BMW USED CARS

The Volkswagen Polo was always
the car you wanted if you found all the other superminis a bit too interesting.
It was about the most coldly rational product out there. The Germans loved it.
But in Britain we like a bit more fizz to our small cars, so we've been buying
Fiestas and Clios and 207s. But even though the Polo is a bit of a stiff here,
the Golf flies off the shelves. VW people have an interesting analysis of this.
The way they see it, in the mid-size hatch market, rationality plays a bigger
part: Golf buyers have families and mortgages. Supermini buyers haven't got to
that stage, or they've passed it and want to forget its privations. A supermini
is all about me.

The Q7 is not a
greenie's favourite. Too big and brash and dirty, it's the sort of car
they'll hang you by the eyelids for driving.

Except that this new face-lifted 3.0-litre TDI Q7 has cleaned up its act. It's the
first car available in Britain with an AdBlue' system, which adds urea to
exhaust gases to neutralise smoggy Nitrous Oxide (NOx) emissions.
Urea? As any doctor will tell you, that's the same stuff you get in urine. Hmm.

Even in non-supercharged,
non-R guise, the XK is genuinely quick.
Armed with the new 5.0-litre V8 - our first look at this engine in naturally
aspirated form - the convertible will hit 60 in just over five seconds, as fast
as the old supercharged XKR. That's rapid.

It
handles, too. Click the variable dampers into race' mode and you've got a
pointy, wieldy thing with no more than a hint of chassis flex. A 911 Cabrio
might give you a fraction more edge, a fraction more feel when you're really
kicking on, but the XK isn't far behind.

Here's the recipe: take one Panda 4x4, ditch its little petrol engine in favour of Fiat's 1.3-litre diesel, add cross-eyed foglights and a few clunky plastic panels, jack it up on its springs by a couple of centimetres, add locking diffs... and hey presto, you've got the cheapest diesel 4x4 on the market. Here's the problem: who's going to buy it?

It's an affable little thing, the Panda Cross, and genuinely competent off-road - the previous generation conquered the Paris-Dakar rally (albeit slowly), and this new version feels like it could manage the same, followed by a quick jaunt across the Antarctic to cool off. But out on the open road, not only is the Cross woefully slow - 20 seconds to 60mph feels positively suicidal on motorway slip roads - but the extra ride height and high-stool driving position gives the Panda the top-heavy toppliness of an old lady wearing a lead hat.

The Fiesta ST is dead. Too niche, says Ford - no one outside the UK cares about hot little superminis. For us, the hot hatch-hooked minority, this is sad news: the new Fiesta has a cracking chassis and could be a proper flier with a bit more power than the 118bhp of the top-spec 1.6-litre engine.

Enter Mountune, Ford's official tuning arm better known Stateside as Roush, who'll take your 118bhp Fiesta Zetec S and, in exchange for about £1,300, bump it up to a healthier 138bhp with a big new exhaust system and a bunch of ECU tweaks. It won't invalidate your warranty, but it will turn your Fiesta into noisy little scrote, a coughing, snorting, phlegming little monster that'll have you tiptoeing from traffic light to T-junction with your hoodie pulled down low over your baseball headwear, eyes set to 12 o'clock, ignoring the disapproving headshakes from suburbia's newly deafened moral guardians.

A Honda Accord Type S. That means a fantastic Accord Type R must be coming. Er, no. The Type S is simply a misleadingly badged, more powerful diesel Accord.

It's the same basic unit that you get in the lower-powered diesel, but Honda has tweaked the turbo, cylinder head and intercooler to up the power and torque to 178bhp and 280lb ft. That's an improvement of 30bhp and 24lb ft. And all for a tiny (9g/km and 0.8mpg) trade-off in CO2 and fuel economy.

This is still a smooth diesel. The turbo kicks in low and plenty of power means neither overtaking nor refinement are ever problems.

There must be an actual number of people who buy Golfs, Focuses, Meganes and Astras but do not even consider for a second buying a Fiat Bravo. Roughly 100,000 Focuses were sold in the UK last year, and the number who didn't consider a Bravo is probably more than 88,888. We'll never know, but it's likely.

Here it is, and there's a new 2.0-litre multijet diesel under the bonnet - a bored-out version of the old 1.9, with more poke. Fiat is rather good at diesels, and supplies them to Vauxhall en-masse, so this one will soon find a home in the new Astra, providing there is a new Astra. It has enough torque to blow away the equivalent Golfs, Focuses and Meganes of this world, and the Bravo is cheaper than all of them, making it the class leader when it comes to bang-for-buck. You could argue that it looks better, too.

It's a fair question: why,
Aston, would you go to all the effort of stiffening, strengthening and
lightening the DB9 Coupe to turn it into the hardcore DBS (yes, that's the Bond
car, let's get it out the way now)... and then go and cut the roof off to create the
DBS Volante?

Because of the
noise, that's why. More than the speed, more than the impressively nimble
handling, that's what this car is all about: monstrous, glorious, technicolour
noise.