Features

I have been in this business long enough now to remember when there were only really five different types of car - saloons, estates, sports cars, hatchbacks and Land Rovers.

Then along came the Renault Espace. At the time, I was working for a different magazine, and the editor became terribly excited about the Espace phenomenon. It was a whole new type of car, and it would change motoring for ever.

After that, it was only a matter of time before the 'niche model' was created. Soon, everyone was producing a supposedly niche model, and within a few years of that, every new car launched was touted as a new class of vehicle in itself. Pretty quickly, the whole business got out of hand.

Now look where we are. There are SUVs, sports SUVs, SUV-coupe crossovers, sports estates, four-door coupes, luxury pick-ups, soft-roaders, grass 'n' gravel leisure vehicles, lifestyle mid-size MPVs and pretty much a unique take on the motor car for every one of its potential owners.

"The distinctions between different classes of vehicle are becoming blurred," a Mercedes-Benz spokesperson once told me, at the launch of a small van it had fitted with windows and renamed the Vaneo, which was available in Dog specification.

So it may surprise you to learn I have identified a definite niche for a type of car that doesn't seem to exist, and all because I've been hanging around with photographers.

Now wedding photographers, with their crisply pressed morning suits and their belt-fed supply of dead funny jokes you've not heard at any other wedding, are one thing, and will drive an old Vauxhall. But the sort of photographer who takes pictures of cars for a living is a more complex marketing proposition.

The car photographer has a great deal of kit, and for reasons that aren't entirely clear in an age when six million photographic pixies are available on a mobile phone. He (it's never a woman, sadly) will also often have something called 'an assistant', who is the modern equivalent of the Victorian chimney sweep's boy and whose job is to fetch burgers and hold things.