Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

This best-of-all-worlds solution has been achieved thanks to some extremely clever thinking. The torque comes from a very long piston stroke and a turbocharger that can spin at up to 248,000 rpm. That’s sixteen times faster than the blades in a jet engine.

There’s more. In most engines the pressure on the top of the piston is around 150 psi (pounds per square inch). In a normal turbo that might get as high as 200 psi. But in the EcoBoost’s micro-motor it’s more than 350 psi.

Then there’s the detailing. The cam belt runs in oil, so it’s silent and will last for ever. Ford has even split the cooling system so that the business part of the engine and the people in the car can warm up as quickly as possible on cold mornings. And the exhaust manifold is water-cooled as well. It’s probably fair to say that there is more innovation and technology in this engine than you find in a Lamborghini V12.

Which is why I was so cross with the elderly Australian tourist I encountered on London’s Kensington High Street recently. ‘Why are you driving this piece of shit?’ he asked. I explained that I was testing it and that, actually, it was rather interesting. But that didn’t calm him down one jot. He was so angry that I should be driving such a thing, he started hitting it with his shopping bags. ‘It’s shit!’ he screamed. ‘And you should know better.’

It’s not, though. It’s great. There’s so much torque that you can spin the wheels into second, and it’ll easily hold its own with Johnny Van Driver in a traffic-light grand prix. And best of all, because the engine is so light, some of the agility that’s gone missing from recent Focuses is back. To drive, it is brilliant, and apart from a gruff but rather endearing three-cylinder engine noise, there’s simply no indication at all that you are being pulled along by an engine the size of Richard Hammond’s left testicle.

Inside? Well, it’s a Focus. It’s spacious, and my test car was loaded up with every conceivable extra. The only item I wouldn’t bother with is the lane assist. You get a barely detectable wheel wobble and small red light on the dash if you wander out of your lane on the motorway, but, I’m sorry, if you haven’t noticed you’re about to crash into a bridge parapet, you’re unlikely to be brought to your senses by what looks like the standby light on a television.

That’s it, though. The only real fault I could find in what’s certainly the most important Ford since the Cortina.

And now we get to the clincher. A top-of-the-range Toyota Prius is around £24,910. With the £5,000 government grant, an all-electric Leaf will cost you £25,990 and a Vauxhall Ampera £32,250. Prices for a similarly sized, faster and nicer-to-drive Focus EcoBoost start at £16,445. I could go on. But there seems little point.

BMW very kindly agreed to lend me a brand-new V8 X5 while I was in Germany for the recent Champions League final, with the understanding that I would review it if Bayern Munich beat Chelsea. So. Let’s have a look, then, at the new Citroën DS5 DSport.

Truth be told, I can’t remember much about the BMW. I know it was driven by a polite man called Christian and that it was brown. But engine performance? Seat comfort? Space in the back? Lost, I’m afraid, in the fog of warm, fuzzy satisfaction that England had beaten Germany on penalties. That Chelsea had won the biggest prize in European football. That Didier Drogba – the giant, the colossus – had waved goodbye to his career in a blue shirt by saving the day.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that twenty-two strangers kicking an inflated sheep’s pancreas around a foreign field – that is forever Chelsea, by the way – can elicit such extraordinary emotions in a grown man? It would be like running around in circles because your son beat somebody else’s son in a pre-school game of Connect 4. Certainly there’s no reason why the win meant I should jump up and down so vigorously that I broke the credit card in my pocket. I may have even hugged a taxi driver, too.

Actually, there is a reason. It’s this: back in 1970 some Leeds supporters put dog dirt in my school cap because I had dared to walk through a Yorkshire town sporting a Chelsea scarf. That, then, is what made me so happy in Munich. Because I knew that in a working men’s club somewhere, the little gang would be sitting, staring into their stout, feeling terrible. I was happy because they weren’t. That’s what football is all about.

Anyway, the next day, the elation had been swallowed by a dreary list of appointments and the car that would transport me between them: the aforementioned Citroën.

In the olden days Citroën made its reputation by being different. It would use different engines from everyone else, different suspension, different braking. As a result, it won a strong appeal among oddballs – people who thought whales were intelligent, that vegetables had feelings and that the best way to combat the threat of a Russian attack was to chain yourself to a fence post at Greenham Common.

Of course, when Russia was no longer perceived as a threat and beards had become a joke, the customer base melted away, which meant Citroën had to come up with a new idea. And it did: value for money.

The company would advertise the car for £5,000 and then, with a hysterical television advertisement, explain that you would be entitled to a 100 per cent discount, £1,000 cashback, free financing, no VAT and the opportunity to sleep with any of the sales assistants who took your fancy.

Soon, however, an accountant must have noticed that while many cars were leaving the factories, no actual money was coming back. And anyway, the VFM rug had been snatched away by the likes of Kia and Hyundai, which were offering 2,000 per cent discounts, free holidays in the Far East and £20 million for your old car.

Citroën was forced to come up with a new plan to disguise the fact that underneath, its cars are nothing more than dreary Peugeots. And the plan it came up with was styling. In the company’s words, it set about industrializing haute couture.

There’s no getting around the fact that the DS5 you see here this morning is extremely striking, and I don’t mean ‘striking’ in the way you’d describe a friend’s hopeless attempt at an oil painting. I mean striking as in Kate Moss. This is one good-looking car.

You may, therefore, be interested enough to have a closer look, and when you do, you will not be disappointed. Because inside, if anything, it’s even better. You sit behind a styled steering wheel cocooned not only by a high central transmission tunnel but also by a drop-down pod mounted to the roof lining.

And both of these features are festooned with highly stylized buttons. They are arranged in the manner of a Rhodesian ridgeback’s neck and look fantastic. But Citroën obviously had a problem.

If you use buttons as a styling feature, you need to give them all a job. Which is why the DS5 DSport that I drove was equipped with every single feature ever fitted to a car, house, spaceship, train, sex toy, fighter jet, submarine, vacuum cleaner, laptop and mobile phone. It’s also why there is not a single electrically operated sun blind in the roof. There are three.

This makes for excellent sport in a traffic jam: pushing things to see what happens as a result. I was especially excited to find at one point in a nasty jam on London’s Euston Road that I could direct cool air into the central cubbyhole.

Now. As I see it, there are a couple of issues with Citroën doing this. First, this is not a company with the best reputation for electronic reliability, and second, it all adds weight. And more weight means less acceleration, higher fuel bills and the need for firmer suspension.