Carole4X4, if you are a lady would you please marry me, if you're a gentleman could you loan me your wife for an evening?

I like you!

Its not about the 70mph speed limit, a Fiesta can go faster than that its about how easily and quickly you get to that speed. Going up a hill at 30mph you want a good bit of torque and grunt and these eco cars generally struggle. In the real world you go from 0-20 and 50-70 alot, yet the only focus from car makers is trying to shave a gram of carbon dioxide off of its figures and charge you 2k more for it.

Physicist answer is that torque is the ability of a force to rotate an object around a pivot, or a measure of how much a force acting on an object causes it to rotate. It's measured in Newton-metres. It causes angular acceleration, so effectively this is the rotational analogue to Newton's 2nd Law. So the horsepower of an engine is the torque x revs per min, divided by some constant that'll take into account pi and stuff.

Cars have a rather useful torque multiplier - it's called a "gearbox" when the right gear is selected even the most miserly eco-box will function adequately. Even a 105PS Golf Tdi will do 0-60 in 10.9 secs and has plenty of grunt.

Of course, if you want a fast car then buy one – there are plenty out there – just expect to pay through the nose to run it due to the perceived damage caused by its elevated plant food emissions - even though you already pay far more tax thanks to the increased fuel consumption.

it's the way we are headed.

And yet we keep blindly going along with it. We really are hopeless.