A few weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, I drove down the A3 into deepest West Sussex. It was my first chance to take the car I’d just bought out of the city and on the back roads of the countryside.

It wasn’t new but buying second-hand meant I could have a car I had admired when it was launched five years ago.

That car was a Skoda Octavia Scout estate. I had attended the model's launch in Italy and was impressed by its combination of huge luggage space and genuine off-road ability.

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Perhaps it’s because I was a member of the original mountain bike generation (I bought my first MTB in 1984) but dual-purpose, go-anywhere-in-any-weather machines have always been my favourite type of transport.

Anyway, as I wound southwards on the A3, I enjoyed a timely reminder of the history of crossover vehicles. I passed a 1997 Subaru Forester (a car I had run as a long-termer when it was new), and was in turn passed by an early Volvo XC70, and the original Audi Allroad.

I well remember the launch of the Audi, held around the top of a mountain in Austria. The car’s combination of full-time four-wheel drive and air suspension made it supremely capable.

Only the launch model’s showy twin-wall alloys spoiled the day. The gap between the alloy’s spokes filled with mud and threw the wheels so badly out of balance that I thought the Allroad was going to throw itself off the road.

Anyway, back to West Sussex in my Octavia Scout. I was on the way to visit somebody who lives deep in a forest and at the bottom of a very long and very steep track, so what better car than my Scout? When I got to my isolated destination, I parked next to an Audi A4 Allroad.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. How else would the person I was visiting be able to drive up a long and challenging track to access the local village in all weathers?

Sure, you might say that very few people need the higher ride height and greater ground clearance crossovers and SUVs offer. I mean, who really needs an SUV?

Well, 'want' and 'need' are two very different concepts, as premium car makers will tell you. The truth is that the crossover and SUV market is booming in Europe. Figures for 2014 suggest that around 20% of all new car sales in Europe were crossovers and SUVs. It looks like this figure will climb to 23% of all new car sales in 2015.