The 2003 Toyota ist has been our car for a year now. It has served us splendidly.

However, an irksome dialogue has arisen with a close personal friend, who owns a late model Mercedes G-Wagon he bought about the same time.

Incomprehensibly, he maintains that his Mercedes, which is really little more than a military box on wheels, as characterless as a school desk, is the superior vehicle.

I will save my friend public shame and embarrassment by calling him Canute, not because he has two wives or is cruel to Christians, but for his Vesuvian stubbornness, so similar to the infamous English king, who commanded the ocean to recede and saw it instead lap over him like gravy across a potato.

The Mercedes G-Wagon in all its various ever-developing models, can apparently handle itself equally well in war as in peace, a master-of-all-trades jack-of-none kind of car.

It costs about as much as a cheap house, though discerning car cognoscenti would probably defend this through its having three fully interlocking differentials.

I have no idea what this means. Personally, I am far more impressed with its blue backlit door sills, but I have always prized style over fully interlocking differentials.

Canute dredged YouTube dry to find evidence for the G-Wagon. I was forced to sit through a clip where the thing blasted its way through a brick wall.

The car they borrowed, Canute assured me, as if this was germane, belonged to Eric Clapton. I responded with the original YouTube clip I wrote about last year, where the 2003 Toyota ist catches a Japanese train so its driver can shout his love to a beautiful woman on the train, who promptly shouts her love back.

The G-Wagon may have the horsepower of 20 Melbourne Cup fields and a 5.5-litre supercharged V8 engine, but I bet it can't catch a Japanese train.

Canute was not beaten. He came back into the ring with a crazy-eyed car reviewer powering a G-Wagon through thigh-high liquefaction masquerading as a river, announcing to the camera that this car could survive nuclear war.

Ptoff!

I could have silenced him with photocopies of the speeding tickets my wife has had in this automobilical meteor, but two more subtle YouTube clips showing the male driver preferring the seat fabric to a desperate woman in the rain, and placing his spotless white jacket over the windscreen with pigeons hovering overhead, pretty much finished Canute off.

Toyota ist owners love their car more than anything else in the whole world.

Canute manfully conceded defeat, cognisant that his G-Wagon with seven-speed automatic transmission, low-slung side exhausts, 40 gigabyte hard drive, bi-xenon headlights, gangster-tinted windows and passenger seat with memory just couldn't compare to the ist and its deceptively large glove compartment.

However, my triumph was short-lived. I chanced to watch Top Gear two Saturdays ago, and the little dwarf on that show, Richard Hammond, the one who nearly died when his Vampire dragster crashed at 463kmh in 2006, was test-driving the G-Wagon.

Hammond marvelled at the vehicle's ability to be two-and-a-half tonnes ponderous but also bright and youthful. Just like an 80-year-old billionaire marrying a 21-year-old pole dancer, he said, they will both have a whole lot of fun.

Hammond pointed out Brad Pitt owned one, as if having Angelina Jolie wasn't enough, as did Britney Spears and the Pope. There is no party this car is not welcome at, shouted Hammond as he cruised through London's West End, liquefaction all wiped off.

In fact, he concluded, this is the coolest car in the world.

But yes, this was Richard Hammond. The Hamster.

I can only point to the last time he recommended something on our telly, the Telecom XT system, which turned out to be the most malfunctioning telephonic software ever installed in this country. I was an XT customer. Elephants and 2003 Toyota ist owners never forget.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.