THE first car I bought was an Austin Mini and my mate had an Escort Mk1. The cars sometimes had a badge on them telling you the trim level, GL, GR, GT and you knew exactly what you were getting.

Today I read an article in Motors about a ‘Nissan Qashqai N-Connect dCI 110’ and had to read the whole article before I realised I still didn’t know what the badging represented.

My suggestion is that all cars carry a barcode on them instead of badging, so that we can scan them with our smartphone and then we could get a full explanation of the car and its specification. I must confess to being a bit of a petrol head and realise that most people couldn’t care less.

Robin Rutherford, Darlington