Elegance is dead really don`t you think? It`s been a steady downhill run since the Art Deco era and now across the world slobbery prevails in dress and attitude.

Shambling figures in tatty jeans, bloated by the puffery of wadding and internal padding. Long gone, the effort or fashion of looking good - except in France, where the odd female of a certain age stands as a beacon of desire and fashion that actually attracts the jaded eye.

Best not mention the blokes, pants hanging off flaccid bottoms and in age, gardening blue jeans and fleece tops - multi piled with 10,000 washing cycles on 60c and twinned with the rotting garbage sack, composting under the apple tree in outer Mongolia.

What chance then for the Motor Car?

Given the entrophy of taste in society and forward sloping window lines, making standing cars look like they are moving downhill, while standing still.( That nausea inducing look of the wedge of cheese, on top of a brick) No return to the elegance of yesteryear then, when battery fails to deliver and the global norm returns to hoof and wheel.

No carriages of laquered wood, pulled by fine horses and tended by sophisticated tastes of a century gone.

Just rough, donkey pulled carts then - rough wood shafts and old lada wheels - incubus snorting and swigging cider while puffing smoke into the empty bottle to meet personal emission laws of 2012.

Post inspired by the new Fiat Doblo - 2010.

oilrag