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Martin Smith is the man who put the flared wheelarches on Gene Hunt's Ashes to Ashes Audi Quattro. It's a high-point on his CV, no doubt about it. Lured from GM to Ford a few years back, design overlord Smith - a cigar-chomping near 60-something - might just have topped that epochal achievement; with the Ford Kuga, he and his team have delivered the first 'crossover' that doesn't make me want to embark on a homicidal rampage.

God, I hate these things. The car business is one of capitalism's most savvy exponents, and much of modern Western capitalism consists of inventing stuff we didn't know we wanted or needed, and then marketing it to us so sneakily or intensively that we're left wondering how on earth we survived all this time without it.

Occasionally something comes along that is so brilliantly simple or maybe so beautifully designed that the world genuinely shifts a little on its axis: the iPod, for example. Or electricity. Other times, the free market goes a bit nuts and decides that flying en masse to some God-forsaken dump in eastern Europe no one's ever heard of for zero pence (plus taxes) is a really good idea.

It gets worse: Ryanair now charges you to put luggage on the aeroplane. Mind you, at least it can still manage that. BA seems to have forgotten how to.

And then there is the 'crossover'. Currently worth about 75,000 units per year in the UK, this rapidly expanding market sector is a dead cert to be doing 100,000 by 2010. That's 100,000 sort-of off-roaders, jacked-up family estates and, in the case of Nissan's Qashqai, front-drive hatches that think they're 4x4s (rather like the Matra-Simca Rancho did 30 years go).

So while everyone's at it, here's my basic rule: any car invented by the marketing department must be bad. Or at least approached with caution. Where should one start? In the literature that accompanies the launch of the Kuga, Gunnar Herrmann, C-Car vehicle line director for Ford of Europe, comments that the "Kuga has a 'can-do' attitude". Of course it does, it's a freaking car! It's been designed expressly to 'do' stuff.

If it had a 'can't-do' attitude it would be as much use as a chocolate radiator. Then there's the claim that this is an all-new addition to the Ford canon. Don't they remember the Maverick? Does anybody?

Whatever, there's no denying that Ford's design team - overseen by Mr Smith but also including the likes of Stefan Lamm and Chris Bird, both of whom are extremely astute designers - is on a roll.