The American cars I love | Thank Frankel it's Friday

There was a double irony about that car, the first being that, in Buick’s eyes at least, there was nothing remotely ‘special’ about it at all. It was their entry-level full-sized car, just another lump of metal falling by the thousand off the end of the line. But actually, to me, someone who at the time had never driven a pre-war American car, it was very special indeed. I had no idea how good it might be.

My car coming of age happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s when almost all American cars were awful. The muscle car era was gone and the Americans clearly had no interest in nor understanding of the more compact, fuel-efficient tin boxes their legislators were forcing them to make. About 10 years previously when I was around 16, we’d done another East Coast trip, this time from Washington DC up to Cape Cod in a hired AMC Concord which my father maintained to his dying day was the worst car he’d ever driven. Sat in the back of it for all that time, noticing mainly that the speedometer ran out of numbers at 85mph, I understood entirely where he was coming from. To me, American cars were Pintos and Pacers, execrable machines from a country that had literally no idea how to build a decent one.

How wrong I was. That Buick was incredible. Here was an affordable, mainstream mass-produced family car that before the war came with a full synchro gearbox, independent front suspension and, would you believe, a straight eight engine to boot. No Rolls-Royce or Bentley of the era had anything like it. These guys were so far ahead of us back then, it saddened me to see how far standards had fallen by the time I first started to travel in American cars.

But I see I’m almost halfway through this column and I’ve not yet mentioned the car I intended to write about. You see, and for reasons I cannot remember, we took another car on that trip north from Florida which, in its own way, was just as charming as the Buick. It was a Chevrolet Suburban, an absolutely vast SUV powered by a 7.4-litre V8 motor. A ‘four-fifty-four’ as it’s known over there, thanks to its displacement in cubic inches.

This car had done at least a quarter of a million miles, and the interior looked like the owner had not bothered to vacate the cabin for the duration. In objective terms, there wasn’t one thing it did well: it didn’t ride, or handle, it wasn’t quiet and despite the enormousness of its engine, wasn’t even that rapid. It was just a big old barge, like any number of millions of other big old barges that plied the Interstates back then and still do today. This time, there really was nothing special about it at all.

And yet I loved it. It was great sharing the driving of the Buick with my father while a friend drove the Sub (it was always just the Sub), but I remember my time alone in the Chevy both more vividly and fondly, terrible to admit it though it is.

I don’t particularly regard myself as a rabid conformist, but I can barely put into words how much I enjoyed immersing myself in that experience: window down, left elbow on the sill, listening to local jazz and blues stations on the radio, or just the fabulous rumble of one of the largest, least stressed V8 motors in existence. In that moment I became someone else: a man without a care in the world, doing his thing, in his big, stupid truck and having a ball.

It's hard to explain, but it is all about the environment. If you parachuted the Sub into the Welsh borders where I live, I have no doubt I’d be appalled by its profligacy, excess and incompetence. But out there, traversing the southern states, it was as in its element there as is my Caterham here. And a point that needs making is that the Chevy would be very little worse on the little lanes around here than would the Seven on a twelve lane Florida Turnpike. Try imagining what a racehorse would be like around a dog track, or vice versa.

So often when people express disappointment in their car choices, I find myself wanting to ask whether they’ve bought a poor car, or just a car that’s poor for them, for they are not the same thing. It helps explain the ever-increasing popularity of coupe-cum-estate-cum-SUV crossovers that are now among the best-selling cars of all: they may not be good at anything at all, but nor are they conspicuously bad, so you’re unlikely to go too far wrong with one.

Which is a fair point I guess. For myself, I’d just rather a car that suited its environment to perfection, and put up with its flaws the rest of the time. A Caterham in Wales, a Suburban in Florida, a horse for a course, no less, and all the better for it.