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I should probably start this review with a confession: I’ve never really wanted an electric car.

There are sensible ways to test a compact family SUV. You could take it to the supermarket, fill the boot with shopping and fill the back with kids. Or you could point it north from Hampshire, drive to Aberdeen, divert through the Cairngorms and see whether it still feels like a good idea several hundred miles later.

The latter seemed more like me.

Some cars impress me. Some cars intimidate me. Some cars arrive on my drive, sit there for half a second and then immediately reorganise the chemicals in my brain at first glance. The Lotus Emira V6 SE is one of those.

The Priory Wareham was the final stop on our Porsche Cayenne GTS tour of Devon and Cornwall, and if you're going to end a drive through some of England's finest countryside, ending it beside the River Frome with a 16th-century monastery waiting at the door is doing it properly.

A Porsche a Peninsula and a Hotel That Perches Above the Waves

There’s something rather amazing, it has to be said, in a few hours to be air-lifted from one season to another, to override providence, to jump 20 degrees in temperature, to swap a dull, grim cloudy rain-sodden day for a bright, sun-drenched, wonderfully warm climate. How good to sleep deeply to the sound of waves with their own rhythmic heartbeat crashing or lapping and the gentle tinkering from a forest of masts.

Images by Hayden Povey

On the whole, cars have an extraordinary habit of encouraging somewhat unrealistic behaviour. The marketeers will almost certainly suggest that ownership could, at any moment, lead to paragliding, wakeboarding or something faintly instructional involving ropes, karabiners and a face mounted GoPro.

They do it so well. The Italians that is. Such imagination and such refinement in best utilising their impossible precipices and improbable shapes and angles.

For I had come to Lake Iseo, an hour from Milan’s Linate airport and called Sebino from the Latin for ‘double-hooked’ and divided between Bergamo and Brescia. It’s wonderfully punctuated with a dozen towns, some medieval.

A weekend in Surrey behind the wheel of the BMW Z4 M40i LCI B58C 3.0i was a masterclass in refined indulgence. I began my week’s tour with a morning admiring the e-foiling and sailing at Queen Mary Sailing Club, followed by a festive shopping spree in Sloane Square, before retreating to the Eccleston Square Hotel for a night of calm luxury, and finished with dinner at Jones Family Kitchen in Eccleston Yards, Belgravia.

Images by Hayden Povey.

There’s something very likable about the Alpine A290 GTS. Yes, it looks fresh and funky in a 2020’s type of way but behind all that, it also feels nostalgic and charmingly analogue in a 1980’s type of way too. For the uninitiated, that squat stance and purposeful nose clearly trace a lineage back to the original ‘Hot Hatch’, the Renault 5, only now it’s reborn with a 52 kWh battery, 220 horsepower and more character than most electric cars at twice the price.