Opinion: a cheap, used Fiat Panda is more luxurious than an expensive new 'luxury' car

We are obsessed with luxury. We crave luxury hotels with goose down pillows. If we’re lucky perhaps we can splash out on a luxury watch. Our face wash is luxury. We can barely survive without quilted and luxurious toilet roll.

Car manufacturers are similarly afflicted. Many of them aren’t car manufacturers at all, they say, but ‘luxury brands’. A loose concept that nobody can really explain without descending into pretentious expressions that string together a load of alluring sounding words but don’t actually mean anything. I’ve lost count of the number of presentations I’ve sat through telling me about target customers who all wear Gucci loafers and spend their days sipping cocktails while planning their next philanthropic endeavour.

Yet the sad reality is that car manufacturers are now ill-equipped to provide luxury. No matter how deep the carpet, how rarefied the materials, how silent or powerful or sophisticated. The truly luxurious motoring experience is dead. It took me buying a £1,300 Fiat Panda with cloth trim and wind up rear windows to realise it.

No, I’m not going mad. Just think about what real luxury means. Time is luxury. All demands on you melting away is luxury. Simplicity and convenience are luxury. Think of it like that and new cars are infuriatingly awful. In many ways, the Panda is the most luxurious thing I’ve driven for a long time. The benefits of this humble little car were brought into sharp focus as I was simultaneously getting to know a new test car. A BMW that cost 50 times as much.

It starts with something as basic as the key. The Panda’s is slender and small and is inserted into an ignition barrel, decluttering the interior. The BMW’s is massive but has tiny, fiddly buttons (some on the side, one on the front). It rattles in the cupholder as you drive.

Jump into the Panda and within five seconds you can be driving. The BMW requires you to select a profile. You can move off in ‘Guest’ but then none of your preferred settings are loaded. So, I select ‘Driver’. At which point it flashes a warning about this changing settings (the reason I’m doing it), and I have to then hit ‘Activate’. There’s a long delay while this new profile loads, during which I can’t use the screen to turn up the heater, or enter something into the nav, or change the radio. The Panda is already down the road, of course.

Now I need to deselect the audible speed limit warning. Luckily this is done with the simple press of a button. But to disable the godawful lane departure warning system requires me to hit the main menu button on the touchscreen, scroll to drive settings and select (incredibly, this tile moves at random times), then find and deactivate the system, then confirm when it warns me I’m deactivating it. At which point it’s possible that I’ve crashed but it is certain I will want to pull over and set the thing on fire.

This is not luxury. And these systems are the death of what cars represent: freedom and escape. The luxury of being the masters of our own destiny. The Panda treasures all those things and a strange peace washes over you as soon as you drop in and start to drive. No new car can match that feeling, whatever the price.