Peak car: Why it's all been downhill since 'ultimate' model in 2010

Something unusual happened to me last week. I got into a brand new family car and it didn’t annoy me at all. Or at least not very much. Or maybe just a lot less than most cars of its kind I’ve driven of late. And the very fact that this is a point worth noting speaks volumes about the modern car condition.

The car in question was a Honda ZR-V if and you’re struggling to work out what that is, don’t worry, I was too until I did my research. Think of it as a Civic wearing a top hat and you’ll not be far off the mark. It’s one of those confounded crossover things that are so popular these days because they do nothing particularly badly, the fact this also means they don’t do anything particularly well seemingly a price worth paying.

But, in fact, it was perfectly pleasant. Really quite good in fact. It didn’t bong at me incessantly because I’d forgotten to floss my teeth that morning, the alleged safety systems (I say alleged because I’m still not sure a car trying to wrench the steering wheel in the other direction is really that safe) are easy to turn off, the powertrain was smooth, the ride fluent, the steering accurate and the seat heaters and stereo were excellent. Really not very annoying at all.

Now of course all this stuff I rail against is intended to make the car more difficult to crash and less likely to kill you if you still manage to find a way. And many of us can remember a time when cars did nothing to help, then folded up like crisp packets if you so much as sneezed on them. Which means that, some time between then and now there was a period when cars were far safer than they were before, but a sight less annoying than they are now. It’s a period I have come to call ‘peak car’. And I think I can identify when it was.

There’s a part of me that wants to say it was the 1990s, because that is unquestionably when I had the most fun in cars. They were lighter and more nimble, far less regulated but just starting to pay some attention to some of the more useful, less intrusive aspects of both active and passive safety with both driver airbags and ABS becoming more common.

But they were by no means universal. By the early years of this decade they were the norm rather than the exception. Airbags became mandatory in 2003, ABS in 2004, electronic stability control in 2011. This, then, was the decade when all the safety systems you really didn’t notice at all until you really, really needed them were fitted to the vast majority of new cars on sale. But this was also a time when cars started to gain useful gadgets like satellite navigation and USB sockets, but before instruments had been replaced by screens, buttons by even more screens and hydraulic power steering by its fun-sapping electronic successor.

Such cars also predate the trend for downsized engines, reduced cylinder counts and inexorable rise in sporting cars of the flappy paddle gear change.