BMW USED CARS

While Britain waits with bated wallet for the launch of next year's all-new Fiesta, stop-gap 1.4 and 1.6 Si models have come along, with a strong emphasis on safety and security and a lot less stress on performance compared with the ones they replace.

Externally, the new two have been stripped of go-faster paraphernalia to reduce insurance premiums. Both have enormous new front and rear colour-coded bumpers with integral fog lamps. New aerodynamic door mirrors and melt'n'twist simulated alloy wheel covers complete the external revisions.

Inside, to complement a new range of trims, we find the same old shiny plastic dash and inelegant controls.

On the face of it, a hybrid S-Class shouldn't exist. If anyone wants a slightly-more-economical-than-usual luxury car, they should buy a fractionally smaller (but still pretty ritzy in the overall scheme of things) luxury car like an E-Class. Or an S-Class diesel. Actually, if saving the world were really the priority, the vast expense of developing a car like the S-Class hybrid would be much better spent building tidal electricity generators, or just standing in the town square in Stuttgart and handing out free loft insulation.

Standard 19in AMG alloys and beefy side skirts do far better justice to the new S-Class's oddly distended wheelarches, while a huge front apron with outsized air intakes and similarly chunky rear end, broken up by a pair of massive twin exhausts, complete the kind of repackaging that makes you think of borscht and punishment beatings.

But the S65's sales pitch gets skewed again by a £145,365 price tag. To put that into a Merc context, the 'L' version of the S320 CDI is £58,975, while the 500L is £73,770, and that'll still hit 62mph in 5.6 seconds.

Whenever and wherever the conversation turns to the Jaguar XF, it's all about the design. Even today, when we show up to drive the thing, the talk begins with the shape of the sheet metal, and the furnishings within.

I won't dwell on it though, save to say two things. First, it looks terrific on the road. Seeing it in pictures and at motor shows, I was tempted to judge the nose as slightly overworked, and the tail as slightly over-subtle. But actually that's the right way to go. Consider: if a car comes the other way, you see its face go by in a handful of seconds. The only time you get the chance to study a car at length on the road is when you're following it, either directly or in an adjacent motorway lane. This means the frontal aspect has to be assertive to make a quick impression, while the rear end can be more subtle but has to be flawless.

This is the finest large sporting saloon in the world. It sits
at the top of a distinguished and expensive heap, including the V10 Audi S8,
the 525bhp Mercedes S63 AMG and the all-new BMW 7-Series V8 twin turbo, and it
trounces them all in different ways.