And, as it happens, I found myself in one of the ultimate exponents of ‘peak car’ only last week. It was a BMW 1M Coupe, that strange looking two door 1-series that went on sale in 2010, right at the end of the peak car era. This is a car with a large, straight-six engine in its nose driving its rear wheels through a six-speed manual gearbox. An automatic was not even an option. It had airbags, traction control, stability control and ABS but only bonged at me if I accidentally left the lights on. It was a third of a tonne lighter than its modern equivalent, the M2 Competition, yet it rode commendably well, was refined on the motorway, allowed me to plug in my telephone as well as feast my eyes on a set of lovely, traditional, BMW dials.
It was, in short, all of the things I wanted such a car to be and none of those I did not. It represented the apotheosis of peak car. If only we’d known at the time.