1’s audience will remember the days when the XJ6 exploded on the hard shoulder and will nod sagely when the race cars do much the same sort of thing on the track.

Jaguar has to win. We know it has access to Ford’s $22 billion bank account, and we know the Ford engine is just about the most powerful unit out there, so there are no excuses. If they are beaten by Mercedes and BMW on the track, they will be beaten by Mercedes and BMW on the road – it’s that simple.

F1 isn’t a sport any more. With the car makers running the teams, it has become a mobile showcase. And there’s no point spending millions to show how brilliant you are if the global TV audience can see full well that you’re not.

It’s a simple choice: get a life, or get a diesel

I know why people who live in the Scampi Belt buy large, unwieldy off-road cars. And I don’t blame them. I have a large, unwieldy off-road car. Lots of my friends have them.

It’s because we like the Norman keep driving position. From way up there, among the ozone, we can see the enemy approaching. Only last week, yet another pensioner drove his car the wrong way down the M40 and was eventually killed when he slammed head-on into a BMW. Wouldn’t have happened if BMW-man had been in a Range Rover; he’d have seen him coming.

We like the security too. Oh, sure, off-roaders are more prone to turning over, and they can clear a motorway crash barrier with feet to spare, but in the Harvester Zone, where traffic rarely gets above 40, a four-wheel-drive can smash and bash its way through the most vigorous accidents, causing nothing more than light bruising to those inside.

So, on the suburban school run, the simple fact of the matter is this: your children are safer in a heavyweight off-roader than in a normal car.

Unfortunately, words like ‘big’ and ‘heavy’ and ‘high’ mean that off-road cars cleave the air like wardrobes. Which means the fuel injectors on their large engines have to operate with the ferocity of that fountain in Geneva.

Let me put it this way. My daughter faces an 18-mile trip to school each morning, so that’s 36 miles, twice a day… at 12 miles to the gallon. This equates to £93 a week, or nearly £5000 a year. For petrol. To do the school run. And that makes me wonder, for the first time in my life, whether maybe it’s sensible to think a little bit more seriously about switching to Satanism. And that’s why I chose to spend the whole of last week tooling around in a diesel-powered Jeep Grand Cherokee: £31,000-worth of carcinogenic soot and evil.

You may think that this was the wrong place to start, because the Americans don’t understand diesel engines, but the Cherokee is built in Austria and uses a 3.1-litre turbo unit designed in Italy. So it should have been OK. I’d only gone five yards before I knew it wasn’t. My foot was welded to the floor, and there was enough noise to cause an earthquake, but the speedometer was climbing with the verve of continental drift: 0 to 60 takes 14 seconds.

Aware of this shortfall, I planned my overtaking manoeuvres with great care. But time and again I’d pull out and sit on the wrong side of the road, going nowhere, until a flurry of flashing lights coming the other way forced me to get back in line.

So it’s all very well saying I got all the way from Oxfordshire to a shoot in Yorkshire, and back, on one 17-gallon tankful, but you’re bound to do 23mpg if you spend the entire time stuck behind old people in Rovers doing 40.

Obviously, I eased it up a bit on the motorway but, at 7 p.m., Johnnie Walker handed over to Bob Harris, and suddenly the radio fell silent. No, really, at 70mph in a diesel-powered Jeep, Whispering Bob is completely inaudible. With no chitchat to while away the hours, I reached into the back and found a pair of headphones. They say you shouldn’t drive while wearing cans, but in a car of this type it really doesn’t matter. You can’t hear anything anyway, and what does it matter if you’re killed? The damned thing is so slow you’d never get where you were going, so you may as well be dead.

Buying a diesel-powered Jeep rather than the 4.7-litre petrol-driven V8 would save perhaps £1500 a year in fuel, but it will add half an hour to every journey. And half an hour twice every working day equates to five hours a week. And that, in a lifetime, is 9000 hours – 375 wasted days. Just to save a few quid. It’s like cutting your hands off to save money on gloves.

