cars

It seems retro is the new vogue - what with Mini, Beetle and Fiat 500 all making a comeback. By contrast, a 21st Century Victor is definitely not going to happen.

Minor crashes in supermarket car parks are increasingly a fact of life and it can be embarassing when you arrive back home and the neighbours see your dented new 4x4. However Honda have come to the rescue with the new CR-V; cunningly this car looks like it has already suffered a nasty front end shunt. OK, so the neighbours will get a bit of a shock when you first buy it, but thereafter, even having had a number of other bodywork 'incidents', they will not suspect a thing. Brilliant.

Some people are born with a Laguna, some people have a Laguna thrust upon them, but if you achieve anything in life it's likely you won't want a Laguna.

We'd like to tell you that the czc is a triumph of style over substance. However as any school kid will tell you, zero divided by anything is zero so clearly it is not.

The Qubo is described by Fiat as a "Free Space" vehicle. This obviously refers to the void between the ears of the intended buyers. This particular design was conceived on a second-hand etch-a-sketch then hewn from a block of solid tofu by a nervous giraffe called Susan.

You like the new mini. You need more space. You hear about the new clubman. You buy one. You take it home and park it on the drive. You look out of your window. You've made the wrong decision.

In his book 'the five nations', Rudyard Kipling describes the SX4 as graceful. Well.... we don't agree.

As an experiment (during the commissioning phase obviously) a large dog biscuit box and a 1980s calculator were placed into the large hadron collider. The mangled, multi-dimensional result did not actually resemble the Caliber, but it has provided a suitable caption for this picture. A great car to buy if you want to intimidate your neighbours without resorting to physical violence.

It often gets overlooked, but remarkably the Doblo achieved a number of automotive firsts. For example it is documented that the Doblo makes an excellent greenhouse and uses more recycled wheelie-bin than any other similarly priced car. Did you also know that the rear windscreen wiper makes a full 360 degree rotation in order that the rear number plate and boot handle can be cleaned effectively. Patent pending.

Daytime running lamps are perhaps the latest pointless fad amongst premium car makers, but the Korando started it all by having side lights that were 3 times more powerful than the main headlamps. Brilliant for visibility but the amount of mosquitos attracted into the car ventilation system frequently left owners with an itchy issue. A recall of all 7 vehicles in the country failed to resolve the problem in 1994.