Motoring

The Duke of Edinburgh was carried to his tomb in a modified Land Rover, and this is apt. He walked away from a highspeed collision in Norfolk a few years ago because – and probably only because - he was driving a Land Rover Freelander. The Land Rover, which was intially the off-road Rover, is the original British SUV. It is beloved by farmers, who need them, and dukes, who like them because they are both grand and useful, a metaphor in metal – at least from their perspective - for feudalism itself. Few cars are as evocative of an ancient chariot, or as versatile: motorways do not daunt them, and nor do potholes.

I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t. It seemed a good idea at the time, albeit a costly way of proclaiming my environmental virtuousness. The car cost €44,000, less a €6,000 subsidy courtesy of French taxpayers, the overwhelming majority poorer than me. Fellow villagers are driving those 20-year-old diesel vans that look like garden sheds on wheels. I order the car in May 2018. It’s promised in April 2019. ‘No later,’ promises the salesman at the local Hyundai dealer. April comes and goes. No car. I phone the dealership. No explanation. The car finally arrives two months late, with no effort by Hyundai to apologise. But I Iove it. It’s quiet, quick and with the back seats down, practical with plenty of room for the dogs.

On April 23, 1946, Enrico Piaggio filed a patent with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce for 'a motorcycle of a rational complexity of organs and elements combined with a frame with mudguards and a casing covering the whole mechanical part'.In less formal terms, the machine in question was called a Vespa - and this year the marque celebrates an impressive 75 years of unbroken production with close to 20 million having been sold around the world across a range of at least 50 variations on the theme.All can be traced back to the day Piaggio came up with the idea of saving his father Rinaldo's bombed-out aero factories from demolition by converting them into production lines which would churn-out cheap transport for the masses.