On one level, and one level only, the Hummer H3 is the best car of 2007. Because if you've got a blog to write, nothing else gives you as much to say as this car does.
Or gives other people as much to say. It arrived in the office and I got endless abuse from kind-hearted colleagues, who either just laughed or began wondering whether all sense and taste and decency had deserted me.
You see, the H3 - the baby of the range - isn't exactly cool in Top Gear's collective eyes. Some SUVs are, but this thing smacks far too much of George Bush and Arnie, or naff celebrities driving around in it simply because it's large.
But the reason I've been driving it is more scientific. You see, I'm convinced the H3 fills a genuine gap in the market, now that the Discovery has gone upmarket and posh.
Farmers and others of the like who regularly get a bit muddy don't have much choice for wheels these days. The Kia Sorento possibly, the odd pick-up, but everything else is too smart and expensive.
Except the H3. It's good off-road, relatively cheap and, as I discovered, very easy to clean. I had two wet dogs in it over Christmas, plus loads of people with muddy wellies, but all that cheap plastic which journalists slag off just wipes down. Looks as good as new now.
But there are things that stop it being snapped up by farmers. Chief of which is the engine. It's not as slow as I thought it would be, but rev it hard and it sounds like all the valves are about to make a swiss cheese out of the cylinder head.
And because it's petrol, fuel consumption isn't what it could be out of a diesel. GM needs to look at that badly if it really wants to sell more of these cars, which it must do if it bothered engineering it for right-hand drive.
But the final straw that convinced me that Hummer hadn't really thought about this car properly for what I reckon is an open market is that it doesn't get any mud flaps. Or at least I couldn't find any on the options list.
So, you clean it, drive down the road and it's as if you've just taken a trip through the River Ganges. All the mud spatters up the side, gets on the mirrors, gets in the door handles, generally gets everywhere where you don't want it.
Which is fine if you only drive it around clean urban streets, so I can see why they've done it because that's where GM has firmly aimed the H3.
Farmers aren't mentioned much in the marketing bumf. But there are much better cars for posing around town, much more socially aware cars for that too, but not much other stuff that'll do as a workhorse. Apart from anything else, I reckon I wouldn't have come in for so much abuse if the car was more honest about what it should be doing.
