WITH all the recent fuss about athletes using drugs, pumped-up cyclists and rugby players who lack only the green skin of The Hulk, has anyone noticed what has happened to our cars?

If Minis and Fiat Bambinos are not on steroids then I'm the next presenter of Top Gear. Have you seen these two formerly famous small cars lately? They are like Ron Mueck's giant babies, with the similar aim of provoking a kind of queasy awe.

There was a time when Europeans sneered at the United States not just over gun crime but their affection for "gas guzzlers". Bruce Springsteen in his blue-collar anthem celebrated: "Cadillac, Cadillac, long and dark, shiny and black, open up her engines let them roar, tearing up the highway like a big old dinosaur."

Meanwhile sophisticates on this side of the Atlantic produced ever smaller cars and were hurtling towards the promised day when we would travel by low-energy jet packs. Eventually, we welcomed the fact that Americans were catching up and when we travelled to Florida theme parks we could begin to hire "compacts" which bore some relation to what we drove at home.

That all feels a long time ago. There was a change in attitude when conspicuous consumption in areas such as Knightsbridge began to be demonstrated by the driving in cities of Range Rovers, essentially designed for use in the countryside and these were christened "Chelsea Tractors". Oh, how we laughed.

The rest of use were looking for increasingly economical vehicles, the better to bestow love and kisses on a benighted planet that needed all the help it could get to avoid global warming. Overcoming rocketing pump prices came into it too, along with soaring insurance bills and the advent of variable vehicle excise duty rewarding the cleanest vehicles.

But somewhere along the way this changed. A realisation that falling oil prices never quite fed through to the filling stations may have played a part. So, too, will have the use of inappropriate vehicles as ubiquitous "company cars" as a form of hidden pay award and prestige. Envious eyes appear to have been cast at the bigger vehicles on our roads and soon there were many Kelvinside and Morningside tractors too, which spread when the industry responded with mid-range vehicles that aped their big brothers. The Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) was born and since then its rise has been unstoppable.

A decade ago the danger at junctions, whether for other drivers or pedestrians, was the "hot hatch", a sporty versions of a simple small car. This hasn't gone away but now there's the SUV, the command of which from its superior turret appears to bring an attitude to match.

Now every single marque has a version of an SUV. I am not knocking that. People make legitimate choices. It can be good for squeezing the kids into, or better for the more mature driver to slide into. But that heightened driving position seems too often to carry a sense of entitlement, of being kings of the road.

It also seems to signal that we have thrown in the towel on climate change when people who will only ever drive on city streets feel the need of four-wheel-drive from within the confines of an urban tank.

The original 1959 Mini was a work of design genius by Sir Alec Issigonis, with its sideways mounted engine and tiny boot allowing four seats in a previously implausible space, the sliding (leaking) windows allowing a door pocket that was said to be designed to take a bottle of gin.

I learned to drive in my mum's Mini and on passing the test my first vehicle was an ageing Mini van (clue, it cost £100) and then another Mini, beige in colour with strange orange furry material for the dashboard and glove box (I have no idea why). My next purchase was a Fiat de Ville, a baby Fiat with a fabric sun-roof and black wrap-around bumpers. With the roof open and the windows down I may even have played Springsteen's homage to Cadillacs.

That early car ownership may explain why I feel somehow offended by these new, pumped-up manifestations of these classic marques. The plundering of the design genius of Issigonis's Mini or Giacosa's Cinquecento for superficial marketing reasons rankles.

Either design something new, or quietly improve something old, but don't bastardise a simulacrum of the original to create a bogus new monster. There, I've got that off my chest. I can retire to my new job presenting Top Gear.