BMW 135i M Sport convertible

Here’s what he says: “We realised a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make”.

Bang on. You can buy a cheap car that takes you to work economically and you may be pleased with the savings you’ve made. But saving money is never joyful. It is mean-spirited and demonstrates that you have a heart of coal. If you wish to lead a joyous life, you should always spend 10% more than you earn.

Joy in a car can come from many quarters. It can come from the “feel” of a button on the dashboard. It can come, such as it does in a Porsche Boxster, from that spine-tingling noise the exhaust makes at precisely 5200rpm. It can come from the way a car turns into a corner or, as you will find in a Nissan 370Z, from the way the engine blips on down changes. Joy can come from a nicely flared wheelarch, from good graphics on a sat nav screen, from the surge you feel when you accelerate. Sometimes, as is the case with the Aston Martin DBS, it can come from so many places, all at once, you are left feeling a little bit light-headed. Even the stitching on the seats made my heart feel all gooey and warm.

I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why I don’t like cars made by Proton and so on. But now I do. They are not joyous. They are built purely to shore up an emerging nation’s balance of trade, and you will never find any joy in anything where every single part has come from the lowest bidder.

Joy, contrary to what BMW would have us believe, does not make us smile. Even in the aforementioned DBS, I do not gurn like a mad person as I drive along. But joy does make us happy and content and satisfied. In a car, joy is more important than an airbag.

Strangely, however, the one car company that rarely gives me any joy is BMW. It’s why I would never buy one of its cars.

That’s not to say its cars are no good. The new Z4 is marvellous and the M3 is one of the most perfectly balanced machines ever created by man. It makes an F-16 fighter jet look ungainly and lumpen.

However, you always get the sense with a BMW that science has ruled the roost throughout the entire design process; that anything with a bit of flair or panache has been ditched to make way for another equation. And as for the line, “We realised a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make”?