So, what do you think is the most important and influential car ever to be sold in Britain? The Lamborghini Miura? The Model T Ford? Or the Volkswagen Golf GTI perhaps? You could make a fairly rock-solid case for the old Volvo 200 series, the first cars to be sold on safety. But then you could also argue it was the Citroën DS, or the E-type Jaguar or the Mini. The answer, however, and I’ll take no argument on this, is the Datsun Sunny.

There are those who say the Japanese never innovate. That all they do is take western ideas and make them more cheaply, and faster. But actually, when it comes to cars, the Japanese motor industry came up with the greatest innovation of them all.

Until the nondescript little Datsun arrived on our shores in 1969 there was a general consensus that cars were bound to break down every time it was too hot, too cold, too windy or too wet.

On a chilly November morning the whole country would echo to the sound of tortured Ford starter motors and clicking Lucas solenoids hopelessly trying to breathe a little life into the nation’s engines.

Cars were made up of 15,000 parts and it was inevitable that from time to time some of those parts would stop working. But then along came the Datsun, which demonstrated that actually this needn’t necessarily be so. It worked even when the weather had broken down completely. And it kept on working, faultlessly, for year after year after year.

Of course there were many people who refused to take Japanese cars seriously, because only 25 years earlier the people who were making them had put Alec Guinness in a box. But why is there still resistance today? Why do you buy a Volkswagen or a Ford or an Alfa Romeo when you know damn well it won’t be as reliable as a Toyota or a Subaru or a Honda? Would you buy a deep freeze if you knew, with a fair degree of certainty, that it would spend its evenings turning your bread into bacteria? Would you buy a television set if every single piece of market research and every single survey had found that it kept going all fuzzy. No, of course you wouldn’t.

But, and this is the weird part, you would buy a watch and be happy with it even if it lost an hour a day and the strap kept breaking. And I know you bought a mobile phone that doesn’t work every time you go behind a tree. And actually, come to think of it, I bet half of you have plasma television sets that ceased to function after a year or so.

You knew that was going to happen. You’d been told by newspaper reports and friends but you went ahead anyway and spent thousands on something that you knew would break about seven minutes after the guarantee ran out.

Why? Because a plasma television set looks as cool as your snap-shut, brushed-aluminium mobile phone which in turn is as “now” as your multi-dialled but useless watch.

This is the problem with motoring. A few years ago we emerged from the four-door saloon period when cars were tools, fridge-freezers, white goods with wheels, and into a time where cars became fashion accessories. The advent of the hot hatch and then subsequently the SUV, the MPV, and the sudden re-emergence of two-seater convertibles means that you don’t simply buy a car to do a job. You buy it to make a statement.

Take the Smart as a prime example. It’s a ghastly, asthmatic little thing with a godawful gearbox and the go of oak, but it makes you look fresh and young and on-message. It’s the same story with the Mini. By any rational standards this is a terrible car with a boring engine and no space in the back. But the signals it sends out are that you’re not wearing any knickers. Whereas the signals sent out by the Toyota driver are that they’re big and sensible and possibly grey.

Think about it. I used to love Ferraris when they came at you like an Italian waiter, waving their arms about and losing their temper and then, just when your food was ready, popping outside for a fag. And forgetting to come back. But now that we see the damn things marching round the world’s racetracks every other weekend, never going wrong — ever — they’ve become, dare I say this, a bit boring. I suspect they may even buy their underwear at Marks & Spencer.

So actually, then, the last thing you want from a car is something reliable. Something that does well in Which? magazine surveys. Something that’ll never break down. Because then you’ll be tagged as a dullard.

What you really need, if you want to come across as moody and interesting, is something desperately unreliable.

At this point I should draw your attention to the recently published BBC Top Gear Magazine customer satisfaction survey. This is the largest independent motoring survey of them all, and my God there are some boring cars at the top.

If we exclude the Honda S2000 that won it, and the Jaguar XJ, which came second, we find the upper reaches of the chart are peppered with Skodas, Toyotas, Hyundais, Lexi and even, heaven help us, the Mazda 323 — an avocado bathroom suite in a Barratt home if ever I saw one.

Interestingly, the Mercedes M-class came last, chiefly because the dealer network is so appalling but also because it’s made in Alabama, where the locals are good at picking cotton, singing mournful songs and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd but not so good at attaching complicated pieces of machinery to one another.

However, if you’re trying to convey a devil-may-care attitude with your next car, don’t bother with Mercedes. Or Fiat, or even Renault. Because the marque that came last in the overall survey of 53,000 motorists is Peugeot.

I wasn’t taken by the 407 saloon mainly because of the gutless 2 litre diesel engine that was in my test car. The smaller 1.6 they sent in the 407SW (the estate) was much better, quieter and less likely to run out of oomph when you need it most. What’s more, while the saloon is handsome in a boy-next-door sort of way, the estate really does have the looks of a square-jawed matinee idol. Sadly, it still has a fairly crummy driving position, but I must say I loved the glass roof and the tailgate that opens in two parts. If you only want to throw a pair of wellies in there, you just open the back window.

It gets better. This is an extremely comfortable car, gliding over bumps and ridges that would have any German rival shaking with the effort, and, for a large estate costing less than £18,000, it’s very well equipped. The door mirrors, for instance, fold themselves away when you lock it.

This then is a car that offers the style-conscious motorist just about everything. We can see, as you slide by, that you must have a family but that you haven’t bought an MPV, which would mark you down as technically dead, or an SUV, which would identify you as being Wayne Rooney.

We can also see you’ve bought a French car, which means you’re anti-Bush, anti-war and possibly that you have a place near Pau. These are all good things, too.

Best of all, though, we can see you’ve bought a car that you knew full well would go wrong all the time. This is good, too. Sit at the side of the road with the bonnet up reading Victorian poetry and I can pretty much guarantee that every girl who drives by will want to sleep with you.

Vital statistics

Model Peugeot 407SW SE HDi
Engine type Four-cylinder, 1560cc turbo-diesel
Power 110bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 180 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Fuel/CO2 50.4mpg (combined) 148g/km
Tyres 215/55 R17
Insurance Group 8
Performance 0-62mph: 12.1sec
Top speed 117mph
Price £17,900
Verdict The perfect car for the style-conscious motorist
Rating 3/5

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