Renault Kadjar is proof that Uber and Google will one day rule the car industry

In 10 years the three biggest car businesses will not be Toyota, VW and GM. They will be Google, Apple and Uber.

The Renault Kadjar is, like most cars, an expensive, awkward hassle.

As you know, every week I try to brighten your day with some frivolous and not-at-all important observations about the car I’ve been driving. But today is different. Today I need to be a bit serious.

Right now, all the world’s big carmakers are engaged in a mad dash to replace the petrol engine with something more in tune with the times. Honda and Hyundai are rushing towards hydrogen fuel cells, and BMW is looking at electric propulsion with small generators to keep the batteries charged. Elsewhere there are pure electric cars, plug-in hybrids and ultra-low-emission diesels.

It all sounds very interesting, but it’s pointless, I’m afraid, because in 10 or 20 years the three biggest car businesses in the world will not be Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors. They will be Google, Apple and Uber. That’s because they have come to understand something more important than what goes under the bonnet. They’ve come to understand that you don’t need a car. But you do need one tomorrow morning, at about 10 past eight. And on Thursday afternoon for a couple of hours.

Think about it. Each weekend your car is parked outside your house doing nothing but costing money. You probably won’t use it at all until Monday, when you’ll be forced to drive through all the roadworks and jams so that you can leave it outside your office all day, where it will probably be keyed or broken into.

Life will go on like this for months until one day it needs a service, or it breaks down, and that’ll be a nuisance because then you’ll have to make alternative travel arrangements. You’re paying thousands of dollars a year, then, for something that you use for what? Five per cent of the time? Two per cent?

The car, therefore, has become like a fondue set. You have one but for the life of you can’t work out why.

It’s the same story with your fridge. Why do you have one today, taking up a corner of your kitchen and making noises, when you can have milk and butter delivered every day and there’s a supermarket on every street corner?

It really is the same story with your car. Wouldn’t it be better if you had access to some wheels only when you needed them? Of course it would, and that’s what Google and Apple and Uber have grasped. We won’t buy their cars. We will share them.

So if you decide on a whim to visit your parents one afternoon , you tap a few passwords into your phone and a car will arrive. Maybe it will have a driver. Maybe it will be driven by nobody at all. Maybe it will run on mains electricity or electricity created by hydrogen fuel cells. All you care is that: a) it will get you where you’re going; and b) when you’ve finished with it, it will cost nothing.

Never again will you have to look for a parking space, or worry about the meter running out, or pay for insurance, or book an registration inspection, or break out the bucket and sponge on a Sunday.

If I were running one of today’s big car companies I’d be worried sick about all this because the whole business model their empires are founded on is daft. They’re making us pay thousands and thousands of dollars to buy something we won’t use 95 per cent of the time.

And that in the remaining 5 per cent is a bloody nuisance because of the jams and buses and cyclists and speed cameras and CCTV-monitored junctions and speed-awareness courses and speed limits being imposed because every council is now being run by a bunch of frizzy-haired lunatics.

Of course, in our minds the car is still glamorous and exciting. It’s a big Healey sweeping through the lanes at 160km/h; an Alfa Romeo on the Amalfi coast with a young woman in a headscarf in the passenger seat. It’s a growl and a roar.

But peel away the history, put down the rose-tinted spectacles and you’ll see very clearly that it’s just a tool. And because it’s just a tool, it’s vulnerable to pressure from a newer tool that makes personal mobility cheaper and easier.

The only way today’s big car companies can fight off this new pressure is to make their cars more glamorous and more exciting than ever. They need to accept that on a practical level they can’t compete with Google’s silent Igloo and must inject their new models with the sort of pizzazz that will make a grown man drool. They need to rekindle the spirit of the big Healey and the convertible Alfa Romeo.

Watchmakers did it when Casio came along. Restaurants did it with the dawn of fast food. Airlines and supermarkets are trying to do it now to fend off budget alternatives. But carmakers are not doing it. They are so obsessed with eco-twaddle and new propulsion systems that they are forgetting about the one thing that will keep us buying their products: excitement.

You get none from the car you see here this morning. It started out in life as the perfectly sensible but dreary Nissan Kumquat and was then turned, for accountancy reasons, into a Renault Kadjar. A name dreamt up by an agency when all the other names have gone.

No one is going to yearn for the day they own a Kadjar. No one is going to spend hours on a configurator, seeing what it would look like in orange or with bigger wheels. No one will search for it on YouTube. It will never be seen in a Fast and Furious film. It’ll never be an option in the Forza Motorsport video game. It’ll never be a poster on a small boy’s bedroom wall. There will never be a Renault Kadjar Airfix model, or a fast “R” version.

The Kadjar offers nothing that would make you buy one if you could use a Google Igloo instead. Both are soulless tools. But one is much, much cheaper.

I’ve singled out the Kadjar because that’s what I’ve been driving this week. But the same thing is true with most cars you can buy these days. They’re just an expensive, awkward hassle.

Of course, the car as we know it will survive. Niche manufacturers will soldier on, perhaps making luxury or speedy versions of the Igloo. And you’ll still be able to buy classics.

But I can assure you: many years from now, when people gather at a racetrack to give their old self-drive, self-owned, petrol-driven “cars” a bit of a blast, no one will turn up with a Renault Kadjar.

Renault Kadjar: Small SUV

Engine: 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder diesel

Outputs: 96kW at 4000rpm and 320Nm at 1750rpm

Transmission: Six-speed manual, front-wheel drive

Average fuel economy: 4.5 litres per 100km

Price:£24,795 ($51,800, N/A Australia)

Rating: 2 out of 5

Verdict: Another milestone on motoring’s road to oblivion