Toyota has started the next revolution for UK motorists

THE other day I got to try out a real technological groundbreaker – but it wasn’t a car.

Nope, I was playing Pong on an Atari – it wasn’t the first computer game, but it was the one that really caught the world’s attention. It seems weird to think that in 1972 playing a crude electronic representation of table tennis was at the cutting edge of killing time with a friend, but we wouldn’t have got to Angry Birds and Grand Theft Auto V without it.

On the way home from toying with Atari’s finest – and having a nostalgic test drive of Super Mario Kart on 1992’s Super Nintendo while I was at it – I overtook what I reckon must be the motoring world’s Pong on the motorway.

Time really hasn’t done the original Toyota Prius any favours. In the same way the Atari looks impossibly simple in a world where you download slick games straight to your smartphone, the original Prius looks positively prehistoric next to say, a Focus or an Astra of the same era. Then again, that’s the price you pay for being first out of the blocks with something new.

The Prius might look gawky now but it offered us the first chance to drive something other than a straightforward petrol or diesel – a hybrid - and it paved the way for today’s BMW i8s, Vauxhall Amperas, ‘h’-badged Lexus limousines and KERS-assisted Ferraris. Toyota now offers six different hybrids of its own, including a third-generation Prius that’s a lot more Call of Duty than Pacman.

But Toyota isn’t prepared to leave it at that. For as long as anyone can remember it’s been perpetually locked in a technological arms race with Honda, and both reckon the next big thing is fuel cells. In a nutshell, cars that can refill in an instant with hydrogen, somehow make it into electricity without any need to cue the Pathé newsreel of the Hindenberg disaster and then tootle along leaving only water vapour in their wake.

Honda’s already been at in the States with the FCX Clarity, and now Toyota’s taken a tentative leap into the British market with the Mirai.

The Japanese giant is playing it cautious – perhaps not surprisingly, given the £56k price tag and the almost non-existent hydrogen fuel network here at the moment – and you can tell by its slightly edgy styling that it’s going to be another machine that’ll date horrifically.

Chances are you won’t be ordering one of the first cars off to roll off the boat this month – not when it costs nearly twice the price of a Range Rover Evoque – but you’d be a fool to bet against it.

Toyota and Honda are bankrolling fuel cell cars, and they’ll be everywhere in 15 years’ time. The Mirai will look crude in no time, but the revolution’s got to start somewhere.

Not everything about the Calais crisis is bad news for motorists

CALAIS used to be about cheap booze and going on holiday. Yet you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s now a rolling news story rather than somewhere you wave your passport.

I’ve just got back from a long weekend of driving on the continent and I’m glad I sailed out of Harwich rather than Dover. The seemingly endless footage of lorries parked end-to-end on the motorways and Gendarmes arresting people desperate to sneak into Blighty doesn’t exactly do the idea of nipping over to France any good.

It’s a horrible situation, and certainly not one that’s down to the Border Force chaps on either side of the Channel; if the grilling they gave a colleague and I for attempting to depart Dover in a smoky old Austin Allegro was anything to go by they’re definitely on the ball.

I’ll let the cabinet ministers, the frustrated truckers and the readers of The Daily Express argue about the one thing ruining motoring holidays more than anything else this summer – but it’s not all bad news. One thing that’s come out of it is a nifty invention that could have all sorts of motoring implications.

The Freight Transport Association – an organisation that represents about half the nation’s truckers – is encouraging Scania Man to fit his lorry with a carbon dioxide detector before chugging into Calais. The idea’s a simple one – as we all chuck out a bit of CO2 every time we inhale the gadget will let you know if anyone’s stowed in the back, helping you avoid a £2000 fine. Clever stuff, and the car world should be taking note.

Suppose your slightly dotty relative leaves Fido in the car while he pops into the shops. Normally if it’s a sunny afternoon our canine chum would be in trouble, but the carbon dioxide detector used to help those frustrated lorry drivers could save the day. If a car was fitted with one that worked in conjunction with its temperature sensors, it could detect the doggy distress and lower the windows before it’s too late.

There’s more. Suppose you leave your car overnight and it gets some unwanted attention. If the car detects the carbon dioxide of an intruder it could immobilise and alert the police. Alternatively, it could lock them inside and set the stereo to play Chesney Hawkes’ 1991 hit The One and Only on a loop as punishment.

Obviously, it would need to be cleverly programmed to work alongside all the other gizmos you get in the Astra, the Golf and so on – but if cars are clever enough to park themselves then they’re definitely clever enough to know if a dog or burglar is inside when they shouldn’t be.