What’s really annoying is that the diesel engine spoilt what I suspect is rather a good car. Oh, it’s too expensive and luxurious for the gamekeeper and it’s way too small on the inside for the school run. Furthermore, its jiggly ride and plasticky switches, allied to some truly disgusting World of Leather seats, means it’s no match for the Range Rover. But then it doesn’t cost fifty grand, and you get a lot of toys as standard, from he-man stuff like permanent four-wheel drive to light-in-the-loaf features like a CD player. It also looks good and, with a V8, it will do 0 to 60 in 8 seconds.

Unlike the Japanese competition, it’s not a utilitarian box. It can cope with the rigours of a grouse moor and works, too, in the executive bathroom.

I’m therefore such a fan that I decided to leave the pheasants I shot in the boot, as a sort of present to the public relations man who lent it to me. Shame it was a diesel, though, in the same way that it’s a shame he’s a vegetarian.

Insecure server?

When I first began to write for a living, I used a manual typewriter that provided very little in the way of distractions. You could type in black ink, and when that became boring you could type in red ink. And that was about it.

But now, I’m simply staggered that I’m sitting here writing anything at all, because my new computer can do so much more. When I turn it on in a morning, knowing that I must write something before lunchtime or I’ll be killed and eaten, I still get waylaid by the promise of a quick game of FreeCell to get me in the mood.

And what’s this? Heavens, it seems I can also sit here all day watching DVD movies with CD-quality sound. So now I face a choice. Write, or spend half an hour or so on board Das Boot.

Das Boot won, but now I’m back and the deadline is getting awfully close. But I fancy looking for pictures of naked girls on the web, so I’ll just do that for a while, if you’ll excuse me.

Right. Now the thrust. I heard a chap on the radio saying he’d just bought a car on the Internet. He’d found a dealership, negotiated a price, chosen a colour and had the whole transaction done and dusted within seven days. Well, I bet he’s fun on a night out. You can’t buy a car over the Net, you idiot. You’ll never know whether the seat gives you backache, whether the salesman’s a git, or if you’re talking to a silicone Maxwell who’ll take your credit card number and fall into the sea with it.

And what about second-hand cars? Even if you could find something for sale that isn’t in Minnesota, how could you possibly know what it’s like without taking at least a tiny test drive? Something that’s impossible online.

I know Ford has built a hologram car for Tony’s Dome, but this won’t give an accurate picture at all. In fact, it is the most useless invention I’ve ever heard of. What is the point of a car that doesn’t exist? Sure, you could make it go into town, but why, if you can’t go with it?

Now, where was I? Ah, yes. What if you decided to do all your shopping via computer? Think. You could work from home, watch the latest movies and have everything you need brought to your door. You’d never need to go out. So then you’d lose your social skills, become covered in boils and, eventually, you’d die. No one would know until goo started to seep into the flat below. And your holo-car began to pixelate.

For me, though, the biggest risk with the Net is fraud. I have been asked many times for my credit card number and, occasionally, I’ve felt tempted to tap it in. But I never will, because, for all I know, the vendor is a Colombian drug lord who will not be willing to uphold any money-back guarantee.

So, if I’m not going to buy anything on the Net, why is every Internet-based company worth £2000 billion? If they can’t sell anything, they’ll go bust. It’d be like opening a restaurant and refusing to unlock the doors. Or, more accurately, like hiring Ronnie Biggs to take people’s credit cards after dinner.

As I see it, the Net has two purposes. First of all, it’s a giant library that can tell you anything at any time of day or night. But none of the information contained in the silicone-nerve centre can be trusted. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing to stop me setting up a web site that says that Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is 47 and has a degree in robotics from Cambridge University.

Try it. Go into the Net tonight and ask for biographical details of, say, James Garner. You’ll find that every site contradicts the next, whereas if you look in a book you know every fact has been checked and then checked again. And most books are not written by 14-year-old boys with apple-sized zits.

So this leaves us with the Net’s only real purpose: pornography. If you want to see what can be inserted in whom by what, then there is a bewildering array of photographic evidence. Every star has been disrobed for your pleasure, and every act, no matter how deranged, is reproduced in full grisly detail.

Which brings me back to the original point. Why is every Internet company worth £2000 billion? Why, if I paid a visit to a venture capitalist this afternoon with some half-baked Internet-based idea, would he be willing to give me his house and all its contents?

