Would suit:
Misanthropes.
Price:
£47 725 (about 676 000).
Performance:
250km/h, 0-100km/h in 7.4sec.
General fuel consumption:
13.64 litres/100km.
I've never felt embarrassed behind the wheel of an Audi before. Cool? Yes. Sophisticated? Often. Smug? Perhaps just a little, but squirming in a "Please understand this isn't my car they made me drive it" kind of way? Never.
But I felt thoroughly ashamed driving around in the new Audi Q7. It's not just the sheer scale of the thing that made me cringe when it arrived outside my house and dwarfed all the other cars - even some of the buildings - while blocking the light from my neighbours' lounge.
Even worse was the Q7's menacing face. It's a scary-looking machine, the Q7; the kind of car you would imagine boxing promoters, old-school Tory MPs or slum landlords might drive; a car that says "screw you" to the world.
You have to wonder what other kind of people would want to send out such a message to the rest of humanity?
Well, I'll tell you what other kind of people: for a start, people who believe they and their family will be safer in a larger car, and what's wrong with that? The instinct to want to protect your family is natural and entirely honourable and it's an instinct that the automotive industry has been all too keen to exploit in the last decade or so.
It seems logical to assume that the bigger the car, the better protected your loved ones will be. And they don't get much bigger than the Q7 - actually, they don't get any bigger than the Q7, which is even larger than its distant relatives, the Porsche Cayenne and VW Touareg.
More than once when driving it I did wonder if I ought to follow the signs to the "heavy goods vehicles" parking at motorway service stations or use the coach park at a National Trust property we went to.
Signs warning of weight-sensitive bridges were also cause for a momentary flutter of concern.
The trouble is, in recent EuroNCAP crash tests, the Q7 only scored four out of a possible five stars and the same for child protection (Audi says it has since sorted that, but still...). Citroën's C4 Picasso, which also seats seven, scored a full - these days, fairly routine - five stars in the same test.
So that's the safety argument out the window.
Who else is going to buy them? Short men, perhaps; or posh, scared women; or maybe men who have suffered genital mutilation in the workplace and have been given one as compensation (James Bond?). Oh, yes, and people who live next door to Touareg owners.
Paragon of quality
That's a bit of a shame, really, because, if we regard the Q7 objectively for a moment, behind the Gorgonesque façade there's a sensational machine. I drove the 4.2-litre, V8 petrol version (three-litre V6 diesel also available, a 3.6 V6, V8 diesel and V10 in 2007) which was very quick and remarkably controlled.
This is an almost 2.5-tonne car that's nearly as tall as a Harlem Globetrotter yet it handles like an A6 estate. Only slightly vague brakes let it down. Meanwhile, the interior is the usual paragon of quality and elegance that one expects from Audi, although its rear sixth and seventh seats should be labelled "children only" and, when erect, leave a piddling amount of boot space.
But brace yourself: the Q7's main rival, the new BMW X5, is about to be launched. It will almost certainly be larger still but I do at least hope it has a happy face. - The Independent, London