Most motoring journalism makes one lose the will to live. The one shining exception is the writing of the Guardian‘s Giles Smith. Here he is on the new Renault Megane Sport Hatch 2.0 165 Turbo…

The Megane was the car with which Renault pretty much singlehandedly woke up a snoozing hatchback sector. While all the dynamic designers and blue-sky thinkers had gravitated towards the SUV department, or were squeezing their brains to come up with ever more malleable family wagons with internal bike racks and fold-out summer houses, the ancient art of hatchback-building had suffered a precipitous decline, leaving only a joyless amalgam of inseparable lump-alikes and blob-u-wants, each one categorisable according to how much it did or didn’t resemble a VW Golf.Renault shook things up by producing a hatchback in which the better part of the design budget had clearly gone into resculpting the rear end, producing an unusually curvaceous back window, wrapped tight around a self-consciously plump and pert boot lid.

I don’t know whether Renault was cannily ahead of the wave here, or whether it merely lucked out. But in an age much given to low-slung jeans, pan-generational adoption of the “builder’s crease” look, and long and surprisingly academic debates about the relative merits of rears belonging to Kylie and Beyoncé, a car whose prime and unashamed asset was allegedly its “shakeable ass” did indeed look inspired.

Renault, in short, gave us the boot as booty, and a grateful and amused Europe responded by buying Meganes in millions. The idea of the car as a penis substitute is familiar to the point of cliche. But the French company was surely among the very first to explore the possibility of the car as a bottom substitute…