I suspect we are looking at the emperor’s new clothes here, and that no one has yet stepped forward to say, Hang on a minute. This is all b******s. And breasts, bosoms and pubic hair.

Vauxhall recently offered a thousand-pound discount to anyone who bought one of their cars over the Internet, and I’m absolutely dying to see just how many people take them up on it. And more than that, how many people meant to but were distracted en route by the promise of some Hot Asian Babes. Or even a game of FreeCell.

The sooner we all remember that a computer is a tool, like an electric drill, a hammer or a washing-up bowl, the better it will be for everyone. And the sooner we remember that cars need to be tried before you buy, the better it will be for your peace of mind.

Ahoy, shipmates, that’s a cheap car ahead

We’ve never needed an excuse to go to France. The food, the wine and, in the south at least, the sumptuous climate are enough. But now the allure is even stronger, because you can go over there and, between mouthfuls of foie gras, wave wads of sterling at their unemployed youths. Then, after lunch, you can go into one of their job centres and stand in the middle of the room laughing.

Do not, however, go there through the Channel Tunnel, because they will think you’ve been eating beef and are an idiot. If time is tight, you are better off flying, and if it is not, why start your trip in a box? If you were a veal calf, they wouldn’t allow it.

But, you will now wail, the ferries are so much worse. They are full of French schoolchildren sent to England to steal from the rich, or sarf London darts teams who bought 30,000 cans of extra-strong lager on the outward trip and drank it all on the way home.

Not any more. Duty-free shopping was abolished in June, and afterwards ferries became little islands of Victorian calm between hurly-burly Britain and the poverty and despair of France.

On a ferry, your umbrella becomes a parasol and you are filled with an overwhelming urge to take up bee-keeping. You park your car and pop up on deck to wave goodbye to the white cliffs with a Dunkirk spirit of adventure in your heart. Seagulls floating on the salty breeze, a quick promenade to the front to make sure the doors are shut, and then inside for lunch at one of Langan’s brasseries.

Sadly, however, I fear that this Jane Austenesque idyll may be short-lived, because this week P&O decided to become a car dealer. It will buy cars on the Continent, which it will sell in Britain at Continental prices. So, you ring them up, choose the car you want, the colour, the spec, and 12 weeks later it will be delivered to your door. You can even get part exchange.

Some of the discounts are breathtaking. A Mercedes CL500, which would cost £83,000 in Britain, is available from P&O for just £69,900. You can save £7300 on a Range Rover, £6500 on a Jaguar XK8 and £2000 on a Golf. And remember, they come with right-hand drive and warranties that British dealers are bound to honour.

Now you’re probably thinking that this is nothing new, that hundreds of companies have been doing the same sort of thing ever since the rip-off Britain stories began. Well, yes, but we all watch Watchdog, and we know that some of these guys will get our deposit cheques and enjoy dinner that night in Rio with Ronnie Biggs. You could, of course, remove the risk element by going over there and ordering the car yourself, but let’s be honest. Hand on heart, do you speak Flemish?

I have spoken to hundreds of people about buying cars on the Continent. I’ve told them about the savings and the ease with which it can be done. I’ve explained that Ford in Britain will even give you a factsheet to facilitate the buying of a car in Belgium. It lists not only individual dealers but also an English-speaking contact. But the response is always the same: ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered.’

We’ve been told that personally imported cars from the Continent have hit new-car sales hard and that soon the car makers will have to lower their prices. But they won’t, because it’s not true. Car sales are not really down at all, while it’s easier and less risky to buy a new car here.

Well, this P&O deal stops all that. It is a blue-chip company, up there with Marks & Spencer and Tommy Cooper as a name you can trust. Instead of taking your money to South America, it will deliver a brand-new car, of your choosing, to your door, with huge savings. It says it’ll bring in 10,000 cars a year, but I really don’t think so. It’ll be more like 1.9 million, because anyone who buys a new car now from a main agent is not simply daft. He’s a fully certified window-licker. A loony. Madder than the result of a liaison between a March hare and Mad Jack McMad, who as you all know was winner of last year’s Mr Mad competition.

