Remember that recent advert from a French car manufacturer that basically showed that buying their people carrier was to buy a new family pet? The car tore around the gravel driveway, opening and closing its windows to the sound of a dog whining and flapping its rear windscreen wiper ferociously as if it was a tail. I uttered one word the first time I saw it: “stupid”. Yet the marketing bods knew what they were on about as I had a similar experience when a used Ford Ka entered my family’s lives.










