Specifications
Would suit:
Uma Thurman.
Price:
£16 300 (about R205 000).
Maximum speed:
180km/h, 0-100km/h in 11.5 seconds.
Combined fuel economy:
5.35 litres/100km (or so they say).
One film I can watch again and again - and not just because we get to see Jude Law hurl himself into an incinerator - is Gattaca. It's the cars I love.
Though the film is set in the future, the characters drive 1960's Rovers and Citroëns powered not by wheezy push-rod petrol engines but by some mysterious energy source that makes a futuristic whirring noise.
The film fills me with hope that:
a) One day a clean power source will be discovered.
b) Car manufacturers will return to the golden age of automotive design - 1955-197.
c) In the future, Uma Thurman will swan around enigmatically in tight black tops.
One company striding towards a Gattaca future, though not quite in the way I had envisaged, is Honda. It's just released its latest petrol-electric hybrid version of the Civic that has a 1.4-litre petrol engine mated to a battery pack hidden beneath the back seat.
We've seen this kind of thing before, of course, most famously with the Toyota Prius. It must be an abiding source of irritation to Honda that, even though it's been making hybrid cars just as long as Toyota, and the Civic is around £1,500 cheaper, the Prius gets to ferry glamorous passengers such as Cameron Diaz to red carpets while the Civic must resign itself to being driven by, well... the only people I know who ever drive them are car journos.
But the harsh truth is that the Civic was never quite as good as the Prius and the new one still isn't.
First, it looks dreadful. The new petrol-engined Civic hatchback is a little too Jetsons for my taste but it is a brave attempt and at least it stands out in a car park.
Unfortunately it hasn't room for the hybrid's batteries so they've had to use the dumpy sedan version of the Civic usually sold to elderly folk in the States.
Then there's the way it drives: slow and ponderous, with controls that feel only hypothetically associated to concepts such as steering and stopping.
And constantly variable transmission (CVT), as fitted to my test car, is the work of the devil, if you ask me. These so-called "stepless" automatic gearboxes always make a car feel like its clutch is slipping, thus summoning chilling flashbacks to numerous breakdowns.
The engine, meanwhile, mimics the plaintive moo of a cow with its head stuck in a five-barred gate.
Diesels can do better
And it's not as if the Civic Hybrid is especially frugal. Honda claims it will eke out a gallon of fuel for 53 miles but, as with Toyota's claims for the Prius, these official figures are only possible if the car is lapping an oval circuit at 53mph on cruise control with a naked jockey at the wheel.
Several diesels can do better in real life.
But what worries me most about these often silent hybrid cars are the iPod users: young men and women slouching around with the latest release by their favourite popular beat combo - Gnarls Barkley James Harvest, or whoever - blaring into their ears at tinnitus-inducing volume.
I have an iPod but only use it to listen to spoken-word recordings so I should be OK. But how on earth are the Asbo-chavs supposed to hear the Civic approaching above the cretinous hollering of 50 Cent?
Clearly what is called for is some kind of futuristic whine to alert the young and, while we're at it, is it too much to ask for an Uma Thurman clone at the wheel for the rest of us? - The Independent, London