A P&O spokeswoman told me that the company had been hit by the abolition of duty free and that it needed something to fill the hole. Well, you’ve got it now, love. Because this car thing is a little bit bigger than a darts team buying booze for the Christmas party.

The trouble is that all the ferries coming back to Dover will be jammed solid with new cars, so ordinary people will have to make like moles and come home through the tunnel. Pity, really, but it’s a small price to pay for making a worthwhile point to our poverty-stricken next-door neighbours. Les rosbifs. Not so mad after all, vieux haricot.

So modern it’s been left behind already

When we think of the French, we think of Breton jerseys, an onion necklace and a sit-up-and-beg bicycle. And when they think of us, they think of le pub. Morning, John.

The pub. A gentle murmur of Sunday morning, corduroy bonhomie. The ceaseless winking of a fruit machine in the corner and a tray of yellowed dominoes left out from the night before. Brown beer, plaice in breadcrumbs with a lemon wedge. Horse brasses. The usual, John.

That’s not the Britain I know. The Britain I know has fired-earth walls and Macy Gray on the stereo. Linen tableclothes, low-voltage lighting and a glass of Chablis. It’s not nicotine yellow. It’s ice white and garnished with a brushed-aluminium handrail. Not a clump of cress.

I was in what the French would call a traditional pub last week, and I couldn’t believe how backward it felt. The patterned carpet. The cheese and onion crisps. And that infernal winking machine.

If I ran Rover, I’d ban all my design staff from pubs. I’d make them go to Gary Rhodes’s place in the City, and I’d tell them to have one of his lamb sausages. Then I’d take them to Pharmacy in Notting Hill and I’d say: ‘Look, fools. This is Britain now. So stop trying to make our cars look like the Coach and bloody Horses.’

They don’t put an onion holder in Renaults, so why do British car designers feel they need all that leather and walnut? This has never occurred to me before, but then I’d never driven the Audi S6 Quattro before. Now I have. And I can tell you this. It’s the most ‘now’ car you can buy.

They’ve taken a normal A6 and flared the wheel arches, not subtly, but with a swath of Healeyesque eyebrows. These shroud massive alloy wheels that sit well with the enlarged radiator grille, chromed door mirrors and brace of superfat exhaust pipes.

Of course, you don’t do all this to a car unless there is some meaningful meat under the bonnet, and there is. They’ve taken the 300bhp 4.2-litre V8 out of the bigger A8, fitted it with afterburners and dropped it into the A6. So now there’s 340bhp, and that’s enough to get you from rest to 60mph in around six seconds. Top speed, to keep the German Greens happy, is limited to 155mph.

Good car, then? Oh, yes, and inside it just keeps getting better. The seats are finished in mock suede, and the dash is carpeted. Sounds ghastly, especially when I tell you the carpet in question is fronted with polythene. But it works. Then night falls and you have to turn on the lights. And at this point you’ll want to pull over and invite perfect strangers to come and have a look. The dash becomes a teeming mass of small red lights. It’s like looking down on Los Angeles from the Hollywood hills, only in the Audi you’re doing 75mph and just moving into third.

Climbing out of the S6 and back into my Jag felt as though I’d moved back two centuries. From Conran to Wren. From Tony Blair’s New Labour to Harold Wilson’s bottle of HP sauce.

But now it’s time for that ‘however’ moment. Ready? OK, then, here goes.

However, while the Audi may well be the soup of the day, there’s a fly in it.

It costs £52,250, which makes it a direct rival to the BMW M5 and Jaguar’s recently tweaked supercharged XJR. Now I know that, in terms of ambience, the Jag is a pub and the BMW is a Harvester, and that in a traffic jam I’d much rather be in the Audi. I also know that the S6 is available as an estate, which makes it useful at the gymkhana. And when it comes to pulling water-skiers, the Audi is in a class of one. But what about those times when you’re not in New Zealand and the boat’s broken. Then what?

Well, sorry, but on normal roads the S6 is outgunned: 340bhp may be a lot, but the Jag serves up 370 and the BMW a massive 400.

