RICHARD PORTER

The younger Porter would have loved today's supercars; the current one's not so sure

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JUST OVER 20 YEARS AGO I WROTE A BOOK called Crap Cars, which rode the early '00s boom for being mean about stuff by listing 50 models I believed to be the epitome of cackness. In the number one slot, because it seemed more interesting and unpredictable than the usual Marina, Robin and Riva suspects, was the original Volkswagen Beetle.

Putting this as the crappest of the crap understandably angered a lot of Beetle enthusiasts, to the extent that one threatened to drop a crankcase on my throat while another told me to 'expect the worst', causing me to spend several months awaiting the release of an alligator into my kitchen. In 2004 I really did hate the Beetle and I was happy to risk the wrath of Run To The Sunners to express this opinion in print. Yet today I couldn't summon up this level of bile towards the Bug. A Beetle would be very, very far down my list of things I'd like in my garage but I sometimes see a tidy one and think, well, they're meant to be quite nicely engineered aren't they, and in the right spec they do look pretty cool.