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Your choice of SUV should primarily be driven by your planned application of the vehicle and what you want from it. One of the elements of the term SUV' is the word Utility', which by definition, suggests that it's going to be used for some kind of work, so with that in mind, you should realise that the SUV market is hugely diverse. The largest difference between the extremes is each car's bias towards utility or comfort. It follows that the best off-road vehicle for the average consumer should possess as many qualities from both ends of the scale as possible.

The primary concerns of the individual consumer should be: Do I need to tow heavy trailers or even other vehicles? Should my vehicle be a hardcore off-roader? Do I need to carry up to seven people in limousine-standard luxury? Are features like safety, purchase cost, running costs and build quality important to me? Does it have to look good?

Personally, I have a very strong affinity with Landrovers - specifically the new Defender (now that they've replaced the engine with a Ford unit) and the old series 3. These, however are not all-purpose cars unlike most modern SUVs, they are almost exclusively agricultural tools which can also be used as cars. They don't have anything like the comforts you expect in a modern car and they're too noisy and slow for everyday road use but I like them simply because they're good, honest and unpretentious off-road vehicles. A 1976 series 3 Landrover was the first car I ever drove when I was about nine years old and when I drove a similar one recently, the wave of nostalgia it made me want to buy it.

However, tne of the best modern all-round SUVs I've test-driven in a while has to be the 2007 Mitsubishi Shogun. Let me explain:

The Shogun has been around for over twenty-five years and is now in it's fourth generation and though still familiar, it has undergone major changes. Mitsubishi prefer to call these changes "refinements" but have kept faithful to many of the features associated with the original Shogun concept from the early eighties.

The tested vehicle was a short-wheel-base Warrior variant with automatic/tiptronic transmission. Features included a mind-blowingly advanced Rockford entertainment package, which amongst other things, allows you to download your CDs to it's memory as MP3 files. The Warrior is also equipped with self-levelling Xenon headlights, a rear-view camera (this takes time to get used to but is highly useful once you learn to trust it), advanced touch-screen

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