It’s the way of good cars that, on driving one, you begin to embody it: to become it. In a hot hatch I am young and lovely and never was a nerd. (I will get to the platonic ideal of the nerd’s car. I fear it is a Honda Jazz.) In a Rolls-Royce I am laconic unless I am driving, in which case I am a wreck. In an electric BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) iX3 I am functional, the woman I never was. I own my own company, though I don’t know what it does. I am not fat, I am not weird and I am ‘good at men’, whatever that means. You might laugh at BMW for its solemnity and self-possession – for its very Germanness – but your laughter is hollow. Britain, increasingly a country of cracked and self-destructive romantics, has no such functional marque and has never sought one. We cleave to the flying bath (the Morgan) and the terrier (the Mini). We are all mad.

But no one can be mad in a BMW. It works too well: it must be, to eat up those lovely German autobahnen. It is less a car than a professional mercenary that you sit on. It’s called an SAV (Sports Activity Vehicle), but it looks like an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle). Don’t........

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