But who cares about engineering? Cars are street furniture, which is about how they look, not how they are made or how they drive. This is why almost nobody apart from farmers takes an off-road vehicle off-road - it's the off-road look that counts, on London's Kings Road or Manchester's Canal Street. The fact that the new Jag can do an unusable 150 mph matters less than its fast looks which, though flawed, are undeniably better than the average old smashed-up Nissan. The Jag, as a retro car, exemplifies one of the big trends of the moment. Chrysler's PT Cruiser is equally retro in its all-American way: you could imagine James Dean or Humphrey Bogart in one. BMW's roadster is an exercise in nostalgia, and Rover's new 75 is another deliberate stylistic throwback: to the days when Rovers were distinctive, and the world bought British.

There are two other important trends in the new automotive pluralism: cute cars and ugly cars. Ugly cars are a niche market - box-like Far Eastern mini-movers like the Suzuki R Wagon are the shape of it, being today's utility-car equivalent of that old holdall, the Renault 4. Cute cars, however, are a much bigger niche. Cars like cheeky cartoon characters are not new - not for nothing did Italians christen their baby Fiat Topolino after a baby mouse - but the market has expanded hugely. The latest crop was started in the early 1990s by the Renault Twingo with its household-pet looks. Ford's dodgem-like Ka continued the trend, and that settled it. Such cuteness - almost exclusively designed by men - was intended to sell particularly to women. Mercedes produced its upright baby A-class, Nissan the Micra, Daewoo the Matiz, and now Toyota has launched the Yaris. Common to all these are the cars' appealing, baby-doll faces, like Japanese Manga comic-strip heroines - sexy and childish at the same time. The tiny Matiz takes forward the space saving "tall-car" concept first pioneered by its Italian designer Giorgio Giugiaro in the 1980s, now combined with the "one-box" no-bonnet look familiar from big people carriers such as the Renault Espace. Toyota's slightly bigger Yaris is designed to appeal to young Europeans, making it very clear it is not heritage-minded by having a central 3D digital instrument binnacle (the dashboard always signals the maker's intentions most clearly). In the past, a new class of car such as these cute babies would have produced a series of near-identical clones from different makers. Under the skin, there's plenty of cloning going on, but now the makers go to great lengths to give their versions individual characteristics. A Matiz does not look like a Yaris or a Micra. The enormous success of Volkswagen's new beetle is explained by the fact that it hits two sales buttons at once - it is a retro car and a cute car in one.