Karl wonders just how many niches automakers can really create

Audi announced last month that it would be building the Q1 in 2016, and has labelled it a compact SUV. Considering the Q3 is a compact SUV, does that make the Q1 a compact, compact SUV? Or just a really small SUV? What it actually means is the Q1 sits somewhere in the middle of a small hatchback and a tiny SUV. But trying to label it presents a problem.

Years ago you could definitively place a car into a segment and that would be where it served its days. A large car was a large car. As in big. A small car was, as the name suggests, a small car. Luxury cars were vehicles you couldn’t afford and sports cars belonged on posters adorning 10-year-old boys’ rooms.

Remember the term four-wheel-drive? Or even the tag ‘4x4’? A car was either a four-wheel-drive, or it wasn’t. It could either go off-road, or it couldn’t. Now, there are SUVs which can tackle the rough, and there are SUVs which are kerb-hoppers. And, even more stupidly, there are SUVs which are front-wheel-drive only.

My test car over the December break is the Chevrolet Trax (yeah, I know, lucky me). It’s labelled as a compact SUV. If we play the semantic card, then it’s a small sports-utility-vehicle. There is nothing, NOTHING, sporty about it. And, unless it’s carrying passengers, there’s not much utilitarian about it, either. It’s front-wheel-drive, which is bad enough, but then you notice at the bottom of the centre stack it has hill-descent control. Seriously? On a tiny FWD wagon? I can see it now; a mum with her two kids is heading home from a shopping trip when, shock, horror, the road starts to slope downhill slightly. Yep, time to press the most pointless button ever fitted to any car ever made to save you from rolling away too fast.

And then there’s the BMW X1. Here is the worst built car in the BMW range but because it’s labelled an SUV, it walks out the showroom doors in droves. It’s ugly, tiny, can’t tow anything and would faint at the sight of pebble.

How many niches of SUVs do we really need? What next, a Fiat 500 made into an SUV? Oh, that’s right, they’ve already done that. What about a Mini SUV? Yeah, done already, too. So, really, we’re just waiting on someone to create a Toyota IQ SUV, right?

Just jacking up a car by 25mm doesn’t make it an SUV. It’s just a slightly taller wagon. If it has all-wheel-drive and can head down a boggy stretch of beach without burying itself, then fine, call it an SUV.

Otherwise, just label it for what it is: A huge marketing exercise in seeing how much of a sucker some people are for an image.

Obviously, there’s a few of them out there. Audi’s built a whole business case for the Q1 around them.

That way, people will get what they want to pay for.