Rachel Reeves did her best on Wednesday to tax the living shit out of every living Englishman. (The Scots, Welsh and Irish are mainly unemployed or on benefits so don’t count for tax purposes). So why is it that when I try to buy a Mercedes AMG One, they’re all sold out? I thought I’d have more luck with a Ferrari F80, but the whole lot, all 799, are pre-sold. And yet both these cars are over 2.5 million quid. And furthermore, both are ‘simply’ their Formula One engines wrapped up in something just about street-legal.

So first and foremost there are ‘cars’. They can be quite fast, quite low, quite special, but until they become quite expensive they can’t be ‘supercars’. I suppose to be proper ‘supercar’ it needs to be pretty noisy too. No-one wants to pay 120 grand for a silent, battery-powered anything. You CAN have batteries AND electric motors and maintain your supercar status, but these MUST be to supplement a petrol engine of immense power and noise. And horses. Read the rules.

But then, for some people, having a ‘normal’ kind of Ferrari or a ‘low end’ McLaren, even a beefed up Porsche or Lamborghini, is not quite enough. Oh, its enough ‘car’ and more than enough ‘power’ but the price tag is simply not eye-watering enough to elevate it beyond ‘supercar’ status into a ‘hypercar’!!! The first of which, really, was the Bugatti Veyron. The world’s first 1000 horse-power vehicle. Basically they stuck two VW engines together with glue and spent five years inventing a clutch that didn’t burn out when you tried to leave ‘neutral’. Then we had Paganis Koenigseggs and all sorts of other ‘hypercars’, all getting up to, or just beyond, a million quid.

So what do we call a car north of two-an-a-‘alf million producing 1000+ horse-powers and pretty undrivable on anything approximating ‘a road’? We could call it simply ‘unaffordable’, even ‘stupid’, but we need… a name… we need a… Warp-speed-car!!!, we need a MEGAcar!!!! We need a car that only tax-avoiding, not-working-people with big garages who probably have a chauffeur anyway- car.

Or, you can buy one of these. A Batmobile. A real one. A ‘tumble car’, powered by a G-wagon engine, of course, why fuck about? It also costs about 2.5 mil but oh my it would be the most fun you could have just before you get arrested for driving a completely non-legal car on the road. And terrorising old ladies in Nissan Micras (which I would), scaring the local squirrel population (which I definitely would), and causing noise, as well as most other, pollution. If you want to take your wife out, you need to get her her own one, cos it only has one seat.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx