RICHARD PORTER

Failure to identify a mystery car in his mirrors has driven Porter to a frightening admission

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A FEW WEEKS AGO I WAS DRIVING HOME when an unfamiliar car appeared behind me. It was medium-sized and an SUV, which already makes it deeply generic, like Kardashians or men who work in the City of London. But actually, head-on in my mirrors, this thing was distinctive because it had a grille like a Jeep. Mentally I spooled through my knowledge of the current Jeep range and came up blank. This car looked like a Jeep, but it wasn’t an actual Jeep. For one thing, it didn’t have its maker’s name written above that slotty grille. This was puzzling, but before I could get a closer look, the mystery car had gone.

When I got home I decided to do some research. This strange, unfamiliar car with its ripoff grille was surely from one of those Chinese car makers you've never heard of but which suddenly has a massive showroom on the bypass and in seven years will be cited as the reason we no longer have Nissans and why Stellantis is now all European car companies except Morgan. So I combed the website of every Chinese company currently flogging cars in Britain and found lots of cars that look like those generic SUVs in renderings of new buildings on hoardings, or Tesla-shaped bars of soap that have been run under a hot tap for too long, but nothing with a faux Jeep grille. I was stumped.