Only two things matter when choosing a car. What is it like to drive fast? And what is it like to drive very, very slowly? Forget about cornering and acceleration. Very little of our time in cars is spent negotiating hairpin bends or revving chavvishly at a junction. Most motoring falls into two distinct categories.
1) Superb driving conditions: driving at night, or best of all in France (whose admirable policy of motorway pricing leaves their best roads free for the enjoyment of British tourists — since paying to use a motorway twice a year is much less painful than paying twice a day).
2) Dreadful road conditions: gridlock; tailbacks; attempting to navigate motorway service stations without ending up in the lorry park; tackling the absurdly positioned ramps in multi-storey car parks. (Most car parks are atrociously designed. But beneath Bloomsbury Square in London is the Guggenheim of underground car parks. Built in the 1960s, it is a perfect double-helix, with the twin spirals connected at intervals — as in DNA — by horizontal links. This means you do not have to go all the way to the bottom and back in order to leave, although you do, obviously, for the sheer joy of it.)
For a car that is good to drive very fast and very slowly, buy a luxury car with automatic transmission. And buy it second-hand. This was always the policy of Edward de Bono, who bought second-hand Jaguars, explaining that ‘the type of people who like luxury cars don’t like buying them used’, which is why they depreciate so fast from new. The best bargains may be luxury cars from non-luxury marques: the VW Phaeton, say, or the Citroën C6.
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