Two weeks ago various national newspapers brought us the news that Aston Martin, a marque that has become a byword for elegance, exclusivity, speed, luxury, performance and James Bond glamour, is getting together with Toyota, a byword for picking up your shopping from Iceland, to launch the Cygnet, a new small “commuter concept” car. Built on the base of Toyota’s existing one-litre-engined iQ city car, it is likely to be available for less than £20,000.

The revelation caused havoc on the internet. The last time I looked, the relevant story on Times Online had 164 comments attached to it. But, despite this there has been, with the exception of a few jokes about penis extensions, almost no media follow-up on the Cygnet story. No newspaper leaders, no radio talk show discussions, no online polls. Why?

Well, part of the explanation must, of course, lie in there having been other news developments, not least President Obama’s alleged checking-out of a young lady at a G8 meeting. But the main reason lies, I think, in the divide between Britain’s metropolitan elite and Middle England.

I split my time between London and the West Midlands — travelling in between the two in cars that I review for a business magazine — and am constantly struck by the difference in reactions to what I’m driving. In short, people in the provinces are utterly obsessed with supercars, whereas people in London are not. I did the journey in an Aston Martin DBS (top speed 191mph) the other day, and whereas the vehicle barely attracted a flicker of interest in NW3, in Wolverhampton I doubt that I would have received a more lively response if Obama and that girl had been making out on the bonnet.

Indeed, to dismiss the online outrage against the Cygnet as the obsessive rantings of sad old petrolheads is to miss an opportunity to understand the psychology of Middle England. And on reflection I would say that there are five fundamental reasons why people outside the urban media bubble find the car so psychologically disturbing:

1. The Cygnet is misguided. Aston Martin’s stated hope for the car is that it will help the environment: the idea being that owners of its existing cars, which have CO2 emissions as high as 390g/km, conduct short journeys in a smaller vehicle with a CO2 emissions figure of less than 100g/km. But if you’ve spent £159,000 on a brand new, V12-powered, race-bred, two-seater, six-litre Aston Martin, you’re not likely to be the world’s most enthusiastic environmentalist, are you? Furthermore, if you’ve spent so much to own the vehicular equivalent of Megan Fox, you’re not going to want to collect your giro in something that resembles a tumbledryer on wheels.

2. The Cygnet is absurd. Aston Martin has described the car as “a realistic answer to the environmental question”, but the fact is that purchasing a car, any car, remains a profoundly ungreen act, and the only way in which Aston Martin, a company that was until recently promoting its Vantage model by picturing it surrounded by flames, at the foot of a melting glacier, could claim to be making a “positive” contribution would be if it stopped making performance cars and began developing wind turbines instead.

3. The Cygnet is futile. Finding a way of weaning the world off its addiction to the polluting internal combustion engine is the most important challenge of our times. Major car makers are rightly focusing on the task, and the public are finally waking up to the importance of the issue. But Aston Martin’s entire existence is based on making performance cars as thirsty as a football hooligan on match day. Frankly, the Cygnet is the equivalent of a lecture on healthy eating from John Prescott. Besides, the company makes so few cars that whatever it does in relation to the environment makes no difference.

4. The Cygnet is disingenuous. The car has been created for environmental reasons only in so far as Aston Martin needs to achieve a lower average fuel economy across its range as required by forthcoming European Union legislation. The real reason for its emergence is money. Luxury car sales are plummeting, the investors who recently bought the British marque from Ford need cash, and sticking the Aston Martin badge on a Toyota is a quick way of doing so. The man who runs the brand alluded to this when he told The Sun that “the Government should welcome the Cygnet and give some financial support to Aston’s efforts to reduce their carbon footprint”.

5. The Cygnet is sacrilegious. A great deal of guff is issued forth about brands and what they mean to people, but in Aston Martin’s case, as any boy who ever pinned up a picture of Bond’s DB5 on his bedroom wall knows, it’s all true. Most of the people who have complained about the car online have never owned or driven an Aston Martin, and could probably never afford to do so, but driving an Aston Martin is a standard, defining Middle England fantasy, and to attach it to something as instrinsically, well, Middle England as a small car is to kill that fantasy.

There is a paradox here. By complaining about the Cygnet, a lot of these Aston Martin aficionados are essentially talking themselves out of ever owning one. But they are also doing something noble: sometimes it is worth defending beauty, even if doing so makes it less accessible. While, with effort, I can think of cars that are almost as maligned — the 2001 Jaguar X-Type, described by Time magazine as “a tarted-up insult to a once-proud marque”, springs to mind — and of brand extensions almost as idiotic (a Harley-Davidson cake decorating kit and a Sylvester Stallone high-protein pudding spring to mind), the Cygnet is worse than all these things put together.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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