Are you in the north? And are you thinking of maybe moving down south for a better job and a better way of life? Well don’t bother, because it’s full. Last night I left the Top Gear test track in Surrey for the journey home. Simple. Go to Guildford, up the A3, round the M25, along the M40 to Oxford and then up the A44 to Chipping Norton. Do it all the time. Takes 90 minutes; less if I have some horsepowers.

Unfortunately, as I left the track a woman came on the radio to announce that some imbecile had crashed near Heathrow and that the M25 was all snarled up.

No big deal, I thought. It’s a lovely evening, the sun is shining, I’m in no desperate hurry and I’m in a Lamborghini Gallardo. I shall get the roof down and go home on the nation’s A roads. It’ll be like the olden days. I’ll feel like Christopher Plummer in his Battle of Britain MG. It’ll be fun.

It wasn’t. First of all, Guildford is a smallish town but evidently it has a population greater than that of Tokyo. And unlike London, where people work till six, seven, even 10 at night and the rush hour is prolonged, this is the provinces, where people leave the office at 5.30 on the dot. The result is as dramatic as a summer thunderstorm.

I arrived Guildford at 5.31, at the precise moment 8m IT consultants climbed into their BMWs and hit the road. It was a staggering, choking, infuriating, miserable crawl all the way to the A3 and I knew, as I joined it, heading south, that the M25, no matter how bad, would have been quicker.

Then I missed the A31 turn-off. Which meant I had to take the B3001 to Farnham. This is a nice road, snaking through some reasonable views and a couple of Ma Larkin villages. You might imagine, if you lived there, that you were in the countryside. But you bloody well aren’t because the road was chockablock. More crammed than a public bog in Algiers the day after Ramadan.

And because it was a lovely evening, some of the local cycling Nazis had slipped into a pair of Lycra shorts and, to get rid of the stresses of consulting an IT all day, gone out onto the road to get in everyone’s way.

It’s all very well thinking that your bicycle is only a foot wide and that there’s plenty of road for people to pass. But if we give you only a foot, you bang on our boot as we drive by and call us names. So we have to give you 3ft and we can’t because there’s a constant stream of traffic coming the other way, which means we’re forced to stumble along at 6mph with nothing to look at except your wizened, walnut hard, shiny black bottom jiggling about in front of us.

Then it was Farnham, which has a level crossing right next to a set of lights . . . that went red as I straddled the railway lines. I was therefore stuck, right in the path of the jammed-up commuter trains that rattle about at this time of day disgorging red-faced businessmen into their cars for the crawl home.

So I was forced to drive on the wrong side of the road – in a Lamborghini, which is not inconspicuous – and take shelter in a garage forecourt. So here we are, in 2007. I’m trying to get from Guildford to Chipping Norton, and I’m stuck on a forecourt, in the wrong town, sheltering from a train.

Eventually I arrived at the biggest roundabout in the world looking for signs to the next town on my list. Basingstoke.

There aren’t any. The council and the Highways Agency have decided instead to list a number of villages no one’s ever heard of. So, using the sun, I took a stab and miraculously ended up on the right road. Which, with no warning whatsoever, became the wrong road.

So then I was in a housing estate, stuck behind a school bus that was attempting to turn right. This might have been possible in the 1940s when there was a war on and no one had any petrol. But it isn’t possible now; not in the southeast of England – which, I learnt last week, would be the 11th richest country in the world if it were a state.

And no one got that rich by stopping to let a school bus past. So I sat there, with the metronomic dashboard clock ticking away my life, knowing that if I had set out on foot I’d have been home by now.

Eventually the bus oxidised and I was able to drive over it and back, through an industrial estate, on to the A287 to Basingstoke. Which I decided to miss by going along the A303 and then turning north onto the A34.

Now the A34 is a big road, a fast dual carriageway mostly and scene of those protests over the Newbury bypass. In essence, the town needed to divert traffic away from the town centre so there’d be fewer outbreaks of cancer, less smell, less noise, and fewer children being run over. But a chap with long hair, called Swampy, decided the bypass was a bad idea because it would mean having to rehouse some snails he’d found. So he made a lot of noise and lived in a tree.

Common sense, however, prevailed and the road was opened. But no one has thought to put up a signpost advertising its presence, which meant I was now on my way to Wiltshire. I like Wiltshire very much. The rolling chalk hills are beautiful at this time of year and there’s a chance you might catch a glimpse of Peter Gabriel.

But then again, I also like the south of France, northern California and the Italian lakes. I like lots of places but where I wanted to be was at home. So I pulled off the A303, only to discover that it was one of those junctions where you can’t get back on again, going the other way. This wasn’t signposted. It never is.

I wonder sometimes how much of the traffic on our roads today is made up of people in strange towns trying to make some kind of sense of the signs.

There’s one, in Olympia, in west London, that says the right turn ahead will take you to Clapham. Yes it will, but it will also take you to Earls Court, Fulham, Chelsea, Putney, Brixton, Brighton, France and the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Russia. Why single out Clapham?

Then there are one-way systems. The day before my four-hour trip across the southeast I was in Lyndhurst, down there in the New Forest. You arrive at a set of lights and want to go straight on, but instead you’re forced to go left, into a one-way system of such mind-boggling complexity and such length that halfway round most people pull over and try to will themselves to die. Well I did.

And have you been to Stroud? You arrive from the west and no matter what you do you end up in the railway station car park. And Basingstoke, where you are sucked off a dual carriageway, whether you like it or not, and wind up in a multi-storey car park. And you have to pay to get out again. How fair’s that?

And now this idiotic government is trying to build another God knows how many million houses in this part of the world to accommodate people from Albania and Huddersfield who think life in the southeast is a bath of ass’s milk. It isn’t. It’s a seething mass of superheated metal, tarmac, frayed tempers and decking. It’s a manicured pressure cooker, a forest of carriage lamps, up-and-over garage doors, and ego. It was full years ago, and they keep on cramming more and more people into it so that now it doesn’t work any more.

Yes, there are tiny pockets of peace and tranquillity. There are roads, too, where you might have fun with a car. But the only reason they are empty is because they serve no useful purpose any more. They were created by sheep but the sheep have gone, replaced now by – well, more sheep actually, with suits and ties and tennis lessons.

There is, if you live in this vast suburban sprawl, no point having a nice car. It’d be like living in Niger with a Gordon Ramsay recipe book. The ingredients just don’t exist, not on the roads you actually use to get about.

What you want, then, is something reliable and practical but so unutterably boring that you never feel inclined to open it up anyway. The Mitsubishi Outlander fits the bill perfectly.

Enough said.

Vital statistics

Model Mitsubishi Outlander Elegance 2.0DID

Engine 1968cc, four cylinders, diesel

Power 138bhp @ 4000rpm

Torque 228 lb ft @ 1750rpm

Transmission Six-speed manual

Fuel 40.9mpg (combined cycle)

CO2 183g/km

Acceleration 0-62mph: 10.8sec

Top speed 116mph

Price £24,766

Rating

Verdict A good car for going nowhere

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