Thank Frankel it's Friday: We've never had it so good

This has been brought home to me this week by, of all things, a Volkswagen Golf. Not a GTI, or fire-sneezing Golf R, but a common-or-garden, every day, ho-hum Golf, with a 1.5-litre petrol engine, the third of five possible specification levels, five doors and a manual gearbox. A more middle of the road car it would be hard to imagine. It is Radio 2 on wheels. 

And it is utterly, breathtakingly brilliant. First, it appears to be built out of kryptonite. Once the doors have shut silently around you it has that locked-in-a-vault feel you never find in old cars. Instead of conventional dials, information comes via a TFT screen of such high resolution that if its definition were any better it would burn holes in your retinas. It also appears able to tell you almost anything you might want to know – the price and location of the nearest or cheapest fuel, for instance. It has things called apps.

But it’s dull as cold porridge to drive eh? You could not be more wrong. The engine has a pleasant fizz to it, the six-speed gearbox is a delight, the steering is perfectly geared and as accurate as you could wish, and if you want to drive on the door handles, you’ll find it a willing and able co-conspirator. There is genuinely very little not to like here.

Best of all though, it works beautifully in the real world. The ride, for example, is exemplary. And I don’t mean by the standards of sub £20,000 hatchbacks, but by those of executive saloons costing two or three times as much. It’s whisper quiet on the motorway and it returns 48mpg in sensible driving. Put it in ‘eco’ mode and tread gently on the gas and it’ll easily go 50 miles on a gallon of unleaded. And that really does call into question the merit of spending the extra in the showroom and at the fuel station on a diesel-powered alternative. 

Why all this now? Because I think it is too easy to ignore golden eras when they come along, only to lament their passing once they’re gone. And lament we will. We are moving into the electric era faster than most had imagined and those that think the process will find its own pace dictated by consumer choice are, sadly, deluding themselves. 

And until very recently I would have included myself among their number. But people are deserting diesel cars not because they want to, but because they fear their movements will become restricted, their running costs punitively taxed and their residual values torpedoed. And these fears are well-founded despite the fact that the latest diesels are as clean as petrol-powered cars but emit up to 20 per cent less CO2. But politicians rarely like being blinded by the truth. Nor is there really any good reason to think petrol won’t be hounded out of the market in turn. The important point to understand is that none of this needs legislation: all a government has to do is sow enough doubt in the mind of the market and the resulting collapse in confidence will do it all with no need to dust off the statute book.

Of course, there is the middle ground, the hybrid powertrain, and doubtless, it has a role to play, but remember that hybrids are heavy, wasteful of natural resources and nothing like as efficient as their meaningless official statistics suggest. The fact is that for almost all hybrids almost of the time one of their two powertrains is at best working below peak potential efficiency, at worst not at all and being dragged around as dead weight.

As for pure electric cars, I think the latest ones are superb. I had the all-new Nissan Leaf for a week recently and marvelled at the thing every time I drove it. But on three occasions I had a journey to do that required me to cover between 120 and 150 miles on a single charge including plenty of motorways, and while the car may well have made it, I wasn’t certain it would. And you need to be certain, so I took something else.

So, if you’re sitting there wondering whether to soldier on with your old tin box or replace it, I’d consider the latter. Who knows, in ten years time cars as conventionally brilliant as the modern Golf may not even exist and we’ll all be repenting at electrically-powered leisure.