The truth about modern cars

That said, I doubt it’s an award that would resonate with many on here, because it’s rightly aimed very much at the consumer who probably knows nothing and cares even less about limit handling characteristics. Our statutes (which I did not write) say our primary judging criterion should be value for money, followed by technical innovation. Which is why the German premium brands rarely get a look in, despite their undoubted excellence, though I still doff a cap to whichever of my forebears found a way to award it to the Porsche 928 in 1978.

And every year, save those when the plague’s in town, there’s a driving event held at a concrete track outside Paris where jurors can come and test that year’s seven shortlisted candidates. And being British, we don’t show up. Well we do, but only to attend the AGM that is tagged onto it, because by then we’ve already arranged our own day in the UK to do exactly the same thing.

And we do it as a home match for three very good reasons, none of which has anything to do with Brexit, being bolshie, Covid, or because it’s closer. We do it because we know the roads, they’re much worse (and therefore a much better test) than those in France and they’re relevant to the audience for whom we write. And we have just held this year’s event, on the same test route on the roads around Silverstone we’ve been using since before my time. They are, to quote one of my most eminent colleagues, ‘an absolute bastard’. By which he means a chassis engineer’s nightmare.

I’ll spare you the car by car analysis because that is not my purpose today, though if you ever want proof that our world is changing, be advised that six of the seven shortlisted cars are EVs. Not hybrids or plug-ins, but fully electric vehicles. Last year as the year before, there were just two.

So we toddled off and did our driving and when we were done, I sat down and thought about which I would choose as my own personal Car Of The Year. Would it be the fastest, the best handling or the one with the best steering? The answer is none of the above.

For the truth is that when I judge new family cars these days, one consideration trumps all others: which is the least annoying?

Sad, isn’t it? But I don’t really care how fast electric cars are, because there’s zero joy in exploiting that performance, and the same is true for the one non-EV we had there (the Peugeot 308) thanks to its unlovely engine and unintuitive gearbox. They all handle in a broadly similar don’t-scare-the-horses fashion and none of them steers responsively because amid all the other challenges car companies face these days, trying to synthesise any meaningful feel into electrically assisted steering systems appears to have been parked on the too difficult spike.

No, what modern cars appear to do better than anything else is annoy the hell out of you. Or, I should say an everyday, ho-hum, common-or-garden, mid-50s curmudgeon like me.

Some start binging and bonging, chiming and whining at you before you’ve even sat down. And I’m not joking. It is ridiculous to me that I should have spent such a large proportion of my day just trying to figure out how to turn off seven different lane keep and other ‘assistance’ systems only to find that in some of them, should you be so stupid as to pull over and cut the power for so much as a second, the bloody things all turn themselves back on again.

I lost count of the number of times I was patronised, babied and gently chided by the cars I drove that day. I found myself shouting ‘shut up’ and far, far worse at more than one of them and, yes, I know, I let myself down. And I haven’t even mentioned just how difficult it has become to give certain cars even quite simple instructions via a multi-menu’d touchscreen where, just one generation ago, you’d have been given a nice fat button to press.

It really shouldn’t be like this. Cars are expensive, even the cheap ones. We spend huge amounts of time in them, yet the more they develop, the more irritating they become. They leave the indelible impression that they’ve been created by people who know everything about technology and nothing whatsoever about how people would choose to use it. If this is progress, it is entirely the wrong direction.

Conceptually it would be better if we at least knew our cars were like this because their makers had touchingly but genuinely mistaken us for blithering idiots who can’t be trusted to turn a steering wheel without our hands being held. But that’s not the case. They do it either to max out their EuroNCAP ratings in the belief that anything less than a full house of stars will be a catastrophe, or because current or impending legislation mandates it.

Funnily enough EuroNCAP doesn’t measure just how much more likely a car is to crash because its driver is staring at a screen rather than the road, or trying to figure out how to turn on his or her bum warmer, but that’s not to say these crashes don’t happen. They undoubtedly do. Indeed it makes me wonder whether one of the motivations for ‘default-to-on’ lane keeping is tacit acknowledgement of the fact that drivers are today far more distracted by their cars than they ever were in the past. But they don’t give out stars for that.

Do not misunderstand me. Not even I am such a Luddite that the result of all of the above is that I hate modern cars. I don’t, but I’d enjoy them even more if they just left me alone. Besides there were at least two shortlisted cars I drove I genuinely liked – the Kia EV6 and the (not yet on sale in the UK) Renault Megane E-tech. Was it a coincidence that these were the two that also annoyed me the least? What do you think?