After sacking me from my magazine editor’s job, the managing director ran through the details of the exit deal. She clearly expected me to have a long list of demands. I had only one: I wanted to keep the company car for six months.

It was, you see, the best company car in the history of company cars.

I had stumbled across it soon after my appointment as I wandered aimlessly around the backstreets near the office. Tucked away in a small mews was a specialist sports car dealership. And there it was: a jet black 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider.

And it was a convertible. God knows why the company let me buy it instead of something sensible. But they did.

I thought of that moment – and that thrill – when I read yesterday that convertible cars are on the way out. If you look at the list of models being produced by the UK’s top 30 car manufacturers, you’ll find only 16 convertibles on offer. There were 12,173 convertibles registered in 2024. Twenty years earlier, it was 94,484.

After I left work on the day of my ignominious defenestration, I went home and told my girlfriend to pack. ‘I’ve been fired. Let’s go to Scotland,’ I said. We ended up in Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands after the best drive of our lives. In contrast to the toxic atmosphere of my now ex-office, the summer breezes could not have felt fresher, nor the road more open.

Let me tell you about that car. By modern standards, it was barely driveable. No power steering: it was like a gym workout just going around a bend. It had a hardwood steering wheel. Air bags? I don’t think so. The engine took ages to warm up. But once it did, it made a deep growl like a wild animal pining for the Dolomites.

You had to take the shell-like roof off by hand and store it in the boot. Who cared about luggage? But once we were driving, the postal districts of inner London became our own personal Riviera.

We were back in Ullapool a few weeks ago. We’d got there in supreme comfort, driving our Jaguar SUV, listening to our podcasts and playlists. But it was boring. The A9, which rivals the A303 in Wiltshire as Britain’s most frustrating road, was as bad as ever.

But 35 years ago in the Spider it didn’t matter. Whether you were going 30, 40 or, um, something a bit higher, driving that car was always a thrill. A study by Fiat (well, it wouldn’t be Volvo, would it?) found that ‘convertible drivers experience a significant increase in hedonic tone (a measure of happiness) and a reduction in heart rate variability, suggesting decreased stress’.

So why are we falling out of love with these marvellous vehicles?

SUVs get the blame for everything, including the death of the convertible. It’s certainly true that driving my old Spider was like flying in a Tiger Moth compared to the Business Class experience of my F-Pace with its climate control, electronic seats and lordly driving position above the roofs of old-fashioned saloons and roadsters. But I think the roots of the convertible’s demise go far deeper than that. Our whole relationship with the car has changed.

The driving part is almost incidental. Cars have become an extension of our homes – we listen to our podcasts in the front, the kids on their iPads in the back.

We are hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Compare that to being in a convertible. Stop at a traffic light and you might even have to talk to someone. You feel naked, exposed.

And let’s face it, motoring in Britain has long ago lost whatever romance it once had. In the 1930s, the wealthy, hedonistic Bentley Boys – including James Bond, who did not drive an Aston Martin in the books – flew around the country in their open-top motors.

American GIs in the war fell in love with local girls and our (to them) tiny roadster sports cars in equal measure. When they went back across The Pond, American manufacturers soon started offering convertible options. Their glamour was only increased when Rebel Without A Cause actor James Dean died in his Porsche Spyder in 1955.

In fact, so glamorous was the car that even spotty Dustin Hoffman looked cool in an earlier version of my Alfa Romeo Spider that he drove in the hit movie that turned him into an overnight success in 1968. The version of my car released in the US was actually named The Graduate.

Six years later, the American songwriter Shel Silverstein captured the essence of the convertible in his hit The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan. One of the protagonist’s greatest regrets is that ‘she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair’.

Indeed, for Britons in the 1950s and 60s, when France and Italy were still exotic, far-off places, the open-top car was the next best thing. Grace Kelly made the French Riviera look impossibly glamorous in the Hitchcock caper To Catch A Thief as she ferried around Cary Grant in her soft-top Sunbeam Alpine. While the Amalfi Coast never looked more alluring than when Sophia Loren cruised it in her open-top Spider in the 1960 film It Started In Naples. ‘You wanna be Americano’ went the most famous song from that film. But we wanted to be Italiano, and still do, even if you risk asphyxiation by lorry fumes if you drive a convertible from Sorrento to Portofino now.

Poignantly, Miss Loren got back into a Spider playing Daniel Day-Lewis’s mamma in the 2009 film Nine. She, and the car, still looked amazing.

But there is one group of people who will be delighted if the convertible really is finished – the car manufacturers themselves.

Soft-tops for them are a colossal and expensive bore. They have to design ever more ingenious and faster ways of storing those roofs. And soft-tops, of course, never handle as well as normal cars and that annoys them.

As a result, there have been long periods before now when convertibles almost disappeared.

In America, air conditioning nearly did for them in the 1960s and 1970s. And I had to go to a specialist dealership to find my Spider in 1990. But I was obviously on trend because, at the same time, Mazda made the brave decision to bring out a new generation convertible, the MX-5. It was a huge hit and the big boys like Mercedes, Audi and BMW had, reluctantly, to follow suit.

Petrolheads still didn’t like them. Their patron saint, Jeremy Clarkson, made a familiar complaint that convertibles were for girls or mid-life crisis blokes with paunches.

In a 2003 Top Gear magazine article, he described his feelings as his finger hovered over the retractable roof button: ‘You are a middle-aged man with a bald patch, yellow teeth and a stomach the size of Norfolk. What message do you think you are sending out by driving down Park Lane with the roof down?’

My friend Tom, who drives a convertible Porsche 911, finds it impossible to disagree. ‘There’s a bit of me that thinks I deserve the abuse while idling at the traffic lights next to a van,’ he says.

At least they won’t abuse him for speeding. Tom is the most cautious driver I know (‘never been out of third gear,’ he says), but loves driving with the top down around the country lanes of his Dorset home. And that’s the point. Convertibles are for people who love driving when most driving in Britain is something to be endured rather than loved.

We still have a convertible. My former girlfriend, now my wife of 35 years, blew a windfall on a Mini Cooper convertible straight out of the showroom in 2012. I just checked the speedometer.

It’s done 21,000 miles. It’s not been the most practical purchase, it’s fair to say. But we now live in the Scottish Borders, where the roads aren’t much busier than when young farmer’s son Jim Clark – who went on to win the Formula 1 championship twice – used to tear around here in the early 1960s.

So down goes the top, out we go on a warm summer’s night – and there’s no feeling like it.