Our festive convention of food and cars carries a theme this year, as our testers pick their most underrated models of 2023. Vicky Parrott slices the turkey(s)
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. It’s the full Christmas gift gauntlet, from overly gaudy jewellery to an embarrassing but very practical pair of socks.
Anyway, whatever flavour of car or transport you use – underrated, overrated or otherwise – take the time this Christmas to huddle around a table and talk to your car mates. Because that’s what Christmas is really all about.
VP So Matt, why did you bring your Jaguar XF Sportbrake? What makes it underrated?
MS You can hardly have a more underrated car than the Jag. It handles as well as it always has. It’s such good value – that XF Black Pack out there is a £40,000 car and was designed to be E-Classrivalling, while the same E-Class is now probably more like £60,000. On top of all that, the D200 engine is more refined than it used to be thanks to the mild-hybrid stuff. Th