Time and again, I’d pull out to overtake a truck and be left there, on the wrong side of the road, wishing that a) I’d stayed where I was or that b) I was in an XJR. Put simply, the S6 is fast, but not fast enough.

And while the four-wheel-drive system makes it tidy on a wet roundabout, it does not have the poise of its rivals everywhere else. From time to time it feels leaden, ponderous even. While the M5 and XJR iron out bumps in the road, the Audi transmits each one with faithful accuracy. It’s sad this. It’s like sitting down at the finest-looking restaurant only to find the chairs are uncomfortable and the food is better at your local.

The funny thing is, though, that I’d go back. Food is only one bit of a restaurant’s make-up, in the same way that high-speed poise is only one part of a car’s. And in so many other areas, the S6 is absolutely bang-on.

Something to shout about

More news from Rover on the 75 front. With 8000 sold, it’s outperforming the Alfa 156 here in the UK, while over in Italy it’s been voted the ‘most beautiful car in the world’. Furthermore, a bunch of Middle Eastern motoring observers have voted it their car of the year. So, there we are then. It’s brilliant.

Well, sorry to be the one who relieves himself all over the bonfire, but I’m not convinced. I don’t care how many LCD readouts they put on the dashboard or whether the K-series power plant is an engineering masterpiece, the Rover name still smacks of postwar austerity; as a result, the 75 is a sort of wheeled Werther’s Original.

And then there’s that advertisement where the new 25 is seen driving round a roulette wheel. What’s that all about? It should have Dr Finlay behind the wheel, not some bird in a silk nightie.

And I don’t see how the situation will ever get better, not so long as BMW remains at the helm. It’s a bit like Manchester United buying Liverpool FC and telling them: ‘Be good… but not as good as us.’ The best Rover can hope to achieve is second place, and that’s why they are about to post losses of around £600 million. A sum described in City circles as ‘a lot’.

Then there’s Marks & Spencer who, like Rover, have a middle-aged, middle-England appeal and who are also about to announce some catastrophic results. And meanwhile we have a £758 million Dome that no one wants to visit, a river of fire that didn’t happen, a big wheel that broke and a flame of hope – which was designed to burn all year in Birmingham but fizzled out after five days.

In Brazil, some of our football players lost an important game of football, and I understand that our cricketers, too, failed to do well in South Africa. So, all in all, it’s not been a good start to the third millennium for the Mr Smiths and Mr Robinsons of the world.

Some, of course, would say that this is predictable, that we should accept the fact that these days England is just a 44 dial code, .uk on the Web, the fifty-first state of America and the thirteenth member of the EU. They would argue that the empire is gone, along with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and that we are nothing more than a two-bit island race in a global village.

I, however, am proud of being English, in a passive, now-that-you-mention-it sort of way. I like the fact it’s always 57 degrees and drizzling, because this means we spend more time at work and less on the beach. And this, in turn, makes us richer.

I mean, look at France. Yes, they won the World Cup and, yes, they came damned close to taking the ultimate rugby crown, too, but so what? Their idea of a luxury car is a Peugeot 406, and their students have to get jobs in London since there are none in Paris.

And Germany? Think how delighted they must have been when they bought Rover, how they’d put one over on Tommy. But now it turns out their longest-serving chancellor was corrupt and their little acquisition is costing them £600 million a year.

Sure, I’m no great fan of Phoney Tony, but then he’s Scottish. As is his Chancellor, his Lord Chancellor, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, his Foreign Secretary and the new bloke at Transport. Then there’s Prescott, who’s Welsh, and most of the rest are homosexual. England’s contribution to the Cabinet is Mo Mowlem, and she’s the best of the lot, by far.

And then there’s Richard Curtis, Marco Pierre White and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. There’s Notting Hill and The Full Monty. I even had some British wine the other night, and it was bloody good.

But best of all, there’s Jaguar. My old XJR has just gone back after two years and 20,000 totally trouble-free miles. No, really, in all that time not a single thing went wrong, whereas life with my Toyota Landcruiser is a nonstop return trip to the dealers.

