PORSCHE, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati together make some of the fastest and finest handling cars ever seen on the planet.
Yet, on the one occasion this year I've needed a really fast car, as opposed to simply just fancied a drive in one, what was sitting in the drive? A Kia Picanto.
That's right, a Kia Picanto – at £5,995 the cheapest, proper four-seat car from a
car maker most people have heard of. The one litre engine ( the 1.1l costs extra) needs more than 16 seconds to drag it to 60mph from a standing start.
Top speed, on a flat road when there's no wind (in Scotland? Aye, right) it should do 93mph. Yes, I know 93mph is illegal in Scotland and has been for over 30 years but you get my drift.
This level of performance is what road testers used to record in the Sixties.
Back in the 1960s, however, you'd be struggling to achieve more than 40mpg and that would be on filthy old leaded fuel. The Kia returns 60mpg and the tailpipe emissions are so low it qualifies for the cheapest road fund licence of all, just £35.
That's right, for whole a year.
So for the average motorist on 12,000 miles that's just 200 gallon needed to see him through the year which sounds pretty cheap motoring even with the current fuel prices.
Staying with the Sixties theme the standard equipment list of the Picanto includes electric-windows, which back in the swinging decade only came as standard on Rolls Royce, Bentley and top-of-the-range Jaguars.
And not only do you get a radio, which no-one fitted as standard back then, but there are four speakers as standard, a CD player which hadn't even been thought of and the system is compatible with an MP3 player, which was pure science fiction.
Also standard, and this is on the cheapest, this-is-as-bad-as-motoring-can-possibly-get model, are anti-lock brakes and even electronic brake force distribution.
These latter bits of equipment are real lifesavers on family cars, particularly in give-and-take conditions, when one or more drivers are not giving the road their full attention.
If you can apply maximum brake and still steer the car then you are in with a good chance of surviving even the most horrendous crash scenario. The difference between The Big One, and just another motoring miss – measured in millimetres and fractions of a second – can be improved with this technology.
Even with the technology in place however, it was going to be a close-run thing, because simple arithmetic meant that if I could not get right across Glasgow to Erskine and back to pick up the spectacles I had left at an early afternoon meeting then my planned trip south would have to be postponed for 24 hours at the very least.
Getting through Glasgow is bad enough at the best of times and all but impossible during Friday rush hour but if I were to get far enough south to escape the traffic around Birmingham and then the M25, I'd have to hit the M74 by 4pm at the latest.
As the minutes clicked away I did the sums over and over wondering whether to simply buy some new specs at my destination and write off the old, or have a go at getting to Erskine and back in a car with no acceleration at the worst possible time of the day.
Acceleration aside, I knew that the little Picanto is well up for it on typical Scottish roads because while the engine has very little puff, it can carry its speed through corners and the narrow footprint on the road means that you can flatten out the curves.
Granted, you won't do the tyres much good and brake-pad wear will be heavy unless you really work at your driving, but it is a car that can be surprisingly quick on quiet roads.
However, the road to Erskine and back was never going to be quiet enough so, after rechecking my sums, I picked up the phone and had someone put the missing specs into a taxi, which cost me the grand sum of £35.
And that, if you haven't been paying attention, is exactly how much it costs to road tax the Kia Picanto for One Whole Year.
The full article contains 745 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
