Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Inside, it’s good, too, chiefly because it feels like a much bigger Mercedes. However, there were a couple of issues. I have new shoes. They are Dr Martens and I like them very much but they were too wide for the gap between the wheelarch and the brake pedal. This meant that every time I pressed the accelerator, I slowed down.

And there’s more. When you push the driver’s seat fully back, your shoulder is adjacent to the B pillar. This means you can’t drive with your arm resting on the window ledge. I’m surprised by how annoying that was.

There was another surprise as well. This is an AMG-badged car, and that is the same as a three-chilli warning on the menu at your local Indian restaurant. You expect, if you turn your foot sideways to press the throttle, to have your eyes moved round to the side of your head so you end up looking like a pigeon. But no.

The turbocharged 2-litre engine spools up nicely enough and the rev counter charges towards the red zone, but the speedo confirms what your peripheral vision has been suggesting: you aren’t picking up speed at anything like the rate you were expecting.

A quick glance at the technical specifications reveals the reason. There’s no shortage of power but most of it is used to move the excess weight. This is a heavy car. You feel that weight in the corners, too. No AMG Mercedes is built to generate 6 g on roundabouts – you need a BMW for that – but this one feels inert and out of its depth. So it’s not that fast in a straight line. And it’s not that exciting in the corners. And the gearbox isn’t much cop, either.

Perhaps the AMG badge is to blame. Perhaps it’s writing cheques the car isn’t even designed to cash. Perhaps, beneath it all, it’s designed to be a quiet and unruffled cruiser. On a smooth road, that’s certainly the case. But introduce even the slightest ripple and you’d better be sitting on a cushion at the time because the ride in this car is terrible.

I’m told that on standard wheels, with normal suspension, the new A-class is pretty good. But in the AMG trim it is – and I’m choosing my words carefully here – effing unpleasant. Fast Mercs in the recent past have got quite close to the line in terms of unacceptable stiffness. This one crosses it.

But towering above the ride in the big bag of mistakes is the fuel tank. It may be large enough if the engine under the bonnet is a diesel, but when it’s a turbo nutter petrol bastard, you can’t even get from London to Sheffield and back without filling up. God knows what it will be like when the 350-bhp four-wheel-drive version arrives next year. That won’t be able to get from 0 to 62 mph without spluttering to a halt.

The standard car, I don’t doubt for a moment, is all right. It’s certainly getting rave notices from all quarters. But this hot one? No. It’s surprisingly poor in too many areas.

And it’s not like you’re short of alternatives. If you want a prestigious badge, Audi will sell you a fast A3 that won’t break your back or cause you to spend half your life putting petrol in the tank. But my recommendation is that you forget the badge and buy an Astra. I drove the VXR recently, and while it may have only three doors, I was extremely surprised by how good it was. And how comfortable.

Strange, isn’t it? The Astra. It used to be a byword for everything we thought we’d left behind. But after a bit of a makeover, the girl from your own village is better than the generously breasted temptress from Stuttgart.

Many years ago I saw a magnificently idiotic film in which Sylvester Stallone played the part of a tough cop who was cryonically frozen for a crime he had not committed. Then, at some point in the future, he was defrosted so that he could rush about punching people in the face.

Every single thing about it was idiotic, especially the director’s vision of what the future might look like. People drove around in cars that were satellite-controlled to keep them at the speed limit. The radio stations only played silly little ditties from television commercials. It was illegal to swear or make fun of anyone because of their colour or their creed or the state of their mental health. It all seemed bonkers. And yet here we are in 2012 and it’s pretty much the Labour party manifesto.

There was something else as well. Capitalism had run amok to the point where there was really only one company that controlled everything. I seem to recall it was Taco Bell. That isn’t in Ed Millipede’s head, of course. But it’s almost certainly coming anyway. In fact, in the car world you could be forgiven for thinking it’s already here.

You might think when you buy a Seat that you are buying something with a bit of Spanish flair but, actually, you are buying a Volkswagen Golf. You may think when you buy a Skoda that you are buying 15 feet of sturdy Czech ingenuity. Nope. That’s a Golf too. Audi A3? Golf as well, I’m afraid.

So what about an Aston Martin Cygnet? Surely, you’re thinking, that can’t be a Golf. You’re right. It isn’t. It’s actually a Toyota. The Subaru BRZ? That’s a Toyota also.

I am particularly excited at the moment about the new Alfa Romeo 4C. Which is a Mazda MX-5. Then you have the Ford Ka, which is a Fiat Panda. The Fiat 500 is also a Panda. And the subject of this morning’s missive is a Panda as well, even though it doesn’t say so on the back. It doesn’t say Lancia, either, which is strange because that’s the company that made it. And that’s why I’ve been trying for two straight years to get my hands on one.

I firmly believe that in the past hundred years Lancia has made more truly great cars than any other brand. Ford gets close. So does Ferrari. But Lancia edges it, thanks to the Stratos, the Fulvia, the 037 – the last two-wheel-drive car ever to win the world rally championship – the Delta Integrale and other, more elderly models with running boards that exist now only in the minds and garages of people who played the drums with Pink Floyd.

Even when Lancia was not very good, it was still rather brilliant. The Gamma was a classic case in point. We all knew that on full left lock, a design fault meant the pistons could meet the valves in a head-on collision, causing the engine to explode. But we didn’t care because it was so very, very pretty to look at.

Then you had the supercharged HPE. Made from steel so thin you could use it as tracing paper, and sold as an estate even though it was no such thing, this was a triumph of style over absolutely everything else that matters and I loved it.

Some say that Lancias were unreliable and while this is almost certainly true, it’s hard to be sure because they had usually rusted away long before any of the mechanical components had the chance to malfunction. Fans didn’t mind, though, because of those bite-the-back-of-your-hand-and-faint looks.

The trouble is that in the 1980s the Italians handed the styling department over to someone who plainly went to work with a box on his head. The result was a range of cars that oxidized and blew up. And didn’t look very nice in the process. With hindsight this was not a good idea. We can tolerate bad-tempered lunatic girlfriends if they are pretty. But not if they look like the Beta saloon. Or the Dedra.

The result was disastrous. Sales plummeted and Fiat, which owns Lancia, decided to pull its problem child out of Britain. And that, we thought, was that. Only now, almost twenty years later, Lancia is back. The Ypsilon.

Let’s look at the obvious problems first of all. Number 1: the man with the box on his head is plainly still in charge of styling because the list of things I’d rather look at includes every single thing in the world.