Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

These, then, are just some of the tricks being used by car makers to shoot their cars through the EU’s goalposts. And every single one of them makes a car a little bit worse.

Which means it’s now the job of car makers to mask the problems with the Elastoplast of ingenuity. And that brings me on to the diesel engine under the bonnet of the BMW 640d.

Yup. It’s a diesel in a BMW sports coupé, and if that isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is. But it’s a BMW diesel, which means it hums rather than clatters. And it’s fitted with two turbochargers. A small one that gets going almost immediately, and then a bigger one to give you some oomph on the open road. Clever, eh?

Less clever is the name. Why is this called the 640d when the 535d has exactly the same engine? Not very logical for a company famed for its obsessive-compulsive nomenclature.

Naturally the engine is mated to an eight-speed box but to make sure you don’t notice the constant cog-swapping, the changes are so smooth, you don’t feel anything at all. It’s like being on a never-ending helter-skelter of torque.

This car is like an old house. It’s riddled with cracks but because of some extremely skilful plasterwork, you can’t spot them. BMW has addressed the problems presented by the EU and, in less than a year, has masked the efforts it made to overcome them with the silky smile of German efficiency.

But what of the car itself? Well, there are plenty of other coupés on the market, but none has so much space in the back and none is anything like as squidgy Slumberdown-soft.

There’s a misplaced line of thinking in the car industry that anyone who buys a good-looking two-door coupé must therefore want a bone-shaking sporty ride. Some do, for sure, but plenty don’t. And that’s where the 6-series is brilliant. It is good-looking. It is a two-door coupé. It is stylish. And yet it rides like a hovercraft. Fit the optional £1,485 Comfort seats and it’s like driving around in a cloud.

There is a button that allows you to firm everything up, and even a sub-menu in the computer that lets you choose which bits of the package you want to be sporty and which you do not. And I recommend that on day one, you glue the switch in Comfort mode and leave it there. The Sport setting just makes you uncomfortable for no real gain in terms of handling.

What we have here, then, is a car that doesn’t just get through the EU’s goalposts but also goalposts that no other car maker has spotted. Goalposts for people who want good looks, comfort and economy.

You don’t need an iPad. You can watch films on your laptop, you can store data on your phone and for taking pictures it’d be easier to set up an easel and break out the oils. An iPad is stupid. A complete waste of money, especially if you already have an iPhone, which does the same job. And can be used for speaking to other people, too. So why did I trot quite vigorously to the shop and buy one? Simple: iPads look nice. That’s it. The end.

We see exactly the same thing going on with Fiat 500s. Why do people buy them? Because they are spacious? Because they are fast? Because they are economical? No. They are surprisingly uneconomical, in fact. The only reason the little Italian cutester is to be found clogging up every chic street this side of the Urals is that it looks nice. That’s it. The end.

I could sit here now and tell you that, mechanically, the 500 is identical to various cheaper or more practical cars such as the Ford Ka and the Fiat Panda. I could tell you too that there is very little space in the back, that some drivers have found even the two-cylinder TwinAir eco-version struggles to do 36 mpg and that the 500 is made in Poland by people who just want to go home and watch telly.

But it’ll make no difference. The Fiat 500 is like a useless little mongrel at the dog’s home. The one with the wonky ears and the sad eyes. You know that it’ll be a bad buy. You know it will leak. But you soooo want it. It’s soooo sweeeet. And that’s the end of that.

Except it isn’t, because wading into the fray is the new Volkswagen Up!, which unlike the Fiat 500 comes as standard with its very own exclamation mark.

There are plenty of variants from which to choose. There’s a Take Up!, a Move Up! and a High Up!, and then you have the colour-based special editions, which were going to be called the White Up! and the Black Up!. Until a VW bigwig realized a company that made Hitler’s favourite runaround shouldn’t really be selling a car called the Black Up!. So now it’s called the Up! Black. Clear? Good.

So let’s move on to the engines. There’s one. It’s a naturally aspirated three-cylinder 1-litre unit that is available in two states of tune. These are: not powerful enough, and nowhere near powerful enough. Prices start at less than £8,000, although the car I tested – the 74-horsepower High Up! – was £10,390, plus an extra £35 for carpets, £350 for cruise control and £225 for a laser to stop it crashing into things in towns. And what I’m going to do now is waste your time and several hundred of my words explaining why you should buy the Up! rather than the little Fiat.

First of all, the Up! is a lot more spacious inside. It has the longest wheelbase of any city car, and that means there really is space in the back for two children. Yes. Of course you can also get two children in the back of a Fiat, but only if you kill them and chop them up first.

Moving further forwards, I will agree the Fiat has a funky and attractive dash. But the VW’s is cleverer because in the High Up! it comes with a detachable ‘maps and more’ touchscreen that can be used outside the car like a TomTom satnav and then, when it’s clipped in place, as a phone interface, a satnav, an entertainment system or to show driving statistics. It works brilliantly.

I like the way the dash appears to be a big slab of painted metal, too, and even though this little car is made in Bratislava, it still feels Germanically, Speerishly well put together. I’d love to say the same of the Fiat but I can’t. So I won’t.

Further forwards still, we get to the engine, and here we stumble over the VW’s first black mark. Even though I was driving the most powerful Up!, I couldn’t even think about pulling into the outside lane of a motorway unless there had been a terrible crash and the whole carriageway was blocked.

It doesn’t matter how far back the faster traffic may be – you will soon be in its way. Really, VW should have called it the Hold Up!.

It’s fairly pedestrian from 0 to 62 mph, but it’s the time it takes to get from 62 to 70 mph that really alarms. We’re talking hours and hours. The problem was that I had only 70 torques, whereas the little Fiat, which has one cylinder fewer, has 107.

Naturally Volkswagen will argue that the Up! is a city car and that this lack of oomph is of no consequence. But that’s rubbish. It’s OK to have a pair of city shoes and a city suit, but when you are spending £10,000 on a car, you expect it to be able to deal with cities and the countryside equally well.

Still, if you are happy to mix it with the trucks and the Peugeots in what Michael McIntyre calls the ‘loser lane’, it hums along and sips fuel like a mouse drinking sherry through the end of a hypodermic needle. In the real-world economy stakes, it’s a full-on Alcoholics Anonymous co-ordinator and the TwinAir Fiat is Oliver Reed.

To drive, it’s even Stevens, really. Both handle nicely. And both make fabulous noises. The Fiat sounds like a lollipop stick in a set of bicycle spokes whereas the VW sounds like Androcles’s friendly lion. It’s the pipsqueak that roared.