The interior in the picture above is what you really want your MX-5 to look like. It’s the top spec model with sat nav and all the trimmings. Car Couture’s 1.8 SE, on the other hand, is basically basic.

Of course, £18,495 isn’t going to buy you an awful lot of two-seater roadster these days but you can at least look forward to fantastic handling and drivability in the entry-level version.

Perhaps we have come to expect too many features in our cars these days. The SE has been stripped back to the bare minimum and that takes some getting used to!

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the operation of the manual folding roof. Lowering the canvass is easy enough but raising the roof is hard work. It demands a certain amount of precision to to get the securing hook in the right slot. Perhaps most frustrating of all is that you can’t really do it without getting out of the car…