It is a truth universally known that the best thing about being ‘a car person’ is not the cars so much as the other ‘car people’: the community – and the car chat that glues it all together.
This crosses my mind as a round of excellent burgers hit the table at Caffeine & Machine’s new Bedfordshire gaff, ‘The Bowl’, yet the conversation still flows, even around mouthfuls of cheese, gherkin and patties.
Sure, the warm, gooey Christmas vibe of the annual road testers’ Christmas lunch helps, but we could have parked literally any cars outside, off the back of any brief, and we’d still be having a colourful, cheerfully argumentative discussion about them.
Not so much because of the cars, but because of the people.
Mind you, we’ll give a nod to Ricky Lane’s Mercedes-Benz B-Class before we even get started. At an initial glance, this is arguably the car that best fulfils this year’s brief, which is to champion our most underrated car of 2023.
After all, it turned out that even Mercedes had forgotten that it makes the B-Class, yet it was one of the most talked-about cars here.
Our seasonal showdown cars are not all so brilliantly mundane, though.
Between the eight of us – Lane and I are joined by Steve Cropley, Matt Prior, Matt Saunders, Illya Verpraet, Felix Page and James Disdale – this year’s automotive buffet runs from a pick-up truck to a hot hatch, via luxury, tech extravaganzas and a few options that you (and some of us) might argue aren’t underrated at all.
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