You don't need to be very old to remember when, if you wanted the mere sight of your car to upset other motorists, you had to spend a lot of money. A heedlessly expensive sports car would normally do it, though for guaranteed at-a-glance offensiveness you needed to go the whole hog and buy a Range Rover. And that could set you back upwards of £35,000. (Incidentally, it's Noel Edmonds's favourite vehicle.)
Recent years, however, have seen a dramatic democratisation in rubbing people up the wrong way with your car. Of the two major irritants in somebody else's car - bulk and flash - it is bulk that our age has particularly specialised in. Modern production methods and higher standards of living have rendered undue bulkiness more broadly accessible. With the availability of a whole new generation of competitively priced four-wheel- drive vehicles, really pissing people off has never been more affordable.
Bristling into the fray comes the new Nissan X-Trail, cousin of the truly epic-scale Nissan Patrol, a car used by the United Nations in trouble-spots and memorably gigantic. Some owners have had their Patrol for ages, yet there are still rooms in it they haven't been into. You won't get lost inside your X-Trail, which falls into the compact MPV category. But compact here has a slightly looser and jokier application than in common usage, and there's still enough room to get up, walk about and stretch your legs.
While you're up, you may care to mull over the aesthetic effect of Nissan's new dimpled seat fabric. A nice touch? Or too reminiscent of those pads of material you get beneath pre-packaged supermarket meat cuts? And you may wish to debate the appeal of a radio that displays "Goodbye" when you switch off the ignition. Cute? Or would it make you want to rip the appliance out of its cubbyhole?
Even though this is a shrunk Patrol, from the driver's seat the offside front corner is nevertheless distant, reliably converting any manoeuvre in a tight spot - entering a regular-sized space in a busy car park, dodging between the sheep on a cross-field drive - into a white-knuckle experience. Plus the rear of the car is in another county most of the time. I came to be grateful for the reversing sensor, which bleeps when you back into the vicinity of anything material.
Externally, the car has a solid, faintly steroidal presence - a dense front end, a plane of side-windows that would suit a mini-bus and high, thick, wheel arches that look as if they might withstand a mortar attack or a rhino charge. The Sport version bulks even larger, with a spoiler on the roof at the back for better aerodynamics and an increased Popemobile effect.
One of the X-Trail publicity photographs shows it skittering along a beach between giant plumes of sea-spray. Being unsure of the insurance position I never tried this in the one that I drove, but I did get to duplicate one of the other shots by leaving my X-Trail at the kerb outside a restaurant.
Of these two idealised images the latter seemed more in keeping with its likely destiny. You could stick it in the mud or churn off through a forest and the grip would probably be emphatic enough to get you out the other side without needing to phone for a tractor. But you'd probably want something a bit more robust if off-roading was your regular practice, and it's my hunch that the X-Trail will mostly be bought by people with children who need to be taken to school.
Of course, that's a mission fraught with its own suspension-risking complexities, and I have to report that the X-Trail and its 2.2 litre turbo diesel engine coped manfully with them all, proving largely immune to attacks from without (speed bumps) and within (children). Yet, as I barrelled along narrow roads, sucking up the air and taking up too much space, I sensed resentment welling in the world beyond the windscreen. The raised driving position comes across to the conventionally seated driver as flaunted superiority, a vantage point from which to look down one's nose on the rest of humanity. Cars like the X-Trail are the four-wheeled, bumper-clad embodiment of the "Child On Board" sticker - a red rag to a bull-bar.
Many people argue for these family tanks on the grounds that they are safer in a crash. This probably can't be gainsaid, though perhaps one ought to factor into one's deliberations the thought that one is far more likely to get smacked into, and to smack into things, in a four-wheel drive beast than in a conventional and innocent, two-wheel-drive saloon. And that some of the people smacking into one may be doing it deliberately.
