Giles Smith

Cars don’t come a lot more handsome than the new Brera from Alfa Romeo, which, with good reason, fancies itself as something of a George Clooney among automobiles — nonchalantly contemporary, but with more than a flicker of an earlier, more charismatic era about it.

In an ideal world, cars wouldn’t have to burn petrol and smog up the place. They would run on a combination of grass cuttings and rainwater and, as they passed, the air would be lightly perfumed with the heady smell of summer. And they would still be capable of doing 120kph, of course. And a bit more than that, when no one was looking.

Driving while attempting to preserve the environment is a notoriously difficult manoeuvre to pull off. And yet the environmentally conscious driver still exists. But there’s hope at last — a greenmobile that doesn’t look like something an elephant sat on.

It’s probably fair to say that reviewers of cars don’t do as much as we could in the way of crash-testing. Asking questions about a new model’s crumple zones by, say, slamming the car into a concrete wall at 88kph, is generally held to be exceeding one’s brief as a motoring reporter. The new SLK oozes playboy bravado. But how was it in an (accidental) crash?

The Volkswagen Golf, now in its fifth incarnation, has been with us for 30 years. In that time, the mother and father of all hatchbacks aimed to become the Beetle of its era, and ended up outselling it. Twenty-two million volks have bought this wagen. And after 30 years of searching for flaws in the Golf, we still haven’t found one.