Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Today you’d imagine that all of the mapping issues had been resolved, and to a certain extent they have. But the back-room boys – the sort of chap who wears a black T-shirt, lives with his mum and doesn’t wash terribly often – are always shoehorning new submenus into the setup. And those are being rushed out as well.

Take the traffic warning technology. The idea is that the map informs you of hold-ups ahead so that you can plan a route around them. Very clever. It cuts congestion, saves fuel, spares your temper and keeps the polar bears happy.

But the system in the Mercedes CLS that I’ve been driving for the past week is forever getting its northbound and its southbound muddled up. Which means I spend an hour dribbling along a country lane, with my door mirrors in the blackberry bushes, avoiding a queue that’s going the other way.

What’s more, a stern-sounding woman interrupts Chris Evans to say in a weird voice that there is a queue ahead. She even gives you the average speed in the queue and adjusts your estimated time of arrival accordingly.

Because of one of her warnings last week, I realized that I would not make it to the restaurant I’d booked before it shut. So I called to cancel the reservation, phoned home to disappoint the children and plodded onwards towards the jam. WHICH WASN’T BLOODY THERE.

There’s more. One of the features provided is a list of all the restaurants in the area. It asks what sort of food you want and then takes you to the nearest eatery that is equipped to help. The trouble is that people only ever want Chinese, French, Italian or Indian. But it would be racist to limit the list to just four options. So, to keep everyone happy, it comes up with every single country in the world. If you have a modern Mercedes and you live in the highlands of Scotland, do please enter ‘Balkan’ and let me know what on earth it comes up with.

I was also amused by the other things it will help you find. Many are useful. Hospitals, police stations and so on. It will even help you locate the nearest mosque, which is clearly important if the sun is going down and you are a Muslim.

But then the black T-shirt brigade obviously thought, Uh-oh. We can’t list just mosques, because it looks as though we are favouring the children of Muhammad over those who support other teams. So, it will also find the nearest synagogue. But – black mark here – it does not seem to think that Methodist chapels are worthy of a mention.

Also, it could not find the Devils Dyke pub on Devils Dyke Road, just north of Brighton. And it will not let you enter a seven-character postcode. It ended up making me very angry. The command-and-control system in my old Mercedes is very good. This new one? It’s so clever, it’s actually a drooling vegetable.

And then we have the phone system. Until very recently Mercedes fitted an actual telephone that was hardwired into the car. What that did was work. Now the nerds in the back room have decided that Bluetooth is good enough. It isn’t. People speaking on Bluetooth sound like deep-sea divers, and that’s when they’re both in an anechoic chamber. Communicating with someone in a car on Bluetooth is like trying to communicate with a corpse.

Electronically, then, the Mercedes CLS has taken a couple of steps forwards and about five in the other direction.

It’s the same story with the shape. The original CLS is said to have been designed by a young stylist who wanted to see how a Jaguar would look if it were made by Mercedes. It was weird, but undeniably attractive.

From the front the new one is even better, but, as with other new Mercs, there’s a styling detail over the rear wheelarch that simply doesn’t work at all. Styling details need to be there for a reason – a hump in the bonnet hints at great power beneath, for instance – but this one is just fatuous. I pretty much hate it.

I also hate the gearbox. The old seven-speed auto has been replaced with the double-clutch flappy-paddle system found in the SLS. It’s electronic, so it works well, except when you are in town going slowly. Then it’s jerky and unwilling to respond when you want to exploit a gap in the traffic.

The rest of the car, though. Wow. It’s been festooned inside and out with lots of neat bits of jewellery that stop just short of being blingy and, in the case of the CLS I’ve been driving, add £27,000 to the £80,000 price tag.

And then there’s the engine. It’s AMG’s new twin-turbo V8 – with, on my test car, a performance upgrade to 550 bhp and 590 lb ft – and it’s much more muted than the old 6.2. Under big acceleration you still get some machinegun noises from the tailpipes, but it’s quieter, more civilized. I’d go so far as to call the driving experience imperious. When slower drivers see this coming, they get out of the way in a big hurry. You feel a bit like Idi Amin. Or was that just me?

Overall, however, I think that some of the original CLS’s appeal has been lost. And, as a result, if I wanted to buy a big, stylish four-door saloon, I’d just walk past this and go for the Maserati Quattroporte.

Have you actually stopped for a moment and looked – really looked – at the new BMW 5-series estate? All things considered, I would say that this is one of the most handsome cars ever made. It has all the BMW hallmarks: the body seems to have been stretched to the limits simply to cover the wheels, and there’s the traditional Hofmeister lean-forward kink in the rear pillar. It’s a tiny design detail that makes the car look as though it’s going a thousand miles an hour even when it’s in a golf club car park.

And yet the car doesn’t look old-fashioned. There’s something about the shape of the bonnet that makes it look as though it may be visiting us from the future.

It’s the same story on the inside. All cars of this type, if we’re honest, feel and look pretty much the same from behind the wheel. But not the Beemer. It’s all very minimalist and unusual. As if you’ve accidentally plonked yourself down in a Bang & Olufsen catalogue. And the 5-series estate is not alone. The new(ish) Z4 moons me with its beauty when I see one go by, and then there’s the limited-edition 1-series M coupé. It’s not a coupé, actually; it’s a saloon. Actually, it’s not even that. It looks like the box in which your washing machine was delivered, only to make sure you don’t throw it away by mistake, it has enormous wheelarches.

I love this car because what it says when you look at it is this: I am very fast and I don’t need to shout about it. It is very fast, too. Faster than a Cayman R. Faster than a Lotus Evora. Faster than you would believe possible. The 1-series M coupé is very probably my favourite car on the market right now. Or it may be the M3. I’m not sure. But it’s one of those two.

I can’t believe I just said those things. I’ve spent the past ten years laughing at the man who styled BMWs and the idiots who drove them. BMWs? They were nothing more than expensive and very hideous mounting brackets for your stupid personalized plate. Montblanc pens with windscreen wipers.

I was a Merc man. But Mercs these days are getting a bit too chintzy for my taste. And so are Jags. And the Lexus is still stuck at the back, in its hairy sports jacket, wanting to smoke its pipe. So now I’ve switched my hero worship from United to City. I’ve become a Beemer man.

I should say at this point that I don’t like all BMWs. The X1 is very terrible, and so is the genital wart that is the X3. Then you have the X6, which is idiotic, and the little 120 diesel, which seems to be a bit boring. But the rest? Mmmm.

That’s why I almost skipped with delight to the door of the car of the new 640i convertible, and I was looking forward to driving it very much.