Please tell me it’s not just me, dear reader, who sometimes looks at a new car – something I do on a more than occasional basis – and with the best will in the world couldn’t say what it is.

There are so many more new cars than there used to be, so many more of them are crossovers than they used to be and, by gum, so many of them look the same that I am, on occasion, utterly lost. I can’t tell one from another.

This is a new experience for me. I always proudly thought that if I witnessed a robbery I’d be able to tell the police what make, model and trim level a getaway car was, and I’d probably be able to name its colour and wheel design. Actually that may be a bad example, because I already know it will be an Audi RS3.

But let’s say an anonymous grey crossover is involved in a hit and run and a nearby copper asks me for a statement about what car was involved. I increasingly fear I’d have to shrug and offer up a simple: “Haven’t a clue, mate. One of those new electric SUVs. I think.”

Strictly speaking, thinking that all cars look the same isn’t a new phenomenon. In an issue of Performance Car I bought back in the early 1990s, the magazine printed a series of silhouettes of D-segment hatchbacks from the time: a Ford Mondeo, a Nissan Primera, a Toyota Carina and so on.

Their gag was that if you could identify none of them from their outline alone, you were a true Performance Car reader. But if you could tell most of them apart, you were an Autocar & Motor reader.

But while not a new thing, I think events have recently progressed at speed. I don’t know about today’s Autocar reader, but I can tell you this Autocar writer of two decades would struggle to tell plenty of new models apart even if they weren’t reduced to their silhouettes.

Even on a clear day I’m not at all confident I could tell a Geely EX5 from a BYD Atto 3 until I got close enough to read the badges. Why is this? Have all the good shapes already been taken? Are we now drawing the same ones again because, basically, we have to?

In national treasure (and Ferrari F12tdf owner) Hugh Grant’s rather grizzly new film Heretic, our villain tells a story, and it’s mostly true, of how Radiohead were sued by The Hollies because parts of Creep were taken from The Air That I Breathe. But then Radiohead got legal with Lana Del Rey because her Get Free sounded too much like Creep.

Are we just, y’know, running out of notes? And if so, is it really so surprising we’re running out of lines? There only so many ways you can draw around four wheels and a car’s oily (or electrical) bits if one also has to include the certain number and location of seats, doors, windows and lights, plus bumpers so soft that hitting a deer writes off the car. So the new Ford Capri looks a bit like a Polestar 2? Well, it has to look like something.

Maybe I should start being kinder to wilfully ugly cars. Say what you like about the absolute munter that is BMW’s XM – plenty of people have – but you will not mistake it for an Omoda 5.

I think electrification isn’t helpful. If you don’t need a grille to cool an engine then you don’t have a signature identifier in the most prominent position on the car. In fact, given that it would upset the aerodynamics so much – and that’s so important for an electric car’s range – you’d better not have one. A person can design plenty of different pretty shapes, but a wind tunnel will say only one of them is the most efficient.

That’s something that’s true of even the latest batch of hypercars. I can tell one of those from another, just about, but when outright performance is the overriding criterion, there is still only one way that will work best.

Perhaps, then, the surprise shouldn’t be that I can’t tell so many new cars apart. But that there are still so many I can.