We just don’t have Germany’s automotive depth — one in six German jobs is car-related — and when it comes to just screwing cars together, we are very high-cost compared with the Far East, Mexico and many other places. We have a small proportion of world research-and-development spending and we have virtually no Tier one.

On top of that, the goons in HM Treasury don’t believe in manufacturing. In the teeth of the catastrophic failure of financial services, they still believe that is where our future lies. David Smith chooses his words carefully on this matter.

“A lot of people in the Treasury still believe the basic terms of trade aren’t going to work for manufacturing because of labour costs, and therefore the temporary weakness of the City is a fluctuation that will come back again. That is what most people in HMT believe. I’ve always believed in technology and I find it so frustrating.”

Max Warburton is blunter. “The government approach is to consider the auto industry as a dying industry not worth supporting in anything like its present form. They may be right…”

Lord Mandelson, to his credit, has made the strongest statements from a politician in support of the car industry for decades. “The health of the automotive industry,” he said in January, “is vital to the strength of manufacturing in Britain and is at the heart of many of our regional economies… In Britain, we need to be at the leading edge of the development of low-carbon vehicles and green manufacturing.”

But the unspoken orthodoxy in the Treasury, where the power lies, is that we should all go back to dealing dud derivatives dished out

by banking shysters. The danger is, of course, that we’ll end up with neither the City nor manufacturing. “We need to be asking,” says Andy Palmer, a British engineer who is corporate vice-president of Nissan in Tokyo, “what we do if we don’t have financial services and we don’t have manufacturing.

We can’t all be hairdressers, right?” Right.

The Treasury resisted the “scrappage” scheme — subsidising owners of very old cars to buy new ones to help the industry through the recession — but somehow Mandelson got it into the budget. It was one small victory.

So where do we go from here? First, it is necessary to ask: what is a “car”? Leaf through — don’t buy, they’re expensive — a load of car magazines at the newsagent. You will find they are surprisingly similar. The first half-dozen pages and a large chunk of the inside will be about machines called “cars” but which, in practice, almost no real people ever drive:

Aston Martins, Bugattis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces and so on. The cheapest of these automotive aristos is “north of”, as they say in the business, £100,000, and some are not far south of £1m. “When it comes to the cover,” says Phil McNamara, the editor of Car magazine, “I’ll always go for an aspirational car from the right brand. This often means the Germans — Porsche, BMW and Audi. However, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin have a strong following. It reflects the automotive hierarchy: Germans at the top, the Brits a little behind them, and the Americans nowhere to be seen.”

Mostly these “cars” go very fast, and it is their combination of speed, power and cost that is celebrated by the boys and their toys on Top Gear. In the real world they represent a tiny fraction of the total car market; if this sector were wiped out tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference either to the industry or to the environment. Yet, in the imaginations of all boys and surprisingly many girls, these weird and impractical machines are what cars really are. The importance of these imaginary machines is that they reinforce the idea that the car is a product like no other, something integral to the self-perception of its owner.

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• Porsche

• BMW

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• Audi

• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

• VW