Sadly it probably won’t solve all the grief at Calais but – and I hope I’m right on this one – it might save your canine chum in years to come.

The C4 Cactus is far from perfect - but at least you remember it

EVERYONE has a favourite Citroen. Whether you ask your mum or your best mate – or even your best mate’s mum – I reckon anyone with even an ounce of car awareness can reel off at least one of the French firm’s offerings.

It might be a rustic old 2CV or a swoopy DS. Perhaps it’s that Saxo VTS you once cheekily handbrake-turned in an empty car park, or the BX your slightly wacky relatives used to run around in. The fact you can probably recall at least one means Citroens are memorable – imagine if I’d asked you to name your favourite Kia instead. Struggling a bit?

Yet the legacy of those great cars is a manufacturer that’s forever trying to overcome a bit of an identity crisis – which is why for every wonderfully weird Xantia there’s usually a crushingly boring Xsara that almost seems to say “Sorry, we got a bit carried away earlier”. Every brief bit of brilliance seems to get hauled in with a succession of me-too models nobody remembers.

Take the C4. I loved the original, with its steering wheel boss that just floated in the upright position no matter which way you turned and the Honda CRX-esque proportions and sharp snout of the three-door model, but I can’t even remember what the current model looks like.

Which is probably why the spin-off appears to have wheels stolen from the set of Space 1999 and two giant Dairy Milks glued to its sides. The C4 Cactus is wilfully weird.

There is a genuine reason for it having those squishy, moulded blobs – park up in a tight space at the supermarket and you won’t return to find a Range Rover Evoque’s door has left a dent in yours. It also looks great despite the bonkers detailing, packs a phenomenal amount of legroom and headroom into a small(ish) space and it’s easy to drive.

The interior is as wonderfully avant-garde as the exterior – particularly the way the glovebox has been made to look like a trendy briefcase. I’m not so keen on its other trendy feature – the decision to operate every conceivable control through an iPad-esque screen. Not only does it rob the rest of the cabin of buttons and switches but it’s so fiddly, complicated and irresponsive it was actually distracting to use.

That’s before I get to the Blade Runner-esque digital dash readout that doesn’t have a rev counter, the boot lip that’s a bit too high up for heaving heavy bags of shopping and the over-assisted, feel-free steering – but I’ll forgive the irritating foibles because I like the Cactus.

In a motoring landscape where generic hatchbacks with badges like EcoBland plastered across their rumps the Cactus is a breath of fresh air. It might not be my favourite Citroen, but it’s a car you can’t forget in a hurry.

MG needs to get back to its sports car roots

OPAL FRUITS, Stephen Fry’s tweets and Top of the Pops. It’s funny how you only really start appreciating some things when they’re gone.

In fact, I’d like to add the MGF to that list. It's roughly 20 years since its launch  – and the more I think about it, the more I realise its absence is a fairly significant bit of Britain’s automotive armoury missing.

Okay, so it wasn’t perfect. If I had a pound for every armchair critic who dismisses the ‘F for blown head gaskets I’d have enough to buy a replacement Rover K-Series engine, but much more serious were its poor showings in customer satisfaction surveys when it was new. Oh, and Anthea Turner was a proud owner.

Yet despite Anthea’s best efforts Britain loved the ‘F – in fact, for a brief stint it actually outsold Mazda’s MX-5 – so for more than a decade it acted as the nation’s fun, inoffensive sports car of choice. Just like the MGB did a generation earlier.

Where is the modern equivalent? It’s the middle of summer, there’s a generation of company car drivers given allowances rather than mid-range Mondeos by their fleet managers – and what I suppose would be called the MGG is nowhere to be seen.

MG is alive and well, but it should be hunting on the territory it used to call its own as well as targeting the Hyundai-peddling masses.

I drove an MG3 last year and it was frugal and fun in an old-school, Citroen Saxo-ish sort of way. I suppose – and feel free to raise your eyebrows at this one – it does sort of live up to the legacy left by the old MG Metro. Fair enough, but what I reckon the world really craves is another proper MG, the sort you can pop the roof down and enjoy when the sun’s shining, and hole up in the pub and discuss breakdowns when it isn’t.

The MGF’s old rivals – the Fiat Barchetta, the Toyota MR2, the Alfa Spider and so on – are all gone, leaving the MX-5 as just about the only option left if you want a small, fun, inoffensive sports car.

Now is the time for MG’s Chinese masters to make it happen, but chances are they won’t. Don’t get bored with waiting – chuck a grand at a cheap MGF and remind the world what it’s missing.