Autocar awards 2021: Alpine A110, Golf GTI and Defender named readers' champions

All this puts the A110 into a sweet spot: comparable to the likes of the Ariel Atom and Caterham Seven in its handling and character but with refinement and grandeur – yet not a price – closer to Porsche territory.

Alpine owners, you suspect, must have found lockdown immensely frustrating. Having an A110 parked outside and an order to only use it for essential journeys is just plain cruel. Pretty much every moment you’re not driving an A110 could be improved by driving an A110. It’s truly a car that you will want to drive every day.

However, it’s not a car that many actually would drive every day, because much of what makes it fun requires compromise. There are only two seats, the boot is tiny, all-round visibility is questionable and the push to save weight has resulted in some flimsy interior trim.

Those compromises are absolutely worth it for everything the A110 offers, but they’re also the reason that you need three cars in your dream garage. At some point you need to take the kids to school, pop to the supermarket or haul some rubbish to the tip. And that’s when you need a Volkswagen Golf.

Of course you need a Golf. Many other daily drivers are available, but your votes reflect that when you want a well-honed all-rounder, Wolfsburg’s finest remains the car of choice.

Daily driver absolutely isn’t a pejorative term: this will be the member of your three-car garage that you will spend the most time in, calling on it to provide comfort, refinement and practicality while still being fun to drive. Tough task.

We grouped together the votes for every type of Golf when picking the winners, but the single most popular variant was the GTI, so that’s what we sought out for our garage. And while the £33,525 starting price for a manual GTI is slightly above our budget, we reckon that some intense haggling will make it work and will be absolutely worth the hassle.

The new Mk8 Golf GTI may stray a little more to the fringes of hardcore hot hatch territory, away from its traditional intoxicating balance, resulting in a slightly firmer, less rounded ride; but still, few cars are able to offer such dashing thrills when you take the long way to the shops, before it turns into a relatively benign family hatch to get your eggs and other fragile items home safely.

But this award isn’t really about that GTI badge: virtually any Golf can perform supreme daily driver duties, whether it’s the entry-level 1.0-litre petrol, a diesel estate or, if you really want to stretch the budget, the hardcore R. That’s because, in all its forms, the Golf sits perfectly balanced in the very centre of the market. It’s big enough for a family yet small enough that it actually fits properly on British city streets. It’s upmarket enough to feel special and polished but mainstream enough to feel relaxing and comforting.

The latest iteration isn’t perfect, as some of the reaction to its rather troublesome infotainment reflects. But the somewhat disproportionate disquiet caused by the dashboard’s lack of physical controls could be seen as something of a back-handed compliment to the assumed all-round excellence of the ultimate daily driver.

So with an A110 for sheer driving joy and a Golf GTI to make even the most mundane of daily chores eminently agreeable, do you even need a third car? We reckon you do, because for all their polish and brilliance, there are things you can’t easily do with our two other category winners. Like take them seriously off road, pop the bonnet and tinker away with them, use them to haul particularly unusual loads or do any of the other weird and wonderful things people love to do with cars.

That’s why we left the final spot in our ultimate three-car garage for a new or used wildcard, costing up to £20,000. Unsurprisingly, this was the most open of all three categories in terms of votes – but the versatility that makes the original Land Rover Defender great helped it secure victory. We grouped all of the wildcard used Defender suggestions together, ranging from run-down project cars to ex-military Wolf 90s.

Certainly with £20,000 to spend, there’s a huge range of Defender options. For our garage, we opted for a ‘model’s own’ option, persuading Matt Prior to wheel out his well-used 90 Td5 XS from 2005. He paid around £12,000 for it and reckons that it’s still worth about the same now. And that bargain price is also good news for our three-car garage in the event that we can’t secure a discount on our Golf GTI.

Prior’s car perfectly symbolises why the Defender makes such a fine wildcard: he has filled it with loads, used it to tow horseboxes, taken it down rough green lanes, used it as a daily driver and whiled away the hours tinkering on it with his toolkit. Essentially, if you can imagine a motoring task that you couldn’t or wouldn’t do in an A110 or Golf, you could certainly do it in a Defender.

And that, essentially, is the whole point of the three-car garage. Now is usually the time when we would contemplate which of the trio of cars we would choose if we could only keep one. But on this occasion, you can’t, really. They form the ultimate three-car garage because of their complementary strengths. And across three cars, possibly with spare change from £100k, all your motoring wants and needs are covered. All you have to do now is find room for them all…