The way I see it, there are four ways to motoring greatness. One is to be more brilliant than any competitors past, present or future (McLaren F1). Another is to take technology or innovation to another level for your time (Citroen Traction Avant). The third way - and probably the most worthy - is to touch and enhance the lives of millions (like the Beetle or Peugeot 504). And then there's the final way, the personal way: like Andy's F-150 (which also scores hugely on point three), or Tom's 205 GTi (which doesn't), just be liked.

Now, my feeble mind got a bit overwhelmed when presented with 100 or so great cars (and the Volkswagen Phaeton), so I needed a bit of help. Step forward the Excel worksheet and those aforementioned categories. Call me a pedant, but I assigned each car a score out of 20 in each of those criteria; four scores, and a possible maximum of 80.

Now, according to the 100 Greatest rulebook, you lot will decide the overall winner through your votes, but if you want my advice, you should know that the Land Rover (Series I and its successors), the (original) Mini and Willy's Jeep are all, according to the Prior-scoring-technique, the greatest cars ever with 70 points apiece; while the McLaren, Ford Model T, Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Fiat 500 and Beetle are all close runners-up with 65 or more.

And so that was a Mini adventure, the end.

Or at least, it would be if I didn't have to nominate one favourite car - not three - and then write 500 words of emotive argument about it. Gah! Okay, okay...

The Mini's brilliant. A marvel of packaging, it set a template which family cars are still following, had an astonishing 40-odd-year production run and sold millions and millions. My Dad also taught me to drive in my parents' Mini, although in retrospect, I should have chosen their old Volvo to have my first crash in three weeks after my driving test. But you live and learn.

That Land Rover is brilliant too, though; it goes anywhere (blimey, it's gone everywhere), also sold by the bucket-load and is still in production (as the Defender) but, more significantly still, it has gone to so many otherwise inaccessible places and enhanced the quality of life of so many millions of people that its place in automotive history is arguably unmatched. Sure, the Beetle, 504 and Mini might have brought affordable transport to the masses, but the Land Rover has taken aid to disaster areas, peacekeeping troops to war-zones and explorers and scientists to the edges of the world. And that, for me, makes it The One.

Except, except, the Willy's Jeep. It's done everything the Land Rover has, is just as cool, helped win the war, preceded and helped inspire the Land Rover and is also still in production. Besides which, I'm a sucker for war films. It's also, in its original military form, a really great looking machine: beautifully proportioned, designed for a purpose, wheel in each corner, not an ounce of wasted metal or space - it's an exceptional piece of product design.

And so, at the end of it all, they're inseparable, and it comes down, perhaps, to which one I'd just rather have. Today, it's the Jeep.