BMW USED CARS

The European Commission has been busy recently, getting
up the noses of German car manufacturers. You see, the EC wants all new cars sold across Europe to average 130g/km of CO2 by 2012 and the Germans, with their uber-barges, are a little bit miffed about this.

But that's not to say that they're burying their heads in the sand. BMW has just launched its 1-Series 3dr
and has taken the opportunity to introduce some new tech to all its four-cylinder engines - both petrol and diesel.

It used to be that the German car manufacturers' rivalries were perfectly illustrated by a desire for horsepower. And oodles of it. But now things are shifting, ever so slightly. Bhp is hardly disappearing from the agenda, but both BMW and Audi are getting into Merc's traditional territory of filling every conceivable niche with a model.

Take the BMW 1-Series. Launched with a simple five-door layout in 2004, earlier this year, it got a facelift and a three-door version. This month we've driven the new coupe style you see here, an X1 SUV is due before 2012, along with a cabrio in Spring 2008, and still they're going at it. In fact, even as I was writing this article, news came through about the hardcore tii concept you can see over the page.

In December's Top Gear magazine, I really liked the engine in the 135i Coupe. Almost made it sound like it was the engine to have in the range. Well, now that needs a teensy bit of alteration.

Because the one to have (and this is definitive because there won't be any more variants, or at least I hope there won't) is thae 2.0-litre twin-turbo diesel in the 123d.

The Ford Ka's greatest weakness is the previous model.
Despite this latest version getting lots more fancy plastics inside, better
packaging for the rear seats and boot, and now a diesel engine, there's simply
no way it can ever exceed the heights the first Ka reached. Not with a chassis
as dull as it's got.

Let's start with a simple truth: no matter what people say, you do not necessarily make a car better by making it faster. Ranges of cars, like sprawling cities, tennis rackets and drunken nights out, have sweet spots. Unexpected, near-perfect moments of goodness where the execution completely marries with the premise, where what you hope for unexpectedly becomes what you get. Want an easy example? The 2.7-litre diesel Jaguar XF with the six-speed automatic gearbox is one of these little moments of quiet brilliance, the gem of the XF range; fast, frugal, a bit swish, comfy, relatively affordable.

Big diesel saloons make a whole heap of sense: big torque
for cruising, decent mpg for range and enough bodywork to engineer out the
usual thrumbly NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) issues that a compression
engine usually burps up. And right now it's impossible to ignore BMW's 535d
when it comes to being the sportiest, most dynamic diesel saloon out there -
it's the proverbial elephant in the diesel engine room.