It's a flat rectangle of plastic, a little over 30cm long and 10cm deep. You can pick one up from any motor parts supplier in the country and they cost next to nothing. They're regulated by both the Government and the EU, so you can't (or at least you're not supposed to) go modifying them for aesthetic purposes. Yet, at this time of year, they achieve such boundless importance that we are prepared to prostrate ourselves on an altar of depreciation and deposits just so that, for about five minutes, we can say that we had the newest one.

I…

It's all very well and good us so-called experts writing in-depth new automobile reviews and spouting our opinions all over the place. We should, in fairness, at this stage know what we're talking about, but that doesn't mean our readers always agree with us. Every motorist has their own set of circumstances, their own idea of budget and running costs and their own preferences. Otherwise we'd announce the best automobile, everyone would buy it and it'd be a very boring automotive world we live in.

Obviously, the automobile makers realise all this, which is why they're constantly striving to find…

Last month I undertook one of my most important tasks in role as a motoring journalist, by casting my votes in the Autobest 2016 awards. This organisation is made up of one motoring journalist from each country, and now stretches across 26 markets from Ireland to Russia. Its role as an organisation is to determine the best automobile for consumers to buy, with that caveat that it must cost no more than €20,000 excluding all local taxes in each country. The automobile buyer is at the very centre of this so it's a task that I take pretty serious.

Whilst…

My arrival in Hong Kong was something of a disappointment. Which is not to say that my flight with Cathay Pacific was anything other than lovely. Quite the opposite; it was, in spite of its length and long-haul nature, one of the nicest flights in my memory. The staff were lovely, the seats comfy and the food better than decent. It's just that, when we came in to land, all we did was descend through the cloudless, blue sky over the South China Sea and drop in for a gentle landing on the purpose-built airport island of Chek Lap Kok.

Me: "I really like the Subaru BRZ and the Toyota GT86"
Mr. Know It each of Motoring Journalist: "You know they are, essentially, the same automobile, right?"
Me: "Of course I do!"

I then spent the next hour crying into my pillow, yet again, over how little I appear to know about automobiles, wailing "there's just too much to learn".

But learn I must and what followed was a frantic Google session in which I learned that, at the time of the production of the BRZ and GT86, Toyota owned around 16 per…

Most seem to be in agreement that 2016 won't go down as a vintage year for the Detroit Motor Show, or NAIAS, as it's more officially known. It was very much a case of sense and sensibility from most of the big players, with the previous week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) seeming to play stage to the more interesting advances in the automotive world. Incidentally, here's our excellent round up of CES 2016.

The big news from a European perspective was the unveiling of the new tenth-generation