Volkswagen is one of the fastest improvers, not least because it is strong in Eastern Europe.”The Vauxhall Vectra is probably the most profitable big car built in Europe,” said Francis Stahl. “It may not be the best to drive or to own – but it makes its maker the most money, and that’s ultimately what the business is about.” Stahl also estimates that the new Volkswagen Polo – developed and built after VW began a savage series of cuts in the early Nineties – cost about 10 per cent less to develop and manufacture than the latest Renault Clio The next Clio, due in 1998, must be at least as good “We have to cut costs, and then cut them again. The level of competition is now so intense – from other European, Japanese and American makers – that to do otherwise is to commit suicide.”Stahl cites the American maker Chrysler as a role model. “Chrysler sells low-cost cars that look good and, in terms of engineering, do a perfectly adequate job, even if they’re not on the cutting edge.

They please the buyers because of their low prices and their attractive style And, although they’re not great cars, they’re good enough. People don’t complain.”European cars, he hints, are in fact over-engineered. “We need to do a good – and in some cases better – job of the important things: fuel economy, reliability, longevity, comfort, safety. But in other areas, such as high performance and miraculously tidy panel gaps, we are spending money needlessly both in engineering development and manufacture. We have to target those areas that actually matter to the buyers and, in effect, reduce quality in those areas that don’t.”In the past, European cars have probably been the most intensely engineered in the world. But in today’s market, our mass makers just can’t afford that extravagance. More and more Japanese makers are setting up shop here (witness Nissan’s expansion in Sunderland) importing Japanese-style work practices to make Japanese-style cars (key ingredients: good value, reliability, ability to do the job).

The Koreans are also coming.The old way of allowing engineers to indulge their whims to please the car cognoscenti who appreciate hidden technical gems is going fast. People want pretty and stylish cars – for a car’s look is important to everybody. In every other way, they mostly just want cars that “do the job”. And that’s what Europe, learning from the Japanese and Americans, is about to deliver..

Lifestyle estate. A slick term to describe an estate car in which form has smothered function, hinting at an affluently active lifestyle with no nasty notions of trade and utility. An Audi A4 Avant or a BMW 3-series Touring is a reasonable load-carrier under its high-society gloss, of course, but ultimate cargo capacity topped the design priority list of neither car. Yet an estate car was, originally, exactly that: a car to cart the gentry around their country estates, hunting, shooting and fishing gear stowed astern. So the fact that Vauxhall’s new Vectra Estate is a capacious cargo-carrier really shouldn’t count against it in polite society, given that it still manages to look quite enticing, with its rising waistline and crisp detailing.
It’s also quite a pleasing drive because, like all new Vectras, it has stiffer suspension, with better disciplining of unwanted body movements, than that found in the first Vectras a year-and-a-half ago.