Our Cars: Cupra Formentor VZ5

It’s the little things that matter. The intangible, nebulous or trivial interactions that determine how you feel. Not the hard numbers on spec sheets, not the winning of group tests and certainly not lap times round fabled mountain racetracks. Because in this day and age it’s a given that your car will start in the morning, and not have decomposed into ferrous oxide come winter, so what constitutes objectively ‘good’ is in danger of becoming a contextual abstraction.

Does it matter if your car is actually ‘good’ if it makes you feel a certain way? Good, compared to what exactly? People were tickled pink and madly in love with their slow, smelly, and unsafe tin boxes in eons past.

So after my last, somewhat critical, piece on the Cupra Formentor VZ5 – which prompted our already-overworked and over-stressed editorial director to message, ‘You realise they’ll be coming to pick it up on Monday?!’, I thought it would be appropriate to dive into the little stuff: the subjective, the feeling-engendering moments that actually build the fabric of our emotional relationship with a car. And on this front the Formentor VZ5 fares rather better than it does in objective assessment.