On the road: Citroën DS5 – car review

'Lighten up about the terrible visibility, and there is fun to be had in the upper gears'

They call it "ink blue"; I call it indigo. The DS5 has sharp, aggressive styling at the front, and it has separated itself from its Citroin branding, so that its identity is conveyed by a funny, squiggly swoosh on the rear. My father-in-law looked askance at this, as if it were a recalcitrant adult child trying to divorce its parent. But I thought it looked chic and modern: goodbye, boring colours and marques; hello, the colour of midnight and the world of the post-marque.

Then I got in. The cabin is fine: in the Prestige version, which I had, you can electrically control your driver's seat, but you can't electrically control the firmness of the ride, or the way the poky gear shifts bring out the racer in you. Nor would you want to: that's the entire point of buying it, because, at 30,000, this is neither the thriftiest nor the most responsible car in its compact-exec class. The parking camera was one of the best on the market (sounds like a small thing, but often they're set to be incredibly melodramatic, sounding the alarm when you're metres away from anything, so that you finish every journey in a state of mild panic).