Mostly, the world’s car makers realise that I’m a harmless piece of navel fluff whose opinions make absolutely no difference to their hopes and dreams. But occasionally, threatening noises are made if they think I’ve been unfair.

Once, many years ago, Renault in France told the people who run its operation in Britain to pull all its advertising from the BBC. “Zis will show zem,” said a red-in-the-face Jean-Claude, unaware presumably that the BBC carried no advertising.

And then there was Toyota, which, after I compared its 1990s Corolla, unfavourably, with a fridge freezer, refused to lend me any more demonstrators until I accepted it was, in fact, the best car in the world and as important as the second coming.

Vauxhall was similarly argumentative about its then new Vectra, and SSangYong in effect banned me from driving its cars in the first place. When I asked its PR man if I could borrow a Rexton recently, he said: “No. We have other priorities.”

If he’d been on fire at the time he took the call, I could understand this. Because, yes, finding a pool into which he could jump to put himself out would be a higher priority than talking to me. But other than this, I cannot think what might be a higher priority for a car-company PR man than fixing up a date when a motoring journalist could try out a new product.

Oh, and I can never forget a letter sent by the public-relations man at BMW to The Sunday Times saying that my dislike of BMWs had nothing to do with their drivers’ pushy attitude, their silly sunglasses, their awful short-sleeved shirts, their hair gel, their orange wives, their awful houses, their fondness for golf and their membership of the Freemasons, and everything to do with the fact I had a garage full of free Jaguars.

Mostly, though, all is calm. I don’t talk to the car makers. They don’t talk to me. I simply borrow their cars. I write about them. They go back whence they came and, whether I’ve been kind, indifferent or wrong, the world continues to turn.

All of which brings me on to the curious case of the battery-powered Tesla sports car that I reviewed recently on Top Gear. Things didn’t go well. The company claimed it could run, even if driven briskly, for 200 miles, but after just a morning the battery power was down to 20% and we realised that it would not have enough juice for all the shots we needed.

Happily, the company had brought a second car along, so we switched to that. But after a while its motor began to overheat. And so, even though the first was not fully charged, we unplugged it — only to find that its brakes weren’t working properly. So then we had no cars.

Inevitably, the film we had shot was a bit of a mess. There was a handful of shots of a silver car. Some of a grey car. And only half the usual gaggle of nonsense from me shouting “Power” and making silly metaphors. And to make matters worse, we had the BBC’s new compliance directive hanging over us like an enormous suffocating blanket. We had to be sure that what we said and what we showed was more than right, more than fair and more than accurate.

Phone calls were made. Editorial policy wallahs were consulted. Experts were called in. No “i” was left undotted. No “t” was left uncrossed. No stone remained unturned in our quest for truth and decency.

Tesla could not complain about what was shown because it was there. And here’s the strange thing. It didn’t. But someone did. Loudly and to every newspaper in the world. The Daily Telegraph said we’d been caught up in a new fakery row. The Guardian accused us of being “underhanded”. The New York Times wondered if we’d been “misleading”. The Daily Mail said I could give you breast cancer.

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