Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

I could go on, so I will. Austin made a car that was more aerodynamic going backwards than forwards, Ford made a car that blew up if a leaf landed on it and Lancia made a car from Russian steel that was as long-lasting as fruit. And only recently Volkswagen was going to call its new car the Black Up!.

It’s almost as though every single meeting in the car industry is specifically designed to exclude rational thought, which brings me on to a gathering of fine minds that must have happened a few years ago in Audi’s boardroom.

They obviously decided that it would be a good wheeze to create a new type of medium-sized hatchback that looked like it might be able to go off road but couldn’t. ‘Yes,’ someone must have said. ‘That’s a brilliant idea. No one else will have thought of making such a thing.’

And they were right. There are no other so-called ‘soft-roaders’ on the market at all. Apart from the Land Rover Freelander, the Range Rover Evoque, the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV4, the BMW X1, the Nissan Kumquat, the Nissan X-Trail, the Mitsubishi Outlander, the Volkswagen Tiguan, the Citroën Cross-Dresser, the Subaru Forester, the Hyundai Santa Fe, the Volvo XC60, the Kia Sportage, the Vauxhall Antara, the Ford Kuga, the Mazda CX-7, the Kia Sorento and the Jeep Compass.

It’s possible they may have known all along that there are many options in this part of the marketplace. But it’s unlikely. Because if they had, they would have made damn sure their new car was better than all the others. And it isn’t.

Let’s start in the boot, which is very small. And the reason it’s very small is that under the boot floor, apparently, there is a large subwoofer. What kind of hallucinogenic drug were they taking at the meeting where everyone agreed that this was a good idea? Who stood up and said, ‘A good bass sound is more important than an ability to carry dogs, shopping or a spare wheel’?

Further forward, we find the rear seat, which is wide enough for three people but only if they have casters rather than legs. And then up front, at the business end, we find nothing at all, apart from some heater controls that have been designed to be annoying.

My £28,965 quattro SE test car was supplied in loser spec with cruise control as a £225 optional extra and, er, that’s it. Every time I selected some tasty-sounding feature from the onboard computer, I was given a message saying, ‘You couldn’t afford this’ or ‘You really should have worked harder at school’. It didn’t even have satnav.

To drive? Well, it’s hard to say because the wheels weren’t balanced properly, and trying to be rational when viewing the world through wobble vision is like trying to concentrate on the finer points of someone who’s constantly hitting you over the head with an axe.

All I can say is that the engine is rather good. I had the more powerful diesel option that had lots of oomph and the thirst of a bee. It sounded nice, too, in a gravelly, smoky, bluesy kind of way.

However, in the morning, when it had been asleep all night, it did take a second or two to remember what it was and what it’s purpose in life might be. You turn the key… and nothing happens. And then, shortly before it remembers that it’s an engine, you give up and turn the ignition off again. This causes a bit of swearing.

Mind you, for cluelessness, the gearbox is worse. In Sport mode it wouldn’t change gear at all, and in Normal mode did nothing else but. Every few seconds. For no discernible reason.

Then there’s the Efficiency mode facility that disengages the clutch every time you lift off the throttle. In theory, this fuel-saving measure sounds like a good idea. In practice, it means you simply cannot maintain smooth progress on the motorway.

The Q3, then. Not practical. Not nice to drive. And technologically, not thought out well, either. So what’s to be done if you want a car that looks like it could go off road but won’t? Especially if you specify the sports suspension that lowers the ride height to that of a centipede.

Well, the obvious answer is the Range Rover Evoque. But if this is too expensive for your taste and not spacious enough, don’t worry, because there is a better alternative. It’s called a saloon car.

Tall people never really think about how far they are from the ground unless they are presented with an economy-class seat or a row of off-the-peg trousers. With small people, things are different. They think about their height all the time. They think that people like me are tall deliberately, that we do it on purpose just to annoy them. This gives them what doctors call SMS – small man syndrome – and what we call a bad temper.

At parties they feel excluded from conversations as they scuttle about banging their heads on coffee tables. On crowded Tube trains they feel bullied. With girls they feel left out. And when shopping for clothes they quickly become fed up with being directed to Mothercare. This is why most bar-room brawlers and emperors are vertically challenged.

It is quite correct to say that in evolutionary terms they are closer to the amoeba and that tall people sit at the prow of civilization. But these thoughts don’t occupy my mind all the time. I don’t feel superior to a small person just because my head is nearer to incoming weather systems. But they definitely feel inferior. Which is why they are engaged in a constant and deeply irritating battle to prove themselves worthy.

We see the same problem with dogs. My west highland terrier is in a permanent state of rage. Because she can’t climb into the back of a Range Rover by herself or leap over fences, she bites the postman, the paperwoman and people who come to mend the computer. She bites my other dogs, too, and since we haven’t seen the milkman for months, we can only assume he’s been eaten. She barks a lot as well, making up for the shortness of her legs with volume. If she were a human she’d have been sent to Elba and the world would have been a safer place.

Strangely, at this point, I need to talk about Richard Hammond. He told me the other day that when driving his Fiat 500 he is constantly bullied by other motorists. That he’s always being undertaken and tailgated and made to wait longer than is necessary at junctions. And I sighed the sigh of a tall man and thought, It’s not the car, sunshine. It’s your inferiority complex.

But, having spent a week with the new Mini roadster, I think he may have a point. Small cars do get bullied. Especially when they are pretending to be something that they are not.

My youngest daughter, who is extremely tall, pointed at the little car that had come to our drive and said, ‘That is not a Mini.’

Her views were echoed on the road. ‘That is ridiculous,’ was the most commonly expressed view.

And the roadster is ridiculous because it is about as far from the concept of a Mini as it is possible to get. The genius of the 1950s original was packaging – fitting an engine and four people into a car that was just 2 inches long. The rallying and The Italian Job came later.

Well, the new roadster is about as long as the Norwegian coastline but has only two seats. In terms of sensible packaging, it’s right up there with the underground bunkers De Beers uses to store a few diamonds. Or those massive boxes that contain nothing but a USB dongle for your laptop.

Of course, the whole point is that it’s supposed to be a sports car. But despite the stripes, the lights, the William Wallace war paint and the massive Cuban wheels, it doesn’t look anything like, say, a Mazda MX-5. It looks like a Mini. That’s been beheaded.

Inside, the news is just as grim. When the new Mini was launched, the wacky interior was interesting. Now it’s just annoying. The speedometer, for instance, is the size of Eric Pickles’s face, but you have to study it carefully for several minutes to work out how fast you’re going.