Until quite recently virtually all cars were billed as exciting because that’s what virtually all of us wanted: speed and handling and lashings of rip-snorting exhaust noises. We needed to know that our car was faster than our neighbour’s car and sometimes, on the way back from the pub, in a cacophony of single camshaft, four-cylinder awfulness, we’d attempt to prove it.
Remember the television ad for the Morris Ital? No, of course you don’t. But tragically I do. It told us that this tarted-up Marina, which had been built, badly, by trade unionists for trade unionists, was faster than a Saab 900 GLS, that it could overtake more quickly than a Mercedes 200 and that it had been styled by the same people who
