Autocar - First for car news and reviews

Last week I drove a Ferrari worth £3.5m. It looked gorgeous and was brilliant to drive. To cap off an excellent day I flew there in the kite and did a two hour car journey in 40 minutes.

I thought life couldn’t get much better, but it just has. Two hours ago we collected our new Fiat 500 from our local Fiat dealer. This is the first time that I’ve bought a new car (Mrs G actually bought it) and it’s a fantastic experience.

I've just been stuck in a traffic jam for 25 minutes on the way to work in the Freelander. I left my ipod lead in Istanbul and didn't fancy what I could find on the radio, so I was getting pretty bored... And then I noticed a pair of skiing gloves...

Not since I was lucky enough to drive a Ferrari 512TR into the market square in Marrakech have I driven a car that provoked so much conversation from passers-by. Or fellow drivers in traffic jams, in fact; a bloke in a classic Mini got out of his car while I was queuing at traffic lights to ask me what I thought of the Clubman, before hopping back into his tiddler when the lights changed.

Last week I took Autocar’s new long-term Mini Clubman out on a photo shoot, and was accosted – in the friendliest way - by three mothers and a couple of guys from the local council, one of them already the owner of a Cooper S. After a thorough inspection, he said he’d be recommending a Clubman to a mate pondering a purchase. That might have been one sale; another came from one of the mothers, who asked if she could see the rear seat to check whether it would accommodate a baby chair. Satisfied that it could, she said she’d be asking her husband to order one. Lucky her. It's good to see that affordable cars can still provoke interest like this.

A weekend spent in a fully loaded Mondeo has given me a chance to test out the upper reaches of the options list. And I've come away pretty happy with the choices I made in speccing my slightly less plush example.

First up, the automatic gearbox - which adds £1100 to the price of a manual Titanium X and which knocks 10 bhp off the 2.0 TDCI motor's power output. I rarely see the point of diesel-gargling slushers for anyone other than minicab drivers, and the Mondy's dull-witted transmission didn't do anything to convert me. It also knocked the 2.0 TDCI's already disappointing fuel economy back to a very underwhelming 33mpg.

One of the curiosities of buying a classic car is that you suddenly become interested in the most arcane aspects of your beast’s welfare, and find yourself reading – and enjoying - stuff about your car that you wouldn’t dream of looking at if you weren’t an owner, much of it found in club and single-marque magazines.

That's how I came to be reading a ‘how to’ story on overhauling the front suspension of a Jaguar XJ-S, an example of which I bought last year. But the story that caught my eye in ‘Jaguar World’ was about vehicle diagnostic systems.

My XJ-S pre-dates today’s era of On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) sockets, but I know I’m not alone in worrying about the impossibility of carrying out any significant repairs to modern cars because they’re so stuffed with electronics. OBD sockets began appearing in 1996 for models sold in the US, and in all European cars from 2001 if they’re petrol and 2003 if they’re diesel.

If I’ve learned one thing over the last 12 months, it’s that they clearly don’t have salt-encrusted motorways in Japan. How do I know this? Because I’m the custodian of Autocar’s long-term Honda Civic Type R, and if the engineers who signed off its rear windscreen had ever sampled the aforementioned conditions, they’d have had second thoughts.

The Civic’s hatch, you see, is a mixture of glass and plastic, split by an enormous body-coloured spoiler. Which is fine, until you try to see out of it; not only does the spoiler block most traffic from your rear view mirror, but the surface picks up motorway grime like no other – and there’s no rear wash/wipe to keep it clean.