Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

My son turns seventeen this month and will be getting a car. But what? Perhaps because he is my son he is about as passionately uninterested in all things automotive as is humanly possible. He knows less about cars than June Whitfield. Actually, come to think of it, he knows less than King Herod.

All he knows is that he doesn’t want a Ford Fiesta because that’s what his big sister drives. And he wants to be different. So I suggested an Alfa. The MiTo, perhaps. The new TwinAir version with the two-cylinder 0.9-litre… his eyes started to glaze over. ‘It’s Italian,’ I said. He liked the sound of that. He likes Italy.

So I borrowed one for a test drive and – Holy Mother of God. It was shocking. Bad almost beyond belief. The idea, though, is quite good. There are plenty of people who would love to be propelled from place to place by this barnstorming little engine with its promise of 60 mpg-plus. But originally it was available only in the Fiat 500, which for many is just too small.

So here it is in the MiTo and it’s as good as ever. It revs like a terrier and makes the sort of noise that causes you to smile. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s very tiny and the MiTo is quite heavy. So while you have the hysterical revs and the comedy noise, you’re still doing only 4 mph.

Time and time again I’d pull over to overtake a Peugeot, pleased with the initial surge of power, but then it would wither and die like a grape in a furnace, and something would be coming the other way, and its lights would be flashing, and I’d have to brake and get back behind the Peugeot again. Fast, this car is not.

It sounds fast. It even looks fast. And it’s an Alfa Romeo so it should be fast. But it isn’t, no matter what you do with the DNA. There is a switch that lets you choose from three settings: Dynamic, which give you nowhere near enough power; Natural, which gives you less; and All-weather, which is irrelevant.

I was happy with all of this. Because, while my son is not interested in cars, he is a teenager. And I very much like the idea of him driving around in something that has exactly the same top speed and acceleration as the Queen.

However, there were some things that were not so good. The gear change was woeful, the ride was catastrophic and I can only assume the driving position was set up for that orang-utan that used to hang around with Clint Eastwood. The pedals are virtually underneath the steering wheel, which means the only people who can get comfortable are those whose arms and legs are exactly the same length.

And guess how much it costs. Nope. You’re wrong. But don’t feel bad, because I was wrong too. I thought that it would be £13,000. But in fact the car I tested, which had one or two small extras fitted, was £16,500. Way too much for any car this size. But for a car this size and this bad it’s a joke.

Of course, you’re paying for the badge. Which is worth a lot, I admit. There’s a lot of symbolism in there: serpents and Milanese legends and a red cross that harks back to the first crusader to scale the walls of Jerusalem. There’s more, too. Alfa Romeo once won every single race in the Formula One grand prix calendar. It’s where Enzo Ferrari began his career. There’s more heritage and more raw emotion in that symbol than there is in the rest of the car industry put together.

And yet the company has the cheek and the barefaced effrontery to put it on the MiTo TwinAir. It’s like putting the Rolls-Royce badge on a corner shop. No. It’s worse. It’s like Princess Anne appearing in a television commercial for payday loans. It’s simply not on.

So when I take over Alfa Romeo – and it may have to be an armed coup – the MiTo TwinAir will be dropped and any library or internet site that contains a mention of it will be burnt.

In the meantime, though, I think my son will get a Volkswagen Polo. I’ll tell him it’s Italian. He won’t know.

When I spend a night at my flat in London, I like to cook myself some supper. And since my culinary skills are a little bit northern, I don’t overreach myself with exotic spices, pestles or mortars. It’s just pasta, some pork and various bits and bobs to liven things up.

Then, the next day, I have to call a skip-hire company and a forklift truck to take away all the packaging. This makes me so angry that my nose swells up and my teeth move about. I mean why, for instance, do spring onions have to be sold with a rubber band?

And it’s not just food, either. If you buy a Gillette razor, it comes in a hardened shell that is impervious to any known form of attack. Scissors, fire and even atomic weapons are useless. And pretty soon there is blood everywhere, which requires a sticking plaster. And therefore another skip to take away the packaging in which that was sold.

Bought a USB dangly thing recently? It occupies less than a square inch but comes in a clear plastic container that could be used by a family of six as a fallout shelter. And that’s before we get to Easter eggs. They come in boxes the size of B-52 bombers and are wrapped in Cellophane and tinfoil and paper and about a million things the world can ill afford to waste. And it makes me seethe.

I’m not, as you probably know, given to environmental thinking. I do not care about the composition of gases in the upper atmosphere, and when it’s chilly outside I will gladly fire up the patio heater. But I have a profound dislike of waste, and there is nothing on God’s decreasingly green earth as wasteful as packaging. When I come to power, people will be allowed, by law, to murder any shopkeeper who sells them anything that does not need to be in a bag, in a bag.

We shall start with the Daily Mail . Because it runs a campaign about the idiocy of plastic bags, but on a Sunday its supplements are delivered in… a plastic bag. Which I have to throw away.

Then we shall move on to the makers of anything that is billed as disposable. Why would you want to throw away a camera, for crying out loud? Or cutlery? Or anything at all?

This nonsense is even spreading these days to the world of cars. You may have noticed recently that Fiat is advertising what it calls the spring/summer collection of 500s. And I know exactly what is going on. It wants people to think of their car as a skirt, something that should be discarded after six months because white is so last year.

I’m afraid, however, that Fiat is by no means the only offender. We all are. Because why do we ever sell the car we have now?

Just the other day my wife said we should change our Range Rover for the new model because it keeps getting punctures. That’s like saying, ‘Oh, no. We need to change the children because they’ve got measles.’ But she is not alone. The world is full of people who get rid of their cars because they imagine they’re about to start costing money, because they appear to be on their last legs. But that ain’t necessarily so.

Top Gear is often criticized – by people with terrible shoes, usually – for concentrating too vigorously on expensive cars that no one can afford. This, of course, is rubbish. Elton John could easily afford anything and everything we feature. It’s also not true. We put far more effort, money and time into featuring old crocks.

You see, we have a message. When you think a car is done for and washed up, we will demonstrate that, actually, it can still get across Botswana, or India, or Bolivia, or the Middle East. Deep down, Top Gear is the most environmentally sound programme on earth. Or it would be if only more people had got the message. And since they haven’t, I’ve decided this morning to tell you a little bit more about the BMW I recently drove on a 1,000-mile odyssey through Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.