The joy of driving a superfluous SUV

Now, in an anxious time, I have an SUV, and this is apt. There is something very comforting about an SUV if it’s yours (though less so if it isn’t). They are designed to dominate any landscape they can fit inside and, if that is a hollow fantasy of control it doesn’t feel like one from the driving seat. The advertising shows them climbing mountains and navigating deserts and investigating forests and this is truthful: they really can do this. It is also true that they rarely do this – their owners are the urban rich, segueing to late middle-age, and are as likely to be found in St John’s Wood as the Gobi Desert– but they can, and that is the joy in it. Owning a luxury SUV is like having a leg you do not need.

Land Rover dominated the luxury SUV market for many years as the mobile home of dukes (aside from the G-Wagon, which was a military vehicle designed for the Shah of Iran, now reborn with disco lights, a car for suave madmen).