What the hostile public doesn’t know about my hated gas-guzzler is that it is nigh on impossible to resell. I have been advertising it in Exchange & Mart for eight weeks now, reducing the price weekly — and there has not been a single call from a tyre-kicker in the whole of the UK. I bought it nearly new for £13,500 just over a year ago, and the most I’ve been offered is £6,000 by a dealer. Not much change from that to buy a fuel-efficient estate car.

One reason may be that my model of 4x4 has been called dangerous. A Californian woman sued the US manufacturer successfully for £200 million after her 4x4 rolled over four times when she swerved to avoid a metal object, leaving her paralysed from the waist down.

Kevin Clinton, head of safety at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says: “In the US, more than one third of fatal crashes with sports utility vehicles are rollovers. American safety organisations attribute this to their high centre of gravity and the likelihood of the roof being crushed during the rollover.” My car comes from America.

So, what led me to buy the vehicle in the first place? Like many women who agree to drive off-roaders on the school run, I thought, mistakenly, that it was safer than the average car. On the arrival of newborn twins, it was time to get a bigger car to accommodate double buggies, highchairs and travel cots.

The feeling of vulnerability when you hold a newborn in your arms would make most women consider a Challenger tank as a suitable family car. The reassuring clunk of my vehicle, an “up car”, as my four-year-old then called it, had all the protective and cosseted warmth of a womb. I had yet to learn the statistic that 4x4s were three times more likely to kill a pedestrian because of their extra bulk and height.

Indeed, it was only when parking the car next to a meter, as I slipped the gear stick into second instead of park, that I had an inkling of its power.

As the car accelerated suddenly from a near halt, it rammed the Toyota Corolla in front of me, nearly mounting the bonnet in a sudden burst of off-road excitement. As the bewildered owner rushed out of a nearby shop, I began to shake when I saw the damage I’d done. His car was a write-off; mine had nothing more than a cracked number plate.

But it was the environmental damage the car was doing that led me to put the ad in the paper. Though my vehicle is not as bad as, say, the Mercedes-Benz G500, pilloried recently in a “list of shame” produced by France’s Agency for the Environment and Energy Management as the most environmentally harmful car in Europe, it was still a sports utility vehicle, and SUVs made up 14 of the 18 cars on the list.

Once you learn that they emit four times more carbon dioxide and particles than more environmentally friendly vehicles, keeping your children safe in them feels like storing up trouble for their lungs in future. My hypocrisy hit home when I joined a peace march in New York, and was handed a banner saying “No War for Oil”. My car was practically as culpable as George Bush for starting the war.

But was I to blame? I was involved in the car-buying process, but it was my husband who had come home with the “up car” brochures rather than the people-carrier printouts — two of which (the Renault Espace and Ford Galaxy) were hailed as the safest cars in the country by a study from government scientists of 180,000 accidents last year.

When I mentioned buying a people-carrier, my dearly beloved muttered something about them “handling like a broken supermarket trolley”. He said his “life would be over” if we went PC and he had to drive around in one. So while I was getting stick for driving a Chelsea tractor, how many men were responsible for putting them on the road in the first place?

Steve Straddling, professor of transport psychology at Napier University in Edinburgh, confirms my view that it is boy wonderlust that makes a 4x4 such a fantasy purchase: “Our studies show that females are more likely to put safety and security first when buying a car, while males go for performance characteristics.”

Husbands promote the idea of the 4x4’s safety to their wives while secretly imagining themselves scaling mountains and crossing rivers.

Whatever the fantasy, the reality of selling them is another matter. The elevated driving position makes most ordinary drivers feel that you are, literally, looking down on them, and often enough you are a target of abuse.

Nobody likes not being liked, and the 4x4 is a hated vehicle. Still, if you’d like to fly in the face of popular opinion and buy it, there’s just the one lady owner — fed up with being given the finger at traffic lights.

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