I’ve looked at all the alternatives. There’s a Jeep Grand Cherokee outside my house right now, but it’s too jiggly. The Mitsubishi Shogun is too brash, and the Merc M-class is just too Guildford. Which means that, some time this year, we shall get either a Discovery or a Range Rover, because they’re still the best 4x4s by far.

And what about sports cars? I know the new Boxster is a fine-handling machine that now goes as quickly as its badge would suggest, and I’m aware that six-cylinder SLKs are about to burst out of the pipeline. But, come on, neither of these is a match for the sheer brutality you get from a TVR. These things are so aggressive that they could almost be Scottish.

But if they’re out of your price range, then it’s off to Mazda for an MX-5, a car that wouldn’t be half as good if it were not for the Lotus Elan.

And anyway, we do still have an empire. It is a small island in the Pacific Ocean, and last time I looked the population was 8000. And all of them, curiously, have Rover 75s.

Appendix

Appendix

A taste of what Postman Pat has pushed through the Clarkson letterbox over the years.

Dear Jeremy…

‘If Clarkson found Norfolk flat and featureless he is in a minority. Norwich has a shopping centre that is as good as any in the country…’

P.G.

‘I think most Norfolk people wish that Jeremy Clarkson would revert back to his previous job selling Paddington Bears. I do not care for his road testing attitude and even less his patronising and sanctimonious views of Norfolk.’

C.M.

‘I was shocked to learn that the French Gendarmerie is using your photo for training purposes of how an English hooligan looks when he is full of britpiss. You should complain.’

T.V.

‘Clarkson, you are a freak. You scare the children the way you look on television. And it gets worse when you open your mouth. Unbelievable.’

T.V.

‘I am a squaddie on top of a hill near the border of Kosovo and recently saw an article calling you a fashion freak. I don’t agree with what they say and I think people from Norfolk still point at cars as well. But getting to the original point, I think you are the coolest dude to put his foot on planet earth… keep up the good work.’

M.S.

‘I am 83 years old and I’ve been driving every day for a living since 1930. The modern cars you write about today, I wouldn’t have one as a gift. They are rubbish. Who wants to do over 50mph anyway?’

J.J.

‘Jeremy, wonderful how you sorted out those navish foreigners and those poofters, and German ones at that. Your friends urge you to consult a doctor and your enemies hope you don’t.’

T.V.

‘Just fill the magazine with lots of pictures of Jeremy and lots of articles written by him. He’s so gorgeous and sexy I’d like to cover him with chocolate and lick it all off…’

S.H.

‘As part of an English project, we are allowed to write about our favourite celebrity. I chose you because I think you’re funny and get to drive ace vehicles. My friend Max is writing to Tiff Nodel, the one who helps to present Top Gear with you. I think you’re better than him though.’

G.F.

‘Congratulations on your new talk show on the BBC. This is an absolute breakthrough. For the first time a baboon will have his own talk show.’

T.V.

‘I have a large collection of toy cars and trucks. The fact that you said collectors of toy cars are child molesters I found not only highly offensive to thousands of ordinary people, but of such you should be sent to a shrink to see what makes you tick… I wish upon you an eternity stuck in an old car in a convoy of trucks and caravans…’

J.F.

‘If the VC were awarded for stupidity and ignorance you would be one of the first to receive it. Nature seems to have given you a large body but a very small brain…’

B.C.

‘People who commit crimes are dysfunctional. They are alienated, bitter and resentful. So they attack symbols of success, like JC’s Cosworth and he wants to flog them within an inch of their lives, which will make them even more resentful. JC is intelligent, gifted and graced by success. He should not insult our intelligence by uttering such bollocks.’

A.D.

‘Jeremy Clarkson is without doubt the most appallingly sexist person to strut across planet earth but he has a valid, if slightly liberal point of view regarding the treatment of the vehicle villain… I have just had the misfortune of being the victim, for the fourth time, of car crime. These bastards should be staked out naked in the desert… etc.’

G.M.

‘We are out there, the Supertramp music fans. I have all the music and if you would like anything taped please drop me a line.’

P.S. Did you see them at the Albert Hall in 1997?

M.O.

‘Dear Mr Clarkson, You’re a prick.’