Motor Mouth: The pleasure and the plain

The Toyota MR-2 is not the car for the man who has everything. In fact, it is the car for the man who has nothing at all. Sparing a couple of exiguous and inaccessible plastic bins behind its two seats, the MR-2 has no storage space. You could, if you laid it out carefully, store a solitary unlined linen jacket in the front boot. Other than that, it's the toothbrush of myth and nothing else.

So, it is not a car for doing long journeys that connect different destinations, unless you are the unusual sort who maintains a national network of wardrobe and toilette facilities. It's a car for short, circular journeys. Not even business trips: if you have a companion, there's no room for a document wallet or a laptop. It's hard to know where to put a newspaper.

Intended solely for the discreet pleasure of driving, Toyota's new roadster is in very competitive territory, because the only other cars that make that claim are Ferraris and even the most extreme of these has space for soft luggage and the Herald Tribune. There is another difference, however: the Toyota costs a fifth of a Ferrari Modena. Is it one-fifth of the value?