There's a convention is road-test writing that you don't say what you really feel about the car until the last lap. You talk about the styling, whether your children can get in the back without impersonating Toulouse Lautrec and whether it's going to rape the planet or just leave it mildly ruffled.
What you mustn't do is immediately say what you think. If you did that, after all, you might not need to blather on and give the semblance that you're coming to some carefully crafted conclusion.
Conventions, however, as all Japanese fishermen currently up to their necks in Antarctic whale blood might tell you, are made to be broken. Sometimes - just sometimes - a new model comes along that merits an instant opinion. Kia's new Cee'd, on sale now, is just that car.
It's good. No, more than that, it's very good. Or even really, really good. However you look at it, this all-new hatchback from our Korean cousins appears to have dropped from nowhere and landed so gracefully that it's in danger of being the best choice out there.
Kia's just spent rather a lot of cash taking the likes of me and various other spoilt-rotten journalists to Nice, where we were treated to two days of nice-ness, visiting fragrant perfume factories, staying in super-exclusive mountain spa hotel (where you don't get a room, you get a house) and enjoying the delights of BA business class (actually scrub that, as their glacial food and drink service is complete pants).
You get the picture though - like most car makers, Kia went the extra round to see that every bit pillow was plumped, every napkin crisp as virgin snow. That way, should the actual subject of your road-testing attention be a bit dodgy, you might just manage to forget the details, remembering only the heady distraction of the launch programme. Here though, we have a huge amount of money wasted. Bottom line is Kia could have launched the Cee'd in the car park of my local Lidl - complete with free five-minute trolley dash - and they would still get the same consensus: this car is tops.
Though it's not about the looks. Okay, the Cee'd is pleasant enough, but it slips in among such rivals as Ford's Focus, Peugeot's 307 and Vauxhall's Astra without so much as bleep from the fashion alarm. And it's not the name, of course... try as Kia might, no logical explanation of a car with an apostrophe on its backside will wash. It's a punner's fantasy.
So apart from the slightly anonymous looks and daft name, what is good? Everything else, I'd say: and most crucially, it drives like a dream. Forget the pronouncements from some teenage car mags about a bad ride and dull steering; I punted my 1.6-litre CRDi around the corniche roads and into Provence's wriggly mountain routes with nothing but a confident smile all the way. It feels sharp to position, perfectly balanced in a bend and implacably well mannered over bumps. Few cars offer an instant driving rapport, but this is one.
