“We will be ambitious and aggressive. ‘But we will not do any more rental business than we do at the moment and that’s currently of a size to allow us to keep the buybacks in balance. Do I want to go berserk just to sacrifice myself on the altar of number one market share? Absolutely not. Beyond that, the business is pretty solid. We’ve got a good group of people in Griffin House. And the cars themselves have surprised me. I was kind of Vauxhall blind before I joined, I thought an Astra GTC was a cooking car, then found out it was a Scirocco equivalent. But to put it all into a nutshell, when I worked for indecent distributors (Inchcape included) it was always crystal clear to me that if the cars were okay and the pricing structure was right, and you had control of your marketing and people who know how to manage their channel to market – in our case the dealer network and the fleet channel –  then you’ll be fine.”

And at the risk of alienating some, perhaps many, badge-conscious SME and other business users, ”fine”, in Tozer’s view, does not mean getting into a sweat over the seemingly relentless expansion of premium brands such as BMW.

“Look, we are a generalist car brand, not premium. We’re not cheap but we’re not premium. You hear the word ‘premium’ quite a lot (from rival mainstream) car makers. But what that generally means is that there’s a problem with pricing and cost structures.

“Clearly, we’re not a brand for ABs; we’re a brand for CDs. Is that a problem or an opportunity? I don’t know. The market is so multi-dimensional. In many respects it is a highly consumerist, quite pretentious, market where the show-off factor is a driver,” says Tozer – a view borne out by the current structure of Vauxhall’s fleet sales: Whereas 35 per cent of its business user sales go to companies offering no brand choice but Vauxhall, only 5 per cent go to user-choosers.

At one level, says Tozer, Vauxhall can present Insignia as an antidote to premium while still giving business users in particular “ a very fine car.”

But what he claims are the “core” ingredients of Vauxhall’s identity –“quality,value, British” – leave plenty of room to find buyers in the broad constituency of what he calls Middle England.

Vauxhall has spent more than a century making cars in Britain and Tozer reckons the ‘British’ tag has unexploited value. “We won’t cloak ourselves in the flag, but we will weave it into our fabric, in the same way that we are woven into the fabric of Britain. That can go alongside a design language which is very strong and will get stronger.”

Tozer is hardly complimentary about Vauxhall’s past or indeed its present at which he is working hard to change. “People don’t  understand Vauxhall and I think the reason they don’t is because we don’t.

“The brand has not been properly nurtured or invested in or developed….if you asked 10 people out on the street ‘what do you think of Vauxhall?’ you’d get myriad answers. It’s  a brand that’s been pushed into the market; there’s not much pull; It’s a bit of a promo brand and that’s sad because the cars are better than that,actually. And we’ve not really built platforms to overcome those perceptions. So it’s a potpourri of lack of strategy ,tactical push, no clear sense of how you get out of this by saying ‘ok, here we are today and we want to be over there. It’s a weakness of the organisation which in turn connects to the brand.”

“Vauxhall is not broken”, he insists, “But is it it working well in a strategic sense? The answer is no and that’s a shame.”

There are some clear targets for action: “Vauxhall’s 330 dealers are mostly strong, well resourced and on the ball; and more are queuing for the franchise”, says Tozer. “But Vauxhall badly needs to iron out wrinkles it has allowed to develop  in the geographical distribution of the network.”

Another nettle being grasped is model range complexity – “we can and need to be much simpler on derivatives, specifications, accessories, etc; all this stuff which just blows my head apart… we’re throwing all that complexity away.”