Jeremy Clarkson: What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

To make matters worse, there was recently a great disturbance in Saab’s force. General Motors had bought half the company in 1989 and the rest in 2000, but realized last year it didn’t want it any more. The production lines stopped and for a while it looked as though the company would be gone. But then it was rescued by a Dutch outfit that makes the Spyker supercar.

In many ways this is a bit like Mr Patel from your local corner shop deciding to buy Harrods. It sounds terribly romantic, but if you’re going to take on the big boys, you need to have deep pockets. A billion won’t cut it. Toyota probably spends that on pot plants.

But here’s the thing. I do not want Saab to go. I’m glad that in Britain 6,000 architects decided to buy one last year and I hope that number continues to grow. Which is why I have a tip for the new company.

The 9-3 is old. It has a nasty engine. And, while I acknowledge the standard fitment of both an adjustable heater and a clock, it is also quite expensive. But it does have one feature that sets it aside from almost every other car on the market. It’s comfortable.

Today all car makers have got it into their heads that, despite the traffic and the price of fuel and the war on speeding, what motorists want is sportiness. A hard ride. Nervous steering. Bucket seats. Big power. There was a time when Volvo sold itself on safety and VW on reliability and Mercedes on quality. Not any more. Now, they all make racing cars.

Before a new model goes on sale it is taken to the Nürburgring, where final tweaks are made to the suspension to make sure that it can get round the 14-mile track as fast as possible. This is fine, of course, if you live in the Eifel mountains and you use the Ring on the way to work. But it’s not fine at all if you live in Esher and your office is in Leatherhead. And it’s also not fine if you ever encounter a pothole or have a bad back.

I know that people in a focus group will tell the inquisitors in the polo-neck jumpers that they would like their next car to be ‘sporty’ because that’s the motoring dream and has been since Christopher Plummer roared away from the battle of Britain in his zesty MG. But in reality, sportiness is a pain in the backside.

Recently, I bought a new sofa because it looked good. Sharp. Modern. Crisp. It’s an aesthetic masterpiece, but after a hard day at work, when I just want to slob out in front of the television, I’d be better off sitting on the floor.

At my age I crave comfort, and that’s why I have enjoyed my week with the Saab so enormously. It’s dreary to drive and underpinned by one of the worst car platforms in modern history, but the seats are superb, and the suspension is capable of keeping the pothole bomb blasts to nothing more than a shudder.

Plus. And this is the really good bit. As I cruised about, with the adjustable heater providing me with just the right amount of heat, and the clock telling me precisely the right time, everyone else – apart from the occasional van driver – was looking at me and thinking, Ooh, look. It’s Chuck Yeager.

To this day, I remain baffled by the Ford Scorpio because at some point someone must have walked into an important board meeting and said, ‘Well, everyone. This is what it’s going to look like.’

Why did no one present say, ‘Are you joking?’ or, ‘Have you gone mad?’ or, ‘Take some gardening leave, you imbecile’? They obviously just sat there thinking, Yes, we have had cars in the past that were designed to look like sharks and cars that were designed to look like big cats. So why should we not now have a car that looks like a wide-mouthed frog?

It’s strange. I know who designed almost every single car in recent times. I know who did the Lamborghini Countach, VW Golf and Volvo 850. I know several people who claim to have done the Aston Martin DB9. But nobody in all my years has ever put their hand up and said, ‘Yes. It was me. I did the Scorpio.’

I bet you would have a similar struggle if you set out to find the man who did the Toyota Yaris Verso – the only car ever made that is five times taller than it is long. I pulled up alongside one yesterday and studied the driver for some time. Do you realize, I wondered, how utterly ridiculous you look in that?

Then there’s the Pontiac Aztek, which was unusual in that it managed to look wrong from every single angle. Normally, even the most hopeless designer gets one tiny feature right by accident – the rear tail-lights or the C pillar, for instance. Even the Triumph TR7 had a nice steering wheel. But the Aztek looked like one of those cardboard cities you find beneath underpasses in Mexico.

And let’s not forget the SsangYong Rodius. Plainly, they set out to build a coupé and then decided at the last minute that what they actually wanted was a removal van. And then, when those two concepts had been nailed together in the most unholy merger since Caligula fell in love with his horse, they realized that the only wheels they could afford were the size of Smarties.

It’s easy, when you look at a SsangYong, to imagine that the designer simply doesn’t know what he’s doing. But that ain’t necessarily so. Remember the Musso? That was as awful to behold as a frostbitten penis and yet, amazingly, it was styled by the same man who designed that old warhorse the Aston Martin Vantage and the Bentley Continental R.

The problem is that there’s a language to car design. Some of the language is written down. Ideally, the wheels should be half the height of the car, for example. But mostly, it’s a dark art. All I know is that the car must look like it’s capable of great speed, or else it looks wrong.

Look at the kink at the bottom of every BMW’s rearmost pillar. The one between the back window and the back door. It’s got a little kink and that makes the car look like it’s pushing forwards, straining at the leash. BMW is also very good at making the body look like it’s been stretched to fit over the wheels. As if there’s barely enough skin to contain all the muscle.

This doesn’t just apply to sporty cars, either. Look at the new Vauxhall Astra. It’s a handsome thing because it’s all straight lines and sharp angles. There’s a whiff of the fast patrol boat. And that gives a sense of howling turbochargers and sea spray – even if the engine under the bonnet is a miserable diesel.

This brings me on to Nissan. A few years ago, it decided to try to make a car that didn’t look fast. The company reckoned that in a world of road rage, traffic and simmering rage, it would be good to have a car that was friendly and unthreatening. So it produced the Micra.

I hated that car. It had the sort of face you wanted to punch. And because it was ‘happy’, it was bought by the sort of people who were never in much of a hurry. I’d love to know how much of my life has been stolen by Nissan and its Micra experiment. One day, I may send it a bill.

But in the meantime, the company has changed tack again and come up with the Juke. It’s not ugly by any means but it is, without any question or shadow of doubt, the stupidest-looking machine to see the light of day since the Ronco Buttoneer.

What were they thinking of? Why, for instance, are its rear wheel arches bigger than those you would find on a modern tractor, even though the wheels are the size of Polo mints? And why are the front lights mounted on top of the bonnet? It’s all completely ridiculous.

I first encountered it at Heathrow airport early one Monday morning. The office said it would leave a car for me in the valet parking bay and so there it was, sitting among the Maseratis and the Mercs, like a big comedy hat at a funeral.