Blame it on Brexit, if you like, or maybe we’re letting our standards slip. Whatever the cause, we’re guilty of having brought you nearly £400,000 less road test metal last year than we did in 2016, when the combined value of all the cars featured in the weekly road tests was almost £2.8 million. Clearly we’ve been unwittingly ‘keepin’ it real’ with our choice of test subjects in 2017. We could have filled a whole month’s worth of issues with tests on new superminis, and more than a fifth of our tests were written about reasonably priced crossover hatchbacks and compact SUVs. Don’t blame us: people will keep buying them.

There was, of course, still plenty of speed and exoticism mixed in with the worthy but less exciting meat and potatoes. We tested two mid-engined, 600bhp-plus supercars – and one of them turned out to be quite dominant in our road test year ‘Top Trumps’-style statistics: the McLaren 720S. The other, the Lamborghini Huracán Performante, memorably smashed our dry handling track lap record. Three new cars were awarded near-perfect five-star road test ratings, while a two-and-a-half-star wooden spoon went to a downsized EV that did little to advance the cause of its electrified breed.

But besides all those, which verdicts will history have the most use for? When we’re looking back in 20 years’ time, I should think it’ll likely be to find our tests on the seventh- generation Ford Fiesta (still great, but no longer a class leader), Tesla Model X (an interesting car, but give us a Model S any day), Hyundai i30 N and Honda Clarity (a trailblazing fuel cell-powered saloon that proves how close the hydrogen car now is to the mainstream motorist’s reach).

Of course, there isn't such a thing as a perfect car, but we've picked our favourite elements from the cars we road tested in 2017 and combined them together to try and create one, expertly illustrated above by pic ed Ben Summerell-Youde. So what were the best bits of the best cars we tested last year?

Read all of Autocar's first drives and reviews