Starting up my comically enormous, seven-seater Cadillac SRX the other day, I was startled to read the following electronic message on the dashboard: "Theft Attempted."
Dismayed, I got out and gingerly inspected the car for the usual telltale signs of a botched entry - screwdriver wounds to the paintwork, a rear window bashed into granules with a half-brick, crowbar marks around the door frame - all the while beginning to rehearse the apologetic conversation I would have to have with the nice people who loaned us the car.
Nothing, though. Not so much as a fingerprint. No one had attempted to steal the car at all. At worst, I suspect, a lorry had passed a little close, setting off the motion sensor - a verdict I grew increasingly confident about when the "Theft Attempted" sign appeared three more times that week.
How this lane-straddling, high-end SUV got to be so flouncingly self-important and alarmist, I don't know, but a car can't just go around crying, "Thief!" Quite apart from anything else, it calls into question the desirability of its driver's neighbourhood, which could, if the word got out, have an unlooked-for depreciative effect on property prices. And then one day someone really will try to thieve the car, and no one will believe it.
Or maybe not. An uncharitable thought occurred: who in their right mind would pinch an SRX? From its aggressive, four-square front end all the way back to the weird extrusion of its tinted-glass boot - something seemingly from another vehicle altogether, possibly the Space Shuttle - this is one ugly lump of bus. Probably only the Audi Q7, the Porsche Cayenne and the legendary SsangYong Rhodius presently out-gargoyle it in the mobile carbuncle stakes.
And, having stolen it, where would you hide it? The SRX is only marginally smaller than Bristol. It doesn't call for a garage; it calls for an out-of-town industrial estate. From the front, the unusually roomy third row of seats is but a distant memory. One morning I set out to walk right round the car, but gave up about halfway.
Which may be just another way of pointing out that the SRX is formidably American. The steering wheel is on the right, but the sat nav speaks with an American accent, the temperatures are in farenheit and the ride is royally spongy. The car would fit right in on the highways around Denver, but felt kind of silly in Colliers Wood.
It's all about living large, though, and there are few cars larger. This is the chariot for lower-division footballers who can't quite run to the 6.2 litre Escalade, the thunderous, road-hogging king of the range. And, needless to say, it drinks petrol like it's going out of fashion - which, unfortunately, it is.
When the car wasn't trying to persuade me that it had recently seen off a mugger, it was keeping me up to date with its average fuel consumption which, in the city, dropped to a truly wallet-weakening 12.3 miles per gallon. I lowered £30-worth of unleaded into the SRX's well-like tank at one point, and I swear it was nearly all gone by the time I got home from the filling station.
Staggering. Unless... you don't suppose someone stole it, do you?
