Bulk buying a tall order

I'M afraid that what I have under my bonnet this morning is not a snarling V8 or a sophisticated new type of smooth and mellow hybrid drive. It's a bee.

I'M afraid that what I have under my bonnet this morning is not a snarling V8 or a sophisticated new type of smooth and mellow hybrid drive. It's a bee.

You may have noticed in recent years that the motorway network is being stalked by a fleet of traffic officers. They look like policemen with their high-visibility jackets and their moustaches and their blue-and-yellow four-wheel-drive patrol cars. But they are not.

They are employed by the Highways Agency to fill the gap left when the proper police abandoned the expensive business of patrolling the motorways and retreated to their desks.

The remit of the traffic officer is to get to the scene of a crash as fast as possible, ensure everyone is okay, clear the carriageway of debris and get the traffic moving again as quickly as possible. That sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it's a government scheme. So it's all gone wrong.

The other day there was a small bump on the M40. There were a few broken indicators and I think one of the cars involved had lost its numberplate as well. No matter. Everything was on the hard shoulder. All of the drivers were well enough to exchange addresses. Everything was fine.

But no. The traffic officer in attendance had decided the crash was so severe that all three lanes of the northbound carriageway had to be shut. So, as you can imagine, the tailbacks were horrendous.

When I got to London, I made some calls and found that on that one day it was not only the M40 that had been shut, but the M25, the M26, the M5, the M4 and the M6 had also been closed at different times due to various minor crashes.

I therefore telephoned the Highways Agency, which began by denying the M40 had been shut at all. Then it said that yes, two lanes had been closed. And it stuck with this until I pointed out I had a photograph of the total closure. Oh well, said a spokeschairperson, it might have been shut for 15 or 20 minutes but we wouldn't know about that.

What do they mean they wouldn't know about that? Do these people have any idea how much carnage is caused by shutting a motorway for 20 minutes? How can they think it's so trivial that it's not even worth reporting?

The Highways Agency actually says that congestion can have serious effects on our economy, our quality of life and (predictably) our environment. Damn right it can. Missed planes. Ruined meetings. Spoilt suppers. Boiled engines. Frayed tempers. And all of that is even before you get to the effects on just-in-time production and best-before sandwiches.

Of course, it's easy to see what's happening. The traffic officers will have been told time and again that their safety is the number one priority. And that if they are dealing with the aftermath of a bump, they should do everything in their power to ensure they are not knocked down. In some cases, this means they won't jump into a lake to save a drowning boy. On the motorway, it means they won't get out of their cars unless the road is shut.

Just listen to the traffic reports. Every day a major motorway is closed while some fat bloke with facial hair and a Napoleon complex picks up a lightly grazed door mirror from the central reservation.

The other day the M1 was shut nearly all day. The M4 in London has been closed on the past two Wednesdays. The A3 is hardly ever open. It's all getting completely out of hand.

In the past, a motorway was only ever shut because it was blocked by a truly massive pile-up. Now, though, I can't remember the last journey I made in which I wasn't wiggling through villages and suburbia to avoid closures. Closures that are only necessary for the safety of the traffic officers.

Here's an idea, then. Tell the motorway Wombles to stay in bed. This way they will remain safe and we can go back to the old days of having a bump and dealing with it ourselves without bringing the nation to it's knees.

And before we finish with the subject, what are they doing in 4WDs? The only good news about this is that since they're government-owned vehicles, it is now obviously all right for us mere mortals to go out and buy ourselves a 4WD as well.

And the choice we face is enormous. Porsche, Toyota, Land Rover, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi and the Americans. All can fit you up with something tall and thrusty and supposedly tough.

For the past week I have been mostly driving around in the new BMW X5. The old one was an ugly, American-made piece of nonsense that never really floated my boat at all. Sure, it was built to offer sports driving dynamics, but what's the point of that in a tall off-road car? It's like making vegetarian food that tastes of sausages.

You sense with the new one that some of that sportiness has been lost. For a kick-off, it's much, much bigger, and as a result, much, much heavier. And when you turn the key, the new 4.8-litre V8 engine doesn't so much zing as snuffle. I don't know what torque is, but I bet it sounds like a Mexican body-builder arm-wrestling a grandfather clock.

I have heard it said that the new version is nowhere near as nice to drive as the old one, but that rather depends. If you want to take it on a hillclimb or to Silverstone, then yes, I would agree. But for normal, everyday work, then no. The new one is better. It floats and cruises where it's predecessor would truffle and snout.

Annoyingly, however, the extra bulk makes it even more useless in town. I sometimes look at people in London squeezing up narrow streets in these massive cars and I think: Are you completely bonkers? Yes, you might need something big and tall for your monthly trip to the cottage in Suffolk, but for crying out loud, why put up with the misery for the other 320 days of the year? That's like permanently wearing a condom for the one day a month you might get lucky.

City dwellers should have a Mini and rent something big when they need to go away. I'm really talking here to people in the countryside who'll be delighted to hear the new X5 -- for the first time -- is available as a seven-seater. Although I should point out the seats in the boot are small, cost extra and ruin the boot space. So I wouldn't bother. If you need seven seats, you're still much better off with a cheaper Volvo XC90.

The X5, then, should still be viewed as a five-seater, and a pretty good one at that. But one day while I had it, I found myself sitting in a jam -- the A3 was closed again -- next to a Mercedes ML63, and I thought: Hmmm. Yet another American-made German five-seat off-road car. And given the choice, I'd take the Merc. It's better looking, smaller and that engine is just so joyously mad.

But of course, I wouldn't. What I'd actually do, without a moment's hesitation, is buy a Range Rover. You sit higher up in the big Brit, and because Land Rover does not make ordinary cars, there's no sense when you're on board that you're simply driving a taller version of a humdrum saloon. But you definitely get this impression in an X5, which feels like a 5 Series, and that means it doesn't feel particularly robust.

Worse. At one point I was forced onto a kerb by a bus driver who set off without looking -- surprise, surprise -- and instead of just popping onto the pavement, the Beemer simply gouged huge chunks out of its front offside alloy wheel. I would like to make the bus driver pay for this. Actually, I'd like to see one done for attempted murder. But either way, BMW's big rugged off-roader was damaged by a kerbstone, and that really shouldn't happen.

It makes you wonder. Next time the road ahead is closed, could you escape up the embankment and across the fields in an X5? I think not. But in a Range Rover you could. I know, because I